A quick hit
Over the years some of the harshest critics of this book have been other English Catholic writers. You find quite a few of them, Anthony Burgess, for example, who attack the book because the kind of Catholicism it portrays is not typical. Waugh would have a short, and brutal answer to that, which would be that he doesn't write about typical English Catholics because he found them boring. We will have an example of an ordinary English Catholic coming up later and the picture we get is not flattering.
However, the thing not to do, and some critics have done just this, is to think that Waugh has any illusions about English Catholicism or that he means to glorify the Flytes. In chapter 4 it is painfully obvious that Waugh knows that the Flytes are very atypical. Nor is it the case, as is sometimes alleged, that Waugh has created some imagined glorious Catholic aristocracy going back for centuries. The family was once Catholic but that is true of all really old English families. Their Catholicism at the beginning of the book is the result of a recent conversion.
And, far from glorifying this family and its Catholicism, Waugh laughs, and wants us to laugh along, at Sebastian and Cordelia's reaction to the possibility that they might no longer be able to have a consecrated chapel inside their very home. They are like spoiled children as were their parents before them.
The first post in the Brideshead series is here.
The next post will be here.
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