THE NEW FILM ADAPTATION of Brideshead Revisited has forced Evelyn Waugh’s most celebrated novel upon popular culture again, and popular culture has suffered enough. This time the chorus is one of sorrow and anger over the transformation of a work of art into a dangled period piece around which swim the sharks of the Academy. Nothing will compare, grumble the loyalists, to the 1981 Granada television mini-series, which, at about 700 minutes, took longer to watch than the book did to read. Director Julian Jarrod has changed the plot into one of an incestuous love triangle among Charles, Sebastian, and Julia, and so source material that was overwrought to begin with has been fashioned into an all-out festival of camp. What more would we expect from the ghastly “age of Hooper”? Yet one aspect of Waugh’s flawed and complicated masterpiece pays revisiting–its ostentatious religiosity. Brideshead is a Catholic novel, all right, but an ill at ease one.

“It is a peculiarity of the literary profession,” wrote Waugh in his diary in 1944, “that, once an idea becomes fully formed in the author’s mind, it cannot be left unexploited without deterioration. If, in fact, the book is not written now it will never be written.” And so it was written during a five-month hot spell of wartime productivity, while Waugh was on leave from the army. The germ of his inspiration is easy to detect. A year earlier, in March 1943, he’d been rereading G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday and had found at least one overriding assumption of the comic mystery wanting: “It is painful to realize that Chesterton introduced ‘the Century of the Common Man’. It was easy in 1908 to believe in the basic wisdom and wholesomeness of the common man and to think all wrongheadedness confined to prigs and cranks. It is harder now after the stampede of silliness and vice in half of Christendom.”