Flytes of fancy.

Santa was very good to me this year. I certainly didn't deserve it. Somehow--perhaps it was my incessant whining--she managed to get her more cinematic-minded elves to cobble together exactly what I had asked for. There lying under the tree, along 'with the keys to my new Maserati, were all six video-cassettes of the now antique ten-hour BBC miniseries, Brideshead Revisited. Santa assured me that she had, through various subterfuges, purchased this extravagant indulgence at a considerable discount. I did not interrogate her about the details. Price was no object. In a weak moment--and I seem to be having more and more of them--I would have paid nearly anything. I'm obsessed.

Symptoms of this obsession began to appear about a year-and-a-half ago. I suspect it has to do with theological battle fatigue, exacerbated by my own accidie. I needed to be reminded of something--something transcending (literally and literarily) the next clash over a papal pronouncement, the last irksome liturgy, the course of church politics generally. I suppose I was longing for something that both mirrored my increasing fecklessness and yet tempered it. On impulse I borrowed the first cassette of Brideshead from the library. I found myself absorbed--absorbed utterly by Waugh's brilliant evocation of the potency of memory and longing "for we possess nothing certainly except the past," as Waughs narrator Charles Ryder confesses. Eight months later I watched all ten hours again. In between, I reread the novel (I had first read it fifteen years ago). Presently I'm reading the novel for a third time, and making my way through Waugh's letters.

Whenever my children see me eyeing a Brideshead cassete, much moaning and gnashing of teeth can be heard. "Noooo, not again," beseeches my eleven-year-old son. "That's the most boring movie ever made!" He has a point. The English journalist Christopher Hitchens has referred to the novel as Brideshead Regurgitated. Still in my best Sebastian Flyte manner--I can't help myself.

Grappling with my addiction, I found some comfort in learning that Anthony Burgess was similarly afflicted. Though he selected Brideshead as one of the best novels of the last fifty years, he readily acknowledged its glaring flaws. "A sham and a snobbish sham," was the judgment of many critics, Burgess conceded. Waugh's romance with the doomed Flyte family was egregiously sentimental, the celebration of the landed aristocracy risible, the sex scenes ludicrous, the theology medieval by way of the Catholic Truth Guild. And a death-bed reconciliation to boot!

Yet Burgess confessed to having read Brideshead at least a dozen times. A dozen! As he noted, the novel somehow triumphs over its showy snobbery and idiosyncratic piety. "This is one of those disturbing novels in which the faults do not matter," Burgess professed. "It is a novel altogether readable and magical."

Inevitably, the movie suffers from many of the same excesses. Jeremy Irons, Laurence Olivier, Diana Quick, Claire Bloom, and Anthony Andrews seem nearly perfect to me now, but when I first saw Brideshead on PBS in the early 1980s, I couldn't watch it. I thought Ryder's melancholy unearned, the burnished settings preposterous, the homosexual infatuation and the foppishness irritating, Anthony Blanche's stutter maddening, and Sebastian's Teddy bear as inexcusable as his alcoholism. It wasn't until five or six years ago that I managed to sit through even one episode. And now? Have I mellowed, or merely gone soft in the head?

Probably both. In any event, John Mortimer's (of Rumpole fame) screenplay is remarkably faithful to the novel. Among my favorite scenes are Cordelia's disquisition on Sebastian's unsuspected holiness; Sebastian's earlier off-handed confession of faith--"they've [Catholics] got an entirely different outlook on life; everything they think important is different from other people"; Father Mowbry's hilarious attempts to catechize the ambitious Rex Mottram; and of course the epic domestic battle over ministering extreme unction to Lord Marchmain. Despite Waugh's absurd pretensions and prejudices, Brideshead's redemptive sense of life's longings and love's possibilities is wonderfully all of a piece. "Perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols," Ryder speculates, "a hill of many invisible crests; doors that open as in a dream to reveal only a further stretch of carpet and another door; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us."

Any novel that can make that remarkable intimation believable is worth reading a few times.