Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.

These memories, which are my life--for we possess nothing certainly except the past--were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark's, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations, nodding, strutting, winking, rolling the tender feathers of their necks, perching sometimes, if I stood still, on my shoulder or pecking a broken biscuit from between my lips; until, suddenly, the noon gun boomed and in a moment, with a flutter and sweep of wings, the pavement was bare and the whole sky above dark with a tumult of fowl. Thus it was that morning.

The book is subtitled The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder, and here Ryder takes a step back from the story that he has been telling, essentially to himself, to reinforce Waugh's theme of the peculiar nature of the grace of the Catholic god, and of the unbeliever coming into the fold. This brief quotation combines several of the book's more notable features; that the narrative of events occurs almost entirely in the past, remembered by Charles Ryder; that the author uses elaborate metaphors and is capable of pulling them off quite beautifully; the wry misdirection of phrases such as 'for we possess nothing certainly except the past,' which litter the novel like a false trail of breadcrumbs. The inclusion of St. Mark's is no accident, nor is the broken biscuit in the mouth, and the deft circling around from the image of memories as a flock of angels that draw the mind to higher things to the image of startled and startling flock of pigeons leaving St. Mark's square bare underlines the economy of both Waugh's prose as well as his thematic dexterity.

The book begins with Charles Ryder serving as an officer during World War II, coincidentally stationed at the family seat of his estranged childhood friend Sebastian Flyte, and the location turns Ryder's thoughts to when he first met Sebastian when attending university. The narrative then begins in earnest, with Ryder recounting his dissolute university days, his meeting the Flyte family, the descent of Sebastian into a rather pure state of alcoholism. Later, Ryder moves on to describe the tragedy of his own life, wherein he marries and becomes a successful architectural painter, only to find himself in love with Sebastian's sister, Julia, who is married, as well. They have an affair, going so far as to break off their marriages, but in the end, it does not end well.

Or doesn't it? Despite the somber tone of the tale, and Ryder's eventual ostensibly lonely end, there is, hidden beneath the narrative, the theme of conversion that comes to life in the end. It is a flaw, a flaw that this book shares with some Graham Greene novels; namely, that the story seems to be of secondary concern, and that it is the Catholicism that matters. To be clear, it is not the fact that the book's theme is religious that irks me, it is that it is so deviously slipped in. The above quotation, which I think truly gets to the heart of the book beneath its attempts at misdirection, is followed by this passage, where Ryder is thinking on the memories of those moments that rise above the unremarkable moments that make up most lives:

The human soul enjoys these rare, classic periods, but, apart from them, we are seldom single or unique; we keep company in this world with a hoard of abstractions and reflections and counterfeits of ourselves--the sensual man, the economic man, the man of reason, the beast, the machine and the sleep-walker, and heaven knows what besides, all in our own image, indistinguishable from ourselves to the outward eye. We get borne along, out of sight in the press, unresisting, till we get the chance to drop behind unnoticed, or to dodge down a side street, pause, breathe freely and take our bearings, or to push ahead, outdistance our shadows, lead them a dance, so that when at length they catch up with us, they look at one another askance, knowing we a have a secret we shall never share.

I can't help but think that this novel would have been better had Charles Ryder kept that secret in his breast, locked away, and that Waugh kills the subtlety of his theme by hitting it, right at the end, on the head.