Friday, March 06, 2009
Those Weird Brits
The past week I read two weird works of literature by British authors: Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh and The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnhim. Both are wonderful in their own ways, and deeply flawed.
Brideshead begins as a breathless love story between two Oxford students in pre-World War II England. Waugh, who was mostly known as a satirist, forsakes irony for lush, sensitive prose that details the blossoming relationship between Charles Ryder, an emotionally stunted man learning to love for the first time, and the free-spirited Sebastian Flyte, who increasingly depends on alcohol to help him escape the realities of life.
About midway through the novel, however, the story takes a strange turn as Sebastian drops out of it. We watch, confused, as Charles gets married, then has an adulterous affair with Sebastian's sister (who just happens to bear a resemblance to Sebastian himself). I kept wanting to ask, Waugh, what are you doing? You've just wrapped me up in this vivid story of first love, and now you want me to swallow this crap about Charles being in love with a woman without any explanation? Is this meant to be parable of sublimated male sexual desire? Clearly not, as Waugh simply moves Charles from man-love to woman-love like a chess player castling his king with his rook.
By the end of the novel, the meaning of it twists in on itself so completely that I felt angry as I read the book's bizarre, opaque last few pages. The only interpretation that makes sense to me is that Waugh didn't realize he was writing a love story between two men and that the conventions of the heterosexual love story just don't convince for the characters he'd created.
The Enchanted April takes a similarly strange turn. It begins as a wickedly witty satire of the lives of put-upon housewives in England. Their lot is so devastatingly well-rendered that when the housewives arrive in sunny Italy for a vacation from their husbands, we're thrilled... as well as mystified by their decision to invite their husbands to join them. Von Arnhim, I guess, is trying to make some kind of point about the redemptive powers of love and beauty, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not quite so forgiving nor so gullible to believe that if your husband's been treating you like shit for twenty years, a day in Portofino is all he needs to change his ways.
Perhaps the strangest thing about these two books is that in spite of (or perhaps because of) their flaws, I've been thinking of them since I put them down, which is more than I can say for a number of polite, nicely crafted works of fiction that have as much tang and bite as a bowl of melted jello.
posted by aaron hamburger at 9:17 PM
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