I'm always shocked by how dense and contrived-seeming the words are. I suppose that it's because I came to it via the TV programme.
Then it was hard-winter in a bleak cottage at the back-end of the back of nowhere with snow piled in jagged lumps outside the door. But we had summer and Sebastian on our screen.
Today it's hard yellow sunlight, Sunday calm, the scaffolders are topping-out, the floorers have done the welds and there's a world that feels very wide when you stand in the wind. I'm tired, but we're nearing the end—the final clearing up when everything begins to come together; when you start to see what you've achieved. I'm thinking of finishing, lying in my bed and Brideshead.
Waugh, I easily, and heartily, detest, but that book! Why does it still mean so much to me? Is it because I want that to have been my life?
To which I can answer an assertive no. Ryder is a prick. They're all pricks in fact.
I suppose that it's because it just shouldn't work as a book, and yet despite its obvious flaws it does. In my head I'd like to like Titus Groan more, but, although I love it, it doesn't mix with my insides in the same way as Brideshead does. Seeing the wonders without feeling them.
Its faults give it a power. Or perhaps it's just the memory of that desperate winter where it was the only sunlight?