I am averse to contemporary literature. I find it boring. Or trite. Or predictable. Or ridiculous. Or…what’s that word when people put on airs and pretend to be someone they’re not? Affected. No, pretentious. That’s it. I find contemporary work pretentious. And boring.
I tend toward older work, modern as they call it, like Evelyn Waugh, of which I had read some in the past – Scoop, Handful of Dust, The Sword of Honor Trilogy – but skipped the much ballyhooed Brideshead Revisited. I was unsure about reading it now, thinking I might find it predictable. I was wrong.
As irritatingly pompous (indeed affected) as the main players, Sebastian Brideshead and Charles Ryder, might be and as predictable the narrative, the prose remains compelling, funny too. Beware of the Anglo-Catholics – they’re all sodomites with unpleasant accents. Or his descriptors for wine: “…shy like a gazelle…a flute by still water…a prophet in a cave.” Or more perhaps to the point, his understanding of the old English world expressed through literary allusions and Latin sayings Et in Arcadia Ego.
Death is found everywhere, even Arcadia, to say nothing of the marvelously sexy and exciting posts on social media. My point, because I always have a point, is that if Sebastian and/or Charles had a social media account, it would be like that, pretentious and dull. But Waugh wrote them in such a way as they were not.
