Allan Massies dips into Brideshead Revisited
Having just read something about the new film of Brideshead Revisited, I picked up the novel, opened it at random, and then, some two hours later, a good part of my working evening was gone. I suppose it is now Waugh’s most popular novel — his Pride and Prejudice as it were — but, when first published, ‘it lost me’, he wrote in the introduction to the revised 1960 edition, ‘such esteem as I once enjoyed among my contemporaries and’ — perhaps worse? — ‘led me into an unfamiliar world of fan-mail and press photographers’.
His confidence had been high when at work on the novel. He called it his ‘magnum opus’ and, if this was partly in jest or self-mockery, it nevertheless seems clear that he believed it to be the best book he had yet written.
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