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Brideshead Revisited RevisitedHow to watch Evelyn Waugh.

By Troy PattersonPosted Friday, July 25, 2008, at 3:08 PM ET

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It should be noted that those sentences erupt in the 1959 edition, which saw Waugh, appalled by his book, trying to redo the overdone bits. But there's no tinkering with emotionality as thoroughly bombastic as Brideshead's. The only thing to do is to put it on-screen. Thus, in the fall of 1981, did a miniseries version of Brideshead Revisited emerge on Britain's ITV, soon thereafter airing on PBS and becoming a smash on both sides of what its fan would doubtlessly refer to as "the pond."

The producers at Granada Television gave the book a lot of room to breathe. The miniseries is 13 hours long: Though the density of Waugh's dialogue requires close attention, it's not difficult to read the book faster than that. The series goes heavy on voice-over narration—with Jeremy Irons, nicely haunted and hunted as Ryder, reading well-chosen slips of the book—and nearly follows the novel scene-for-scene. It's no insult to the craft of John Mortimer's script to say that the miniseries is not so much an adaptation of the novel as a straight-up televisualization of it, sensitive and servile.

The pleasure's in the leisure. The time opens up a space that creates a distance from some of the novel's excesses, humanizes some of its hokum, and allows you to submit to the flow of the characters' feelings and of Waugh's sentimentality. The miniseries gives texture to the efficient text of the original: cold shadows in the mansions; servants, stern and omnipresent, toiling amid the gaiety and the strife; the runny ruin on the sandy face of Anthony Andrews, who, as Sebastian, creeps from devil-may-care carousing to God-help-him squalor at an imperceptible pace. And there will never again be anything quite like the performance of Nickolas Grace as Anthony Blanche, a schoolmate of Ryder's who takes dandyism to its logical and fabulously degenerate nadir. It is not possible to compare the performance to anything except a bushel of perfumed plums or maybe an outtake from an imaginary cult classic in which Peter Lorre plays Dorian Gray.

The miniseries is also, to use a term of Tom Wolfe's, "sheer plutography," inviting the Masterpiece Theatre set not just to peep through the windows of a divine mansion but to move in for a considerable while. The Moment, the blog of T, the Times' style magazine, has recently deemed Brideshead Revisited "required viewing," ushering it into a nascent pantheon of screen fashion greats: "[T]he general mood of Edwardian opulence and the aristocratic languor of the summery white men's flannels are said to have inspired films like Chariots of Fire and A Room With a View." Could there be any more appropriate tribute to "lasting schlock"? Waugh's swooning elegy for the graces of yesteryear endures as a guide to all tomorrow's parties.

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Troy Patterson is Slate's television critic.

COMMENTS

Notes from the Fray Editor

There was some argument as to that title of "greatest comic novelist": nominations from the Fray included P.G.Wodehouse, Thomas Berger, E.F.Benson, Peter DeVries, Kingsley Amis, John Barth and Terry Pratchett. Kerstin recommended reading the letters between Waugh and the writer Nancy Mitford—recommendation strongly endorsed by the Fray Editor.

Comments from the Fray

I admit I've never really gotten this book. How on earth can a family of frivolous, affected aristocrats be seen by anyone as the acme of civilization? As a glossy soap opera all this solemn, unintentionally campy hokum perhaps works. But as a seriously intended statement of what British society has supposedly lost, it's just laughable.

--florentine

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Patterson writes:

At 39, Ryder—and, with him, the credulous reader—is convinced that the world of the Flytes has expired and, with it, an essential part of the soul of England.

The reason this can not possibly be true is that the Flytes are Catholics, making them outcasts among England's elites. Rex Mottram did not understand this either. I don't disagree with Patterson's overall view that the novel contains elements of "schlock"… and I continue to shake my head at the ending, which is unearned. But the novel also remains complex in ways that defy breezy summaries and summary dismissals.

--michael1960

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