The title of the book remains one of those things that conjures pictures and emotions and can even manage this with people who have never read the book. Indeed, in the pre-amble there is a letter from Waugh himself saying that this book had changed people's opinion of him. In the blink of an eye (or the turning of a few pages) he'd

"...lost me such the esteem as I once enjoyed among my contemporaries and lead me to the unfamiliar world of fan-mail and press photographers."

It seems fitting that this, quiet, landmark book should cause such a change in Waugh's own world as the changes he inflicts on his creation's lives.

And yet, what is Brideshead Revisited about and why does it have a small place in people's minds? Perhaps it's the prologue of the book that sets the tone. Gone is the sharp, charactures and cutting dialogue and in it's place is an air of wistful defeat and the sense that, once the book begins proper, everyone is living on some borrowed time. I'm not convinced that most illusions to Brideshead Revisited are made by people who've read it, perhaps only seen a film or TV version, and it's gone on to perhaps mean something that it isn't. It's become a look of period in time. I can't say I got any of this. If there is a period of time it's fogged by the blinkered rememberings of our main character, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder.

Much of what you expect of Waugh, starting as he does in roaring London, is gone. And so this novel is coloured more by his previous work like Vile Bodies than by any vibes Brideshead Revisited produces. The heart of the story is one of love, oddly the love of a family. Meandering over a large period of time Brideshead Revisited charts the slow burning solace of Charles Ryder as he befriends a rather eccentric young man at university and slowly finds himself enveloped by his family, a family doomed to fall apart before their time, crippled and isolated by their ties to catholicism in a changing, non-catholic world. It's this decay that Waugh predicts (as he wrote this during WWII) that perhaps rings so true. The world of the toff as at an end and though it didn't really happen for another decade or two his design of making this family catholic makes their crumbling all the swifter.

It is a sad, sad tale and occasionally beautiful. Our main character is far from perfect and paints a rather poor picture of himself in the second book of the collective but this never breaks the interest and never causes the book to lose it's romantic side. Just don't expect a warm and fuzzy Waugh adventure.