It was a treat from first to last though, I look forward to listening again in a few more years, no doubt it will resonate even more with age.
I gave Irons' narration only four stars though because a couple of the accents jarred a bit (mostly Rex's, I'm glad Waugh didn't make him Australian), but overall he handles the large cast with aplomb (he must have picked up a lot from all those knights and dames back in the 80s). 'A genuine literary masterpiece.' Time 'Heartbreakingly beautifulThe twentieth century's finest English novel. I'd forgotten how funny it was, though, Rex's failed Catholic conversion and Antony Blanche's appearances being the comic highlights. At once romantic, sensuous, comic, and somber, Brideshead Revisited transcends Waugh's early satiric explorations and reveals him to be an elegiac, lyrical novelist of the utmost feeling and lucidity.
I can't possibly be objective about the novel itself, it is inextricably bound up with my adolescence (I first read it when the TV version was being shown) and is one of the main reasons that drew my wife and me together (we named our third son Charles Sebastian). Read by Jeremy Irons, star of the acclaimed 1981 television series based on the novel. At once romantic, sensuous, comic, and somber, Brideshead Revisited transcends Waughs early satiric explorations and reveals him to be an elegiac, lyrical novelist of the utmost feeling and lucidity. The scenes from that incomparable drama floated through my head as he read, bringing all the magical cast back to life (Olivier, Gielgud, Claire Bloom, Jane Asher, John LeMesurier et al, like some 70s thespian super-group), not to mention the music. Selected by Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of the century and called 'Evelyn Waughs finest achievement' by the New York Times, Brideshead Revisited is a stunning exploration of desire, duty, and memory. His company has not been deployed overseas, and they wait in England for news of their destination. What a coup for the BBC to snare Jeremy Irons, star of the 1981 TV adaptation, to revisit his role as the protagonist and narrator of Waugh's wartime masterpiece. Brideshead Revisited Summary Next Prologue In 1943, Charles Ryder is a Commander in the British Army during World War II. If you enjoyed Brideshead Revisited, you might like Waugh's Vile Bodies, also available in Penguin Classics. Enchanted first by Sebastian Flyte at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognise his spiritual and social distance from them.
It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. Evelyn Waugh's beloved masterpeice, now in a beautiful hardback edition with a new Introduction by Paula Byrne 'Brideshead Revisited' has the depth and weight that are found in a writer working in his prime, in the full powers of an eager, good mind and a skilled hand, retaining the best of what he has.
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