SOURCE: "A Twitch upon the Thread," in New Oxford Review, Vol. 61, No. 9, November 1994, pp. 19-20.

In the following essay, Hallett examines Charles Ryder's reaction in Brideshead Revisited to the Catholicism of the Flyte family.

"Is Evelyn Waugh a Catholic novelist?" a friend of mine asked. "I am thinking," he explained, "of Brideshead Revisited. That book has a compelling quality; every few years it draws me back to it. But its mystery escapes me."

In a way my friend is sensing the very mystery that draws the book's narrator, Charles Ryder, to write about the family that lived at Brideshead. Charles, a non-Catholic, is both repulsed and attracted by the mysterious force that unites and directs the seemingly disparate members of the Flyte family. Part of the attraction of the book is that Waugh never explains the mystery; instead, he renders Charles Ryder's experience of it.

Almost as soon...