![]() ![]() It was a treat from first to last though, I look forward to listening again in a few more years, no doubt it will resonate even more with age. ![]() I gave Irons' narration only four stars though because a couple of the accents jarred a bit (mostly Rex's, I'm glad Waugh didn't make him Australian), but overall he handles the large cast with aplomb (he must have picked up a lot from all those knights and dames back in the 80s). The scope of more than a decade, the heightened style, and the complex structure would all stretch his powers and produce what early on he called his magnum opus. It tells the story of Charles Ryders infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. When he sat down to begin work on Brideshead Revisited in February, 1944, he was aware that this would be his most ambitious novel. I'd forgotten how funny it was, though, Rex's failed Catholic conversion and Antony Blanche's appearances being the comic highlights. The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waughs novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. I can't possibly be objective about the novel itself, it is inextricably bound up with my adolescence (I first read it when the TV version was being shown) and is one of the main reasons that drew my wife and me together (we named our third son Charles Sebastian). The scenes from that incomparable drama floated through my head as he read, bringing all the magical cast back to life (Olivier, Gielgud, Claire Bloom, Jane Asher, John LeMesurier et al, like some 70s thespian super-group), not to mention the music. ![]() What a coup for the BBC to snare Jeremy Irons, star of the 1981 TV adaptation, to revisit his role as the protagonist and narrator of Waugh's wartime masterpiece. ![]()
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