Carol's Comments March 2015

Carol’s Comments March 2015

Hello Everyone! Welcome to another issue of Carol’s Comments. As a devoted Downton Abbey fan, I eagerly awaited the series return on January 4^th. Before Season Five began, I decided to mainly focus on books which gave an alternate perspective on the British aristocracy’s decline after World War I. I started with one of my favorite novels, Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh.

Set between 1924 and 1944, Waugh’s story centers on middle class artist turned British Army officer Charles Ryder. He recalls in a bittersweet flashback his halcyon days at Oxford where one summer in 1924 he meets and develops an intimate friendship with Sebastian Flyte, a very charismatic and rather eccentric young aristocrat. 

When Sebastian takes Charles to Brideshead, the family ancestral estate for a visit, he soon becomes quite captivated with the entire Flyte family especially with Sebastian’s elusively beautiful sister Julia and his devoutly Catholic mother Lady Marchmain. Ultimately, Ryder’s life  is intrinsically intertwined with the bewitching Marchmain clan forever.

After finishing Brideshead Revisited, I still wanted to remain in the luxuriant and strangely melancholy world of the enigmatic Flytes.  Since I own the entire 11 episode 1981 Brideshead Revisited miniseries on DVD, and was literally snowbound for much of January, I binge watched the 12 hour television  adaptation over three consecutive weekends.

Primarily directed by Charles Sturridge (who replaced Michael Lindsay-Hogg after a British writers’ strike temporarily delayed production), this extremely faithful dramatization stars Jeremy Irons as Charles Ryder, Anthony Andrews as Sebastian Flyte, Diana Quick as Julia Flyte and Laurence Olivier and Claire Bloom as Lord and Lady Marchmain. 

John Mortimer’s brilliant screenplay exquisitely re-creates the sumptuously evocative atmosphere of Waugh’s original book. More importantly, Andrews and Irons give such incredibly memorable performances that I always imagine them as Sebastian and Charles whenever I read Brideshead Revisited. 

Ultimately, this unforgettable award-winning miniseries remains the definitive film version of Waugh’s classic novel. Not even the recent 2008 abridged theatrical remake starring Emma Thompson and Matthew Goode (which was also filmed on location at Castle Howard) can compare to it. If you love Downton Abbey, I highly recommend watching it. 

Next I took a temporary literary detour back twenty years to 1905 after reading excellent reviews in the New York Times and Entertainment Weekly about Priya Parmar’s fictional biography Vanessa and Her Sister.

In Parmar’s inventive novel, artist Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf’s older sister narrates the story by using imaginary diaries and letters which describe the very avant-garde lifestyle she, Virginia and her two brothers, Thoby and Adrian Stephen led in London’s bohemian Bloomsbury neighborhoods between 1905 through 1912. 

Through this unique literary plot device, the reader not only learns about how the Stephen family forms an intellectual circle of friends known as the Bloomsbury Group but also witnesses  Vanessa’s turbulent relationship with her sister, notably Virginia’s possessiveness and mental instability which eventually ruins her marriage to fellow painter and art critic Clive Bell. At first, I thought this unusual storyline would  be difficult to follow, Instead these absorbing fictional letters and diary entries intimately draw the reader into Vanessa’s and her friends’ personal lives and struggles.

Finally, the author also features a prologue which lists every member of the Stephen family and all their intellectual friends (circa 1905) along with an epilogue which describes the fates of the surviving Bloomsbury Group after 1912.

After my brief interlude in the Edwardian era, I quickly fast-forwarded twenty years to the early 1920s to read The Paying Guests 2014’s wildly popular New York Times bestseller by Sarah Waters.

Waters uses three distinct genres: historical fiction, erotic love story and murder mystery in this intriguing and dramatically different story. Set in 1922 in London’s prestigious Champion Hill suburb, the novel revolves around Frances Wray and her widowed mother. After Mr. Wray’s death leaves his family nearly destitute due to poor financial investments, the women need to take in lodgers (aka paying guests) to supplement their meager income. 

When they decide to rent upstairs rooms to the young married couple Leonard and Lilian Barber, Frances quickly becomes intimately entangled in their lives. As time progresses, Frances’ close friendship with Lilian suddenly transforms into an illicit love affair.

Then in the last third of Waters' book, the plot abruptly switches to a crime thriller when a brutal murder profoundly and irrevocably changes Frances’ and Lilian’s lives and romantic relationship forever. I found this section of the novel very exhilarating because the reader witnesses the murder and subsequent investigation through the criminal’s point of view.

Although I’m not usually attracted to the themes explored in The Paying Guests, it does offer a very imaginative and provocative glimpse into what Downton Abbey might have looked like if the Crawley sisters or their cousin Rose had chosen a Sapphic lifestyle.

All the books and movies reviewed in my column can be found in most local public libraries. My readers from St Joseph County, Indiana can visit the St Joseph County Public Library web site at libraryforlife.org for more information. Thanks for reading and your continued support as I start my fourth year writing this blog. See you all next time!