THE GREAT GAME REVISITED
I surprised myself when I rediscovered in middle age an appreciation for reading. One particular year in university, I recall devouring the entire canon of E.M. Forster and Graham Greene, then feeling saddened that there couldn’t possibly be anything as satisfying to come from modern writers so infatuated with their own neuroses; the New York novel I believe such books are still called. As I turned my money-making efforts to acting and writing, script-reading became essential work, though recreation was found occasionally in the London Review of Books. Then I picked up IN THE VALLEYS OF THE NOBLE BEYOND, a true account of John Zada finding himself in Canada’s boreal wilderness. It rekindled a latent desire to explore the human condition, as expressed by the literary greats.
Full disclosure, I have watched the 1980s adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s BRIDESHEAD REVISITED more times than I can count. I can attest to it being a true adaptation that did not suffer producers who felt they knew better than the author. Reading the novel for the first time this year, I was even more struck by why the story of Charles Ryder’s obsession with an Anglo Catholic aristocratic family speaks so clearly to something lurking within me.
I recalled recently a discussion with a friend during my own university days (not Oxford). I proclaimed then a certainty that we were in the last heady days of the West. For Charles, those days were consumed by two loves… two siblings, in fact. For me, it was a life in the UK film renaissance of the 1990s and then Canada’s indie rock ‘n’ roll scene of the 2000s. Pubs, cigarettes, and casual affairs with women who had no clue what they wanted from life was a club I was invited to join for the last days of a libertine lifestyle that overtook London and certain colonial outposts during the brief Cool Britannia phase.
Like Lord Marchmain, my father lives in exile with a younger wife and bemoans his own mismanagement of youthful desires. And I am the artist like Charles, wearing thin my brush on the plaster wall that divides the adequate from the divine. BRIDESHEAD REVISITED is, by many reviewers’ standards, the finest novel of the 20th Century. It is also very much about our present day. Charles reminisces about a lost time of security, as the pre-war world gives way to flailing uncertainty over a future that is happening immediately. It’s a world in which Charles may very well not find his place.
Today, the rules-based order is being dismantled by the very country that secured it. We are now revisiting the Great Game of the 19th Century. Queen Elizabeth II seemed immortal, didn’t she? As long as she lived, we fooled ourselves into believing that a collective global security based on shared values would go on forever. Some things will never change. Monsters could be contained and vanquished through coalitions of the willing. But then the relative consequence-free invasion of Ukraine reminded us all that the we have been living through a blip in history… and the rock of stability turned out to be mortal flesh and blood.
As the British Empire began its languid dismantling in the era of Charles Ryder, another empire waited in the wings and promised the status quo, that the language and ideals would remain the same… merely a more youthful cut of suit would change. Now, as the United States dashes for the way out and it’s people turn against one another, the comforts of yesterday are still so very close at hand, that alarm has not yet eclipsed melancholy.
At the fall of the Roman Empire in 476AD, the German Barbarian Odoacer declared himself King of Italy. Yet, Byzantium continued in the East, and in our own time, there is hope that Europe, with its new 700 Billion Euro defence fund, will unite in its mission to preserve the notion of the sovereignty of nation states. Meanwhile, the King of America will look to create a win to distract his diminished people from their cultural civil war. He is unburdened by the need of his predecessors to spread democracy around the world, for he does not value it at home. Panama will not be his target; it evokes images of the failure of Suez. Canada can be subdued into client kingdom status without conquering. Greenland will be his choice. In taking Greenland’s precious metals, it will no longer be necessary to defend Taiwan. Look to America withdrawing from NATO as the prelude.
There are many Bridesheads that will be revisited in the coming months and years.