Time's All-time 100 novels: Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited" and William Golding's "Lord of the Flies"

The most important thing to know about Evelyn Waugh is that he is a man, in spite of his given name. The second thing to know about him is that he is Catholic, a fact that informs most of his work, especially Brideshead Revisited. Brideshead is about an aristocratic, dysfunctional Catholic family seen through the eyes of an agnostic family friend, Charles Ryder, who is constantly surprised that a family can be both thoroughly dysfunctional and thoroughly Catholic at the same time, since, in his eyes, the dysfunctional part - which includes alcoholism, adultery, separation and a strongly hinted bit of homosexuality - automatically means they are hypocritical or just plain silly when paired with the Catholic part.

 

Orwell apparently said that Waugh was "about as good a novelist as one can be while holding untenable opinions," the untenable bit, presumably, being his Catholicism and fundamentally conservative view of the 20th century. But if you can accept the fact that reasonable people can believe in, and long for, God, then you can appreciate the beauty, the humor and the subtelty of what happens to the characters in Brideshead, especially the narrator Ryder.

 

Lord of the Flies, another on Time's list of books that I somehow escaped reading in school or college but had always meant to read, explores the darker side of human nature. Sadly, it was a bit of a letdown. Once you know the premise of the book - that a bunch of boys end up alone on an island after their plane crashes, killing all the adults on board - you can guess where it goes from there.

 

Things start out OK, with the boys forming a government and dividing up the labor needed for survival, but it soon collapses into a Hobbesian nightmare. Give Golding credit for writing the book, but I can't help but think it could have been done much better. Nothing was particulary moving, insightful or menacing.

5 stars

All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren

Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Moviegoer - Walker Percy

1984 - George Orwell
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey

The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene
Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

4 stars

The Assistant - Bernard Malamud
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis

On the Road - Jack Kerouac

Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett

Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe

3.5 stars

Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

3 stars

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger

Lord of the Flies - William Golding

 

2 stars

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret - Judy Blume
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

Watchmen - Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

1 star

The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon