Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

Brideshead Revisited felt like a book written especially for me. I, after all, was raised a Catholic, in a family with some not insubstantial but nevertheless declining wealth, went to a boys’ boarding school and then Oxbridge, and have to deal with the consequences of all of the above every day. The novel is in the form of a memoir by a man called Charles Ryder, of his relationship with another family, the Flytes, in particular the eldest daughter Julia and the younger son, Lord Sebastian. Advertised on the blurb as an Oxford novel, Oxford is only a small part of the larger story. That story concerns first, Sebastian’s attempts to escape from his family and their religion; then Charles’ relationship with Julia, herself somewhat lapsed in faith.  

I always find talking about novels hard; the longer they are, the worse it becomes. We have to latch onto themes, but often the effects are lost when we work with brief summaries. If not themes, we just choose characters, but that too feels cheap and misleading. I loved this novel and think I will end up rereading it many times, but when I say it was written for me it’s not some attempt at placing myself on a pedestal – what I mean is that I don’t think, had I different background, I would have got nearly so much out of the book. One must know firsthand the family dynamics, the experiences, the guilt of class and religion. And to be quite honest, I am not sure I would wish them on anybody.  

Sebastian – and his Drinking 

I ought to begin with Sebastian, Lord Flyte, and his story. He has a somewhat dandyish reputation at Oxford, and carries around with him a little bear, Aloysius – whether as a stunt, or because of a deep immaturity, we are not to know outright. He meets Charles when, after a night out, he vomits through Charles’ open window onto the carpet. They become friends, and he inducts Charles into a world of wastefulness and fun. Charles is what we might call well-off, but he’s not like Lord Flyte, whose elder brother is the Earl of Brideshead, the family home.  

These are important gradations within the British class system that still exist, but they are invisible unless you get close enough to them. For plenty of people, I am the poshest person they know. But my family are nouveau riche – we made our money in the 19th century through actual work. And my limited noble blood comes through my grandmother, not the male line. A friend gently rebuked me when we had lunch together and I acted as if we were in the same place. His family home has more old portraits than mine has plates, and the origins of their significance go much deeper into the past, and are nothing near as shameful as commerce. Money is a certain leveller, but in the end, it cannot get you onto a hunt unless you buy all the land the foxes live on. Whether or not you want to be a part of this club doesn’t change the fact that it still exists.  

Charles and Sebastian do a lot of drinking and revelling, ultimately becoming good chums. Charles visits Sebastian’s home, but Sebastian tries hard to prevent him from meeting anyone from his family. When that happens, all the happiness that had built up, and all the humour of the novel’s first part, collapses. The drinking, which at first is as harmless as it can be (“I like this bad set and I like getting drunk at luncheon”), soon becomes mildly concerning (““Ought we to be drunk every night?” Sebastian asked one morning”) and then outright depressing (“I found that sometimes after I had gone back to my college, he sat up late and alone, soaking”).  

It only gets worse. Sebastian’s name is undoubtedly a pun. Lord Flyte wishes for his own flight. We get variations, from characters, on what is wrong with him. At one point he accuses Charles of spying on him for his mother. But, regardless, his drinking becomes worse and worse, and he tries to flee home, running away to get drunk on Christmas, and eventually leaving for Morocco, where he lives a little like how drug addicts are today portrayed, although with enough money arriving each month for him to support himself. He wants to get away. “He must feel free”, as one character ambiguously puts it.  

The treatment of alcoholism within Brideshead Revisited was one of the ways the novel hit close to home. When I was about 10, I started having attacks of depression, almost on a termly basis, at school. They came from the most ridiculous source, for a boy at that age – the thought I was failing to live up to the family name, which had been so honoured by my famous grandfather and great-grandfather. I used to go up to the board in the form room when nobody else was about and try to analyse how I was performing within the class, to see whether I was the best, or whether I was not trying hard enough. I grew out of the feeling, not the depression. But pressures, of a certain sort, have always been there, even when we try to avoid them. 

Language and Silence 

One of the reasons why we lived on a remote estate in Scotland, I think it’s fair to say, is that my father wanted to flee too. With the sale of a painting he’d inherited, he had enough money to buy the estate and become a farmer. But he, like Sebastian, was an alcoholic in his flight and before it. As with Sebastian’s home, I know that at my grandmother’s there is a drinks tray available for whoever wants it. As with my own family, the attitude towards Sebastian’s drinking is utterly repulsive. And we see this in the novel’s use of dialogue and other language, which brings us onto the next topic. Here is what Julia has to say when she hears of her brother’s plight: 

“He’s been drinking in his room all the afternoon” “How very peculiar! What a bore he is! Will he be all right for dinner?” 

The older brother remarks that God loves drunkards. The fact that they all got drunk enough to be arrested and put in the papers is a matter of amusement to the younger sister, Cordelia, who is admittedly only a child at this point. It takes a long time for the drinks tray and cabinet to be locked away. As so often happens, the approach taken denies the problem exists at all. “Then dinner was announced, and we went to the dining room where the subject was not mentioned.” 

In front of the servants, nowadays more respectfully called “staff”, you are not supposed to talk about such things. But then, nobody wants to talk about them anywhere else. “Sebastian’s stay here has not been happy” is all his mother writes to Charles in a letter, but it tells us more than enough – and not just about him. Silences and evasive language mark the upper classes who are here the centre of the story. Because they barely even acknowledge that Charles is unhappy, they cannot get much into working out why he is or what to do about it. Even the solution proposed at one point, to remove all drink from his access, is itself a concealment. If there’s no drink, he cannot be drunk, and hence we cannot say that we have a problem on our hands.  

The language of the novel can be very funny too – Waugh’s reputation these days is primarily as a comic novelist – but what sticks out is the way that it stops being quite so funny once people start getting hurt. One of the very impressive things about the novel is the way that it manages to transition from being essentially a comic novel set in Oxford, into something much more tragic, almost without you noticing. A character like Charles’ eccentric father, who we meet early on, is quite funny, but the characters who take centre stage afterwards, who are just as out of touch or backward, are anything but. Their inability to face things hurts people, Sebastian most of all. It takes a doctor in Morocco to say the quiet part out loud, that Sebastian is an “alcoholic”. Nobody else seems to know the word.  

Silences don’t just tolerate alcohol abuse – they create other problems too. Most notably, they allow the family’s finances to flounder. It must be said, it’s rather hard not to let your finances fail when you are in the position that the owners of Brideshead are. Away from the world, away from the management of your funds, even if you have reasonably good advisors, you may not know what options you have. That, more or less, is the view of Rex Mottram. This Canadian financier is up-and-coming and marries Julia to keep up the upping. He talks of finances and figures, and for any obstacle he assumes money can resolve it. When confronted with the fact that he has divorced another woman who is still alive, and hence cannot remarry as a Catholic, his solution is rather simple. “All right then, I’ll get an annulment. What does it cost? Who do I get it from?” –  his directness is a breath of fresh air. Except that the air stinks. 

Catholicism 

If we placed the characters of the novel on a chart spanning the earthly and the heavenly, Rex would be underground. Charles would be suspended in the air, Julia and Sebastian (the “half-heathens”) would be somewhat above him, and the rest of the Flytes except the absent father, much higher still. Rex is rough, determined, and brutally clear where the other characters take tangled paths even to say they need the loo. We might be inclined to side with him against the Flytes, but that’s not where the novel goes. I feel that, if the first thing we learn about Waugh is that he’s a comic novelist, near-enough the second is that he is a Catholic convert – so we know that Rex isn’t going to win. Still, it’s up to us to judge how far he loses. 

“I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.”

That last line is so good you have to underline it. And it contains the whole argument, it seems, of the book. Whatever is left out is contained in this quote from on G K Chesterton’s character, Father Brown.

“”Father Brown” said something like “I caught him” (the thief) “with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.”” 

Charles is not a Catholic, while the Flytes are. Even Sebastian and Julia, the ones whose faith is weaker, still have a sense that the religion is true, even as they fail to live up to it. Charles is misunderstanding entirely when he says, “It seems to me that without your religion Sebastian would have the chance to be a happy and healthy man.” As an assertion, it rings true. The problem is that once you believe in the truth of the religion you were born with, even as you seek to turn your back on it, it is still your orientation point, even if you are orientating yourself away from it. “You know at heart that it’s all bosh, don’t you?” “How I wish it was!”  

Waugh’s novel, whose goal according to the preface was to “show the operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely connected characters”, ultimately does just that. Everyone attempting to leave the whirlpool is carried back into it. Whatever the misery that it causes them, they also have much richer lives, internally at any rate, than Rex. And we get a sense that religion saves them in the end, from something truly horrible, even if it is only inside, only in their heads.  

Even Charles himself is not living well, and he borrows Julia’s image of a part pretending to be a whole to describe himself later on in the novel. After Sebastian disappears to Morocco, time passes, but Charles’s life as a painter of increasing importance, his marriage and two children, ultimately receives little attention. “I took it to be youth, not life, that I was losing.” But he was living more richly when he was with Sebastian and the Flytes, even though most of the time he was miserable. It’s that classic problem – meaningful misery or empty apparent contentment. Charles decides that his marriage and worldly success were not contentment after all, and his affair with Julia, herself in an unhappy marriage, brings the novel into its final section.  

Convincing us that Julia and Sebastian return, in their ways, to the faith of their childhoods, is easy enough. But Waugh goes further, and his novel is sneakily the story of how Charles – a committed atheist – finds himself slipping into a position where faith becomes necessary. It all happens at the end, but it’s rather well done. Bizarrely, plenty of people on Goodreads seem to have missed it. Even the novel’s full title gives us a large, flashing clue: Brideshead Revisited: The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder. God left out the hook, and Charles unknowingly took it. And good for him.  

Conclusion

For many of the rest of us, the novel’s ending will be immensely frustrating. Charles and Julia divorce their unfaithful partners to be with one another, but then come to accept that to do so would be to “live in sin”. And so, instead, they part out of deference to God and never see one another again. Their faith, it turns out, is mighty. But it makes for resignation and a denial of emotional satisfaction that is a real challenge to nonbelievers. I can imagine many of us will have thrown the book across the room in annoyance. But that’s faith for you. Though they do not set themselves on fire, in Brideshead Revisited we have people who make you feel they are serious about their beliefs. We can only accept that and close the door on their story without being too rude about them behind their backs.  

For me, though I went to mass at school every week, and was raised moderately Catholic, I remain still some distance from Julia and Sebastian. I don’t see the same necessity as they do to act the way they do. But I am close enough that I could respect their decision, even if I thought it was ridiculous. Regardless, the ending is one of those brilliant ones which will change with us as we grow ourselves, a bit like the end of Wharton’s Age of Innocence (another book with a challenging ending). Though I did not need yet another excuse to want to re-read it, there’s one right there for you.  

My Job, My Life, My Blog

After my birthday dinner in November, my friends remarked, though not to me directly, that they had never seen me so happy. That really is a most extraordinary thing. I have been many things to many people, but happy? Not often. Entertaining, exciting, supportive, intense – those might fit, but not “happy.” At my worst I am depressive, moody, snappy. For people to notice, and be so shocked as to mention it to my girlfriend, must mean it was a real surprise. Indeed, the whole thing has been quite a surprise to me too.

In September, I started full time work. With Marx and Marcuse at the ready, I was so prepared to be alienated and miserable that I was completely blindsided by what actually happened. The work was interesting, my colleagues were brilliant and good fun, the company paid me well and gave generously into my pension, while allowing me great flexibility about when and where I worked. I quickly made friends with a few people in my team, and with several people from the same graduate intake as mine. I had time to meet them in the afternoons at the office café for free hot chocolate, and even hang out after work. I travelled to our headquarters in Germany a few times, and visited a power plant in the UK, walking around in a hard hat and covering my ears with a gleeful expression on my face as I tried not to be utterly overwhelmed by all the loud exciting noises.

Normally, when I go into work, I use the bus. From my family’s home, it’s a fifteen minute walk through the fields to get to the bus stop. In the mornings, the grass is slick with dew and you can smell the changing of the seasons. On the bus I read, and usually on the walk back I’ll call my girlfriend, who is just finishing off her studies at Cambridge. At home I have little enough time to sense its value, but just about enough time to make use of that knowledge and spend it well. Bizarrely, after many months of day-to-day freedom, I found myself reading far more, and far better. I even found myself writing, completing two stories late last year by getting an evening routine going. In November, I started running in the mornings too. Though I cannot say I always enjoy this, I’m glad I’m doing it.

A night or two each week I still teach a few Ukrainian refugees in the UK online as part of the charity my girlfriend and I set up. At this point, if their English isn’t good, there’s no helping them. But I have fun and so do they. On weekends I can travel to London or further afield. All told, I am managing to maintain a decent social life, given I’m not in London full time. And given I’m not in London full time, I’m able to put away a nice amount of my salary into savings.

So that is it on paper. A job that pays well, where I have a positive impact and career growth, travel and freedom, a good pension and nice colleagues. I have regular exercise, a wonderful girlfriend, a much loved social circle, some active participation in making the world a better place, and time for reading and creativity. Life is, perhaps as it’s never been before, good.

So why do I find myself asking if this is all there is to it?

We can approach the problem of our lives in at least two ways, psychologically and philosophically. I have been reading philosophical fiction, and now philosophy, for far longer than is perhaps healthy. But the main problem that we soon run into, clutching our copy of Crime and Punishment in the school medical centre while waiting for a checkup, is that Dostoevsky and his friends don’t actually have much to say to us, just yet. We may relate to questions of free will and meaning, but they are inevitably abstracted, airy – just like how we don’t really understand what it means when we read in introductions that Dostoevsky had gambling debts. All of these questions and answers about how to live our lives, even Rilke’s “live the questions for now” in his Letters to a Young Poet, require that one is actually living.

And living is an active thing. It is also a thing that requires, I think, certain life conditions. We cannot live at school, or even at university. We require a choice to live, and we require consequences. We may have to face our consequences all the time, but only rarely in the sense of consequences that last our entire lives. It was only when I was in an office with the odd fifty-year-old that I realised the impact of exercise and healthy eating can have as we age; and how undesirable the alternative is, as I watched the older colleagues shuffling around with the same kind of pace and face I’d expect at a retirement home. At school we make decisions about how we learn, in the holidays we establish good or bad habits, but it takes a great deal of wisdom to see through them all the way to their ultimate consequences. I certainly didn’t, and now I have plenty of regrets for my thousands of hours in Call of Duty matches.  

We have choices at university and school, but these are still fairly bounded. We can mess up our schoolwork and get kicked out, but this is like Sartre saying we always have a choice because we can always kill ourselves. It’s laughably irrelevant. Or rather, provided we make the decision to actually study, there’s only so much choice left. Just like, if we make the decision to fail, there’s only then a choice about how to fail. At the other end, in life, there are many more choices. Some of them rest on what’s come before – I cannot immediately become a doctor, for example. But most of them come to us with the freedom of a quest in Skyrim or any other role-playing game – we can choose whatever we want to do. Suddenly, a vastly increased weight of responsibility – for fitness of mind and body, for our social circles, for where and how we live and work and spend our time – is hurled upon us. Not everyone has to decide all of these things all at once, but the decisions come, and often sooner than we expect.

If the choices and the consequences were always there, as I now see they perhaps were, then what I mean is that once you are out of it all you can gain a wisdom you might have missed earlier. And some people miss it then too. But you’re on my blog, so probably haven’t. The wisdom is the knowledge that things you do matter. Now, at last, we can do philosophy.

It’s a bitter irony that the best times in our lives for reading philosophy, when our minds are most subtle (and supple) and our time most flexible, are inarguably the worst times for doing philosophy. Of course, I can kill a pawnbroker at any time, but as I age I am more interested in practical philosophies that will not send me to prison. I want to try Schopenhauerian ethics and annihilate my willing; I want to live the way Nietzsche’s works make us hope he does; I want to read Camus and Sartre and try it all out for myself; I want to be so religious my clothes stink of incense; I want to walk the world over with only Walt Whitman for company, looking like a tramp. Now I can start to put these things into practice.

Here is where that psychological element comes in. The problems of life that I face now are mine. If before, when I was depressed, I could often blame someone or something else directly, now I am in control. I could always say I’m not happy because I’m not doing meaningful work, or because I’m not seeing my friends enough and can’t, or because I’m not exercising. With all of those things sorted, any problem that remains – and there is one – is real. The easy solutions have been tried, now life is at hand. The diffuse problems of society and economics, these too are there in the background, but divided now from the mush of poor mental health that comes with living badly, as it were. I can see them, and I can allow myself whatever anguish they will cause – for example, when I decide to rent in London and have to deal with that mess.

So when I feel this this-is-it-ness, it’s deeper than just some unkind word taken to heart on the playground or a shut door at university where I expected an embrace. It is the world I have a problem with, and the world I must answer. The problem, it goes without saying, is that although I am doing everything I am supposed to, something is still missing. I have started thinking about death at night, and the repetition of days. “Days are where we live”, as Philip Larkin has it. And seeing my days not being right, still having some hole – that’s a problem, and one I am responsible for sorting out.

To resolve it, I can look at my life and begin tinkering with it. Should I do more writing? Maybe write to some literary magazines? Or is the running not enough? I feel disgusted with myself for eating meat still – can I finally give it up or properly cut it down? (Living at home, this is hard. When I move to Germany at the end of the month, then it will be all on me). Can I see my friends more? What about calling my brother? And so on. We approach life as if it is a PC we have built, and begin moving the wires around, occasionally adding some RAM or something else here and there, and see what works. It feels almost fun, like a game.

Then there are the stronger remedies, like the bizarre ones my Polish girlfriend gets recommended when she calls her grandparents with a slight sniffle (drinking onion syrup or placing a bulb of peeled garlic next to your pillow, to mention a few). These remedies are philosophical. Is my attitude right? Am I heeding the voice of my conscience? Or should I, on the contrary, just grab a pillow and suffocate the voice instead? Then there are wild lifestyle changes – why not try being properly Epicurean, or properly Stoic? Visit a monastery? Should I give all my money away? With these too, there’s an element of play involved. And a worth goal – our own happiness, or satisfaction, or soothed conscience, or peace. (After all, the goal is itself a question for the philosophers).

The general feeling is one of excitement. Life is real, and its problems are real, and the solutions are worth trying. Never have I felt so much joy from a cutting phrase in Weil or Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein or Weber. Like a child in a toyshop who can’t wait to get home and unbox the latest toy tractor, when I hear a cool idea I can’t wait to think it over properly, to live it, and to see whether it works. That is what explains my obsession with Wittgenstein these past few months – I am trying to live some of what he says. I’m not reading for essays anymore, not even for blog posts. (Apologies!) The sheer weightiness of my decisions, made day after day, suffocate me like a stone upon my chest. Yet at the same time, suffocation entails dizziness. And I am madly lightheaded!  

Life is so sweet when we know that this is it. Without excuses, with all responsibility heaped on, every joy is magnified. To look at a tree and run my hand over its rough bark is a pleasure I’ve never felt so richly before. I go through art galleries almost at a blind run, and then allow myself an hour before a painting that takes my breath away and reaches right through to my soul and makes it bleed. I live – more and more I am living. Even if the regrets are magnified too, because nothing now will ever replace the lost time, still I am living. Suddenly, I can say to myself “da capo” and mean it. I find myself growing strong enough to confront my regrets and my mistakes – not all of them, by any stretch – and tell them and myself that it was worthwhile. Life is good.

This insane post is an attempt to work out what I am feeling. The this-is-it-ness of life is frightening and I still do not have a solution to the thought of death. I am working on it. I am living and trying everything I can and not letting it get too much for me. Because this is the real problem and challenge of my days. One is rising and falling on a see-saw above the abyss. We can be elated, and find our excitement from the urgency and seriousness of the search, or we can be rendered miserable by the emptiness of all things as we confront the void. The latter is what happened to Tolstoy, but even he managed to get out of it. I know how he did it too – I’ve got his letters even, and I’m making notes, and maybe one day you’ll see a photo of me in one of my posts, my beard grown out and a roughhewn walking stick in hand. (Be careful though, that might be the Whitman phase!)

These thoughts and reflections, if they deserve that title, are best, I realise anyway, to have when you are not too old. I am now twenty-six, and not old by any stretch, but there are times when I do feel a bit un-young. Leaving aside the body, my memory is ever-so-slightly weaker and my ability to work with complex ideas is decreasing a bit too, from the baseline of my manic teenage years. I am not sure I could work my way through the Critique of Pure Reason anymore, even if I wanted to. Luckily, I don’t think this will be a problem.

If I had come to the realisation that I needed to change my life too late, I might have found I lacked the strength of mind and will to actually do anything. Tolstoy latched onto religion and stopped thinking. But he did a heck of a lot of thinking before he got to that point, as even his mature religious writings show. I, anyhow, have time and energy to live. To take us back to the beginning, part of that is thanks to having been very lucky in ending up with the job I did. I know that my consultant friend at Bain, or was it BCG, who is much cleverer than me and knows her Russian literature as well as I do, doesn’t have the time to do any thinking any more. That, to me, is a real waste.

Anyway, against the this-is-it-ness of things, and the void in the far distance, I am trying to keep myself excited. I hope the drama of my mental life, which is as much a part of this blog as is the stuff I read, continues to provide some interest in the years to come. And do tune in again for the inevitable update, some years hence, when I say that I have finally had a child of my own, and owing to the stress I have decided to stop thinking after all! (From what I understand, this is fairly common, though hardly deserving of condemnation.)

I did not make a post about it last year, but this one marks five years of Mostly About Stories. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading some of the posts. I’ve even enjoyed writing some of them!

Jon Fosse – Septology

When I wrote about Aliss at the Fire, I wondered whether it had now become necessary for anyone wanting to write stories about faith and religion to adopt a style like Jon Fosse’s. A style that shifts constantly, fluctuating between perspectives and making porous limits which normally seem solid. One feels adrift within a more mystical world, where God and faith are not idle thoughts but lived experiences. Now, having finished Fosse’s much longer Septology, I wonder whether I can even write a blog post about it without adopting the same style, which here reaches still greater heights of mystic power, and letting my sentences run and run, and my entire language become like a breath, going in and going out but never, except at the end of the post, finally ceasing. 

I will spare readers such an attempt. Instead, I will try to say a few words about the book. It is hard. Normally, if I like or dislike a book, I will annotate it heavily. My Septology has been only lightly touched, mainly just with marginal notes indicating what scene we are in. I underlined only a single phrase. This gives some indication of some of the strangeness of the text, which has no full stops and lives by commas, ands, and paragraph breaks. Much of the narrative here is mundane, repetitive stuff, the kind we might know from Samuel Beckett or Thomas Bernhard – a character’s struggle to persuade themselves to get out of bed or open the door. When moments of great beauty or significance arrive, they are entire paragraphs of reflection which gain their power by accumulation and contrast, and which whither and die when we try to extract them. 

Septology concerns a painter called Asle, who lives in the Norwegian countryside. He has a friend, almost a double, also called Asle, who lives in Bergen and suffers from alcoholism. There is another double-like figure in the form of Asle’s wife, Ales, who died some time ago of a mysterious illness. Other characters include Beyer, a gallerist, and Asleik, a farmer. There is also a somewhat sinister woman called Guro, who has her own double too. Our narrative is mostly of reflection. The first Asle is our narrator, and he uses the first person, but when he reminisces or transports himself to the life of the second Asle, he uses the third person, even if he seems to be thinking of his own past.  

Over Septology’s seven books narrator-Asle goes to Bergen several times, discovers his friend Asle passed out in the snow and takes him to the hospital, delivers some paintings to Beyer, has an artistic crisis and decides not to paint anymore, and decides to visit Asleik’s sister for a Christmas meal. But mostly he ruminates. As in Aliss at the Fire, Asle seems to see into his doppelgänger’s soul. He also sees into his own life’s story, seeing figures as he drives past the places of his past, and in such a way that we cannot know whether he falls into their world, or whether they emerge back out into his.  

Asle is not the other Asle. But they are almost one another, being both artists, both being bearers of the same name. Yet what is the meaning of this? Fosse is careful with names. Streets and restaurants are given simple names like “The Lane” or “Food and Drink”; so too are people – “The Teacher”, “The Bald Man”, and so on. One effect of this is to give every encounter a heavy sense of symbolism and significance, even if we cannot always identify at first glance what that might be. The second Asle, when met for the first time in a memory, is “The Namesake” – not the same, but bonded to him, nevertheless.  

When I really think hard about Septology, I can say that it is a book of suffering. And the two Asles are part of this. They have led divergent lives, with a common root in their art and countryside upbringing, and the split occurring when it comes to the matter of love. Narrator-Asle meets Ales by chance in a café in Bergen, and immediately they fall in a kind of magical, dreamlike love that seems to last until her death. The other Asle arrives in Bergen to go to The Art School there with a girl already following him, pregnant with his son – The Boy. He marries her, but within a year has already found someone else, Siv, a woman who studies at The Art School and who seems to offer a more fulfilling relationship than the suicidal Liv. But like the names, the relationships echo, and it seems – seems, because nothing in Septology is quite certain – that Asle is then unfaithful towards Siv with another woman, Guro, and Siv leaves him too.  

A harmonious home life, versus a chaotic one. But both are marked with tragedy and ultimate loneliness. Both Asles drank heavily when younger, but Ales’s Asle gave up – under pressure from her – whereas the other Asle did not. Early on in the novel we are faced with shocking images of the second Asle, “weighed down as he is now, so weighed down by his own stone, a trembling stone, a weight so heavy that it’s pushing him down into the ground, I think”, as he struggles even to get up to pour himself another drink. His life has completely collapsed with the breakdown of family life, and his thoughts seem to circle around suicide.  

The other Asle has also seen his life collapse. The love he has for Ales is so pure, so total (in a novel with much German, Ales’s similarity to Alles – “everything”, cannot be entirely coincidental), that her loss leaves her own Asle with deep, deep wounds too. He lives alone, he lives in the countryside, with barely a friend, and now his heart’s companion is gone. Though years have passed since then, the wounds remain. 

But still our narrator survives. He does not return to drink, he does not end his life. The reason is, without a doubt, his religion. Septology is a novel about faith’s ability to be a fortress that can protect us from the greatest injuries. Faith is this novel’s foundation and its source of power. Each of Septology’s seven sections begins with art, but each ends with Asle in prayer. Whenever he is in pain – and he often is, thinking of Ales and his loss – he takes his rosary and prays. The Our Fathers, Hail Mary’s, and Christ Have Mercy’s, stabilise him and help him cast off from the world when he needs to sleep. Because his life is so full of pain, these moments in the text feel fair and earned. Religious or not, we see that these moments are necessary – utterly vital and necessary – for Asle’s own survival.  

For the survival of pain is this story – not its complete defeat. We notice that for all the memories we encounter, Septology is also full of silences. Asle mentions, without remembering, the end to his drinking. And in truth aside from its beginning, the relationship with Ales is also a blank. We have to take on faith that the relationship was what he claims it was. Often Asle thinks of Ales and then says he doesn’t want to think about her, that the pain is too great, so that these blanks remain. We notice, sooner or later, that Asle’s memories of the boy Asle are indeed usually about himself. But making him another, not the “I”, seems itself a way of hiding past pains whilst approaching past realities.  

God is also present in the silences. Asle feels God, just as he feels Ales’s presence, and seems even to see her at times. The flowing prose of Septology allows for this, just as it allows the whole text to seem, at times, like a breath or a prayer. Asle’s art draws him close to God, as does his contemplation of Ales – who had introduced him to faith to begin with. Septology’s world is full of pain, as is that of Aliss at the Fire, so that as with that work God becomes a necessary force – the only way of not falling into despair. A child drowns, a sister dies suddenly of illness, as does a beautiful friend – and many other characters suffer similarly upsetting fates. But we see here, unironically, what it might mean to commend the spirits of the departed to God – and what solace we might find in those words.  

Ultimately, what Septology does is argue for the power of faith as well as any apologist could, perhaps better. Religion is proved, if ever, by experience, and Septology draws us into an experience which shows faith’s potency in that specific life – and, in the second Asle’s case, the damage of its absence. We see something similar in my other favourite religious writer, Marilynne Robinson. Both writers, Fosse and Robinson, are adept at making a reality that is sanctified and filled with wonder. Fosse’s difference is that it sometimes seems we are relying on Asle’s consciousness to make his reality so, whereas in Robinson’s works life really does seem to be invested with God’s reality. By this I mean that her language constantly confirms God’s presence, whereas Fosse’s language confirms God only at particular points, for a particular consciousness. That means that stretches of Septology can be quite dull and meandering, as we wait for that moment where we will feel significance and harmony again. 

Such an approach would most aid a story showing a wavering, on-off faith. But that’s not really what’s going on here. It’s just that Asle is remembering something, and we need to work to make it meaningful for ourselves, if we can. If sometimes it can feel like this is not worth the effort, that shouldn’t take away from the rest of the book. Septology is a work of contrasts, of light and dark, faith and the loneliness of its absence, and it may be that its magnificent, truly heavenly highs are dependent on the moments when the story is simply a limited low. Really, truly, it’s a marvellous book regardless.