Brideshead Revisited (2)

The present interest in 'Brideshead Revisited' was triggered by coming across an Epsom Library chuck out, a small boxed set of 3 DVDs which looked as if they had been chucked out because they had been loaned out so often that their box was falling apart - see the right hand part of the bottom edge of the illustration. But a snip at £2 for the 3 DVD's, which as far as we could tell were in perfect working order.

Like a lot of other stuff that we watch, a costume drama now, but when written, set in the recent past, in this case maybe 25 years before the time of writing, the time of the youth of the author. At 12 hours or so viewing, a condensation rate (minutes of film to page of the book) somewhere between that where a 10 page short story from Agatha Christie is turned into an hour's drama and where a substantial novel from D. H Lawrence is turned into a two hour feature. A nicely made, well cast thing, gently paced and without the drumming, insistent and insidious sound track you get with the same sort of thing made now. Little breast baring and no violence. Not a social worker in sight although we do get the odd don and the odd parson. Good viewing for something which is more than 30 years old.

All that said, a rather odd entertainment in that none of the people in it were very likeable. A rather flawed bunch.

Moved to read the book again, to find that it had not made the last cut, so off to Ashtead Library to find that they do still carry Waugh - unlike, for example, his contemporary Huxley, who has more or less vanished from the shelves - and I was able to take out a nice Everyman's Edition, which came with an introduction by Frank Kermode and a chronology of the life and times of the author, Evelyn Waugh. Just the thing for the regular reader. Now read with an interest which declined through the three parts, while still finding that none of the people in it were very likeable and with part of the interest being the oddity of a convert to Catholicism writing such a book. How on earth could someone who saw so clearly what (at least upper class) Catholics were like go in for it himself? Also of interest that I liked the evocation of a possibly fairy tale Oxford of the twenties best, and liked the moralising of the second and third parts least.

Another point of interest was the name of the first part of the book,  'Et in arcadio ego', which I had always assumed to mean something like 'and I was in heaven', with the I being the narrator Charles Ryder, and in some part Waugh himself, luxuriating in the joys of undergraduate Oxford in the 1920's for those with money. A quote from Horace or Martial or someone like that. But the all-knowing Professor Google seems fairly clear that I have got it wrong. At, for example, http://quintessentialpublications.com/twyman/?page_id=30, I am told that the I in question is death and a loose translation might be 'death is everywhere, even in Paradise', a Renaissance rather than a classical thought. Also the title of a painting by Poussin in the Louvre. All of which fits the Kermode line that the book is really about death. But take care, Wikipedia is not that impressed with the line taken by the likes of quintessential publications.