WAUGH NO BORE

Eleanor Doughty’s attack on Brideshead Revisited (Sacred Cows, September) fails to tell us what Evelyn Waugh said its “presumptuously large” theme is: “the action of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters”. Yes, this is a Catholic theme, but literary critics should make an effort to understand a writer’s worldview.

If she doesn’t like Brideshead because it is “overly preoccupied with Catholicism”, huge amounts of European literature must be closed to her.

Her failure to engage with Brideshead’s theme accounts for her extraordinary claim that the novel’s punchline never comes. How did she manage to miss the climactic scene in which the dying Lord Marchmain finally accepts his previously rejected Catholicism? The agnostic narrator Charles Ryder realises that this moment is like the veil of the Temple being torn in two.

Waugh’s Catholicism arose directly out of his early satirical novels: he came to see how grace could act on people despite the world’s chaos and absurdity. This is also the unifying theme of his World War II Sword of Honour trilogy — but perhaps Miss Doughty finds that “a bore” too. Andrew Nash abingdon, oxfordshire