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.

The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene

"Scobie thought: what are those others worth that they have the nerve to sneer at any human being? He knew every one of her faults. How often he had winced at her patronage of strangers. He knew each phrase, each intonation that alienated others. Sometimes he longed to warn her -- don't wear that dress, don't say that again, as a mother might teach a daughter, but he had to remain silent, aching with the foreknowledge of her loss of friends. The worst was when he detected in his colleagues an extra warmth of friendliness towards himself, as though they pitied him. What right have you, he longed to exclaim, to criticize her? This is my doing. This is what I've made of her. She wasn't always like this."

The Heart of the Matter is set in a West African town by the ocean, during World War II. The town is occupied by the British, but there are Indians and Syrians there, too, as well as the natives -- it is the original Tower of Babel in the words of one character. The British authorities are primarily occupied with the ships that come to port, searching each to prevent the smuggling of diamonds to Axis forces. A precarious sense of order prevails during the day, as the book's main character, the policeman Scobie, tends to both war-related matters and local law enforcement. But underneath the blank smiling face of a native (or an Englishman) stirs something sinister, which emerges under the cover of darkness in the form of illicit transactions, plots of intrigue, and bloody crimes committed on the wharf.

We are, of course, not only in West Africa, but the familiar territory of Graham Greene. And, true to form, the town is not just a far-flung colonial outpost, but the battlefield of a man's soul. The Nazis, the diamond smuggling, a war that killed millions -- these serve as a background for Scobie's struggle, which stems from that most commonplace of difficulties: an unhappy marriage.

Scobie is a good man. He does not lie, he does not cheat, and he strives to do the least amount of harm. He is, like Greene, a converted Catholic. Like any good man with a modicum of power he is weighed down by a sense of responsibility, for the orderly upkeep of the town, the well-being of his servants, and, above all, the happiness of his poor, suffering wife, the object of mockery described in the passage above. And, like any good Catholic, he blames himself for her misery, for keeping her in this stifling town for fifteen long years, amidst fatuous expatriates who are determined to preserve the etiquette of the clubs and boarding schools of their homeland.

Scobie's crisis begins when he falls for another woman, a young widow whom he pities as much as his wife. This sets off a series of events in which the good man, little by little, succumbs to the evil that is everywhere around him, and to which so far he has been immune. It is an old story, but what sets this one apart is the cause of Scobie's downfall, which is not the classic temptation of sin, but Scobie's drive to be good. It is the religion he makes of his wife, who embodies his vow to be a better man, and the sin for which he must atone. But she does not want his sacrifice, and yearns to escape his overbearing pity, which mirrors the conundrum that Scobie himself confronts as he grapples with God: who, in the end, shoulders the cross? The one martyred, or the one for whom the sacrifice was made?