"Here love had died between me and the army. Here the tram lines ended so that men returning fuddled from Glasgow could doze in their seats until roused by the cnductress at their journey's end. There was some way to go from the tram stop to the camp gates; a quarter of a mile in which they could button their blouses and straighten their caps before passing the guard room, a quarter of a mile in which concrete gave place to grass at the road's edge. This was the extreme limit of the city, a fringe of driftwood above high-water mark. Here the close, homogenous territory of housing estates and cinema ended and the hinterland began."
(Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited)
2 comments:
I welcome your review of Brideshead on the CNG Lending Library.
My discussion point: That the hero is dull and the only truly exciting character is brutalised and expelled... leaving us to the dull people and their faux relationships. That a love of ho-yay is all that keeps us reading. A desperate belief that Sebastian will sober-up and return to us in his teddy-carrying form for a bit more youthful man-on-man titilation.
Which of course, in true Waugh style, never happens.
Disappointing, despite one of the world's great character creations.
I loved, loved the first half but, like you Dans, despaired when Sebastian was packed off to drunkland. Julia was just Sebastian-in-a-wig to me - poor Charles. Even so I think the book's pretty lovely in lots of parts - the crappy resolution not being one of them. Will attempt to get around to a CNG Lending Library review presently...
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