Evelyn Waugh's sacred and profane prose

October 28 marked the birth anniversary of Evelyn Waugh. Born over a century ago, Waugh nevertheless wrote books that are remarkably contemporary. In Scoop, he poked fun at the newspaper business, its grand aims and (sometimes) shallow proprietors. Writing when he did, at the height of the journalism boom in the West, Waugh may not have imagined that the print medium would one day meet its demise at the hands of technology. Even so, his caricatures of those who run the newspaper business tick all the boxes.

Humourist P J O'Rourke brilliantly explains the novel's premise: "The most famous book among all foreign correspondents is Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. The newspaper in Scoop is, of course, The Daily Beast, which is owned by the moronic Lord Copper and run by the obsequious Mr Salter. There's a brief passage which I think all reporters know. 'Whenever Lord Copper was right, Mr Salter would say 'Definitely, Lord Copper,' and whenever Lord Copper was wrong, Mr Salter would way, 'Up to a point, Lord Copper.'' Then follows a little snatch of dialogue where Lord Copper says, 'Hong Kong - belongs to us, doesn't it?' 'Definitely, Lord Copper.' 'Yokohama - capital of Japan, isn't it?' 'Up to a point, Lord Copper'."

The entire novel is a laugh riot - it traces the half-hearted journey of William Boot, a young contributor to Daily Beast's nature columns, who is mistaken for a war correspondent and packed off to a fictive African country to cover, in the words of Lord Cooper, "a very promising little war". Waugh plumbed his own experiences of working at the Daily Mail in writing Scoop (incidentally, he too was sent off to cover Mussolini's expected invasion of Abyssinia, present-day Ethiopia).

While he wrote many books, Waugh is most remembered for his classic, Brideshead Revisited, a novel that speaks deeply, and possibly darkly, to the power of faith. Set in the inter-War period, Brideshead is the precursor to what can be called the "benevolent outsider" genre, taken up with relish by such modern novelists as Alan Hollinghurst (The Line of Beauty) and Ali Smith (The Accidental). Charles Ryder is an undergrad at Oxford, where he is befriended by the fabulously rich, and possibly gay, Lord Sebastian Flyte. The two men develop a close (platonic) bond, and Charles is invited to the Brideshead mansion, Sebastian's family home.

At Brideshead, we meet other members of Sebastian's family: Julia, his sister, with whom Charles begins an affair, and Lady Marchmain, Sebastian's mother. At this point, the novel retains its pleasing lightness, as the newcomer partakes of the rich hospitality of the Marchmains. Sebastian is the heart of these pages. He is the carefree bird that flits from one scene to the next, spreading his charm in what is a dark counterpoint to what will come later.

In the 2008 film adaptation, director Julian Jarrold is explicit about Sebastian's feelings for Charles, and some of the movie's most tender scenes imagine the two men in love. That the dreamy Matthew Goode and Ben Whisaw play Charles and Sebastian, respectively, helps. The love-not-love triangle between Sebastian on one hand and Charles and Julia on the other covers the novel, and Jarrold's film, in a veil of understated tragedy.

The novel is at heart about living in thrall to the precepts of religion. By the end of the novel, Sebastian has drifted away from his deeply Catholic family. He is now in Tunisia living the life of a ghost. His love for Charles unrequited, he now passes his days in a drunken blur. He is besides estranged from his mother who has, after all, been unable to reconcile her love for her son with her religion.

The others suffer too. Julia refuses to marry Charles because, as a Roman Catholic, she does not believe in divorce. (Both she and Charles were married in the course of the novel to other people.) In the end, we meet Charles as "homeless, childless, middle-aged and loveless". Brideshead has been converted into a military base and Charles, now in the Army, is billeted there. He looks back on his days with a mix of nostalgia and apprehension, and to the reader, the scenes acquire a strange menacing power. Here was all beauty and life; and here now is barrenness. 

Critics have interpreted Brideshead variously, but to me its stern chaperoning of Catholic values ultimately drives a stake through the novel's heart. Waugh may have lessons for us on leading the good life but when the good life is so tragic it is natural to lay the absence of comfort at the hands of Jesus.