Don't ask me to revisit braying Brideshead

13 April 2012

Those of us who passed through Oxbridge in the Eighties tend to have strong feelings about the 1981 TV version of Brideshead Revisited. We well remember the insufferable braying and teddy-bear touting it prompted among some affected undergraduates. There are people who hold it largely responsible for kicking off a decade of Sloane Ranger resurgence.

In the current economic climate, we need have no such fears about the new film of Evelyn Waugh's novel, I think. In any case, it's reported to be not a patch on the Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews original. That was 11 hours long. The new film stuffs the lot into just over two hours.

In America, where it's already been released, they have received it with polite bafflement. One internet reviewer has prettily observed that it can "best be described as a combo of Brokeback Mountain and Pride and Prejudice". That makes it sound almost like a film to see.

But not quite. Not for me. Even setting aside the social consequences of the last effort.

Not just because Brideshead and all the other Waugh films were the absolute epitome of ghastly British costume dramas - all stately homes and vintage cars scrunching up the gravel. Not to mention the tweeds.

Nor even because I always loathe adaptations of any book worth reading, for the simple reason that they don't enhance one's literary experience, they taint and supplant it.

No, the reason is that the book itself is a failure. I love much of Waugh's comic writing but Brideshead Revisited simply doesn't work. When he was writing it during the war, Waugh referred to it as his "magnum opus". When he came to re-read it for revision in the Fifties, he admitted he was appalled by its "glaring defects" and "gluttony". He had to admit that it was not, after all, a classic but a period piece.

To enjoy it wholeheartedly now, you need to read it as a child or adolescent and not re-read later. Because even if you can take the snobbery and Catholic agitprop, the central failure is sexual.

Waugh himself admitted that if the love between Charles and Julia falls flat, "the book fails plainly". And Waugh's attempts to write heterosexual sex were laughable.

His first attempt to convey that Charles and Julia's first, all-important sexual encounter was a bit of a quickie was awkward enough. "I was made free of her narrow loins", Charles announces, talking euphemistically of "assuaging a fierce appetite".

Fifteen years later, Waugh knew he had to improve this passage. But he made it even worse: "It was as though a deed of conveyance of her narrow loins had been drawn and sealed. I was making my first entry as the freeholder of a property I would enjoy and develop at leisure."

I have to say that trying to turn this expression into a seductive pick-up line has never worked for me. Nor has Brideshead Revisited. Sorry.

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