I SHOULD note at the outset that despite being a literary-minded Catholic convert, I regard Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited with something less than uncritical affection. I tend to share Waugh’s own judgment, handed down in the late 1950s when he made revisions on the book, that it “is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language,” and I think some of its themes are better amplified in Graham Greene’s novels and Waugh’s own Sword of Honour trilogy.
Moreover, I’m one of the few Catholic conservatives who have never seen Granada Television’s famous twelve-hour Brideshead miniseries, which made a star out of Jeremy Irons and PBS addicts out of millions of Anglophile Americans. In a sense, then, I represent the ideal audience for the shorter, sudsier adaptation of Waugh’s novel now showing: I’m less likely than most Waughophiles to gripe about deviations from the source material, and less inclined as well to compare the thing unfavorably with the better, longer Reagan-era adaptation.
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