THE GREAT GAME REVISITED

I surprised myself when I rediscovered in middle age an appreciation for reading. It’s more like I tripped over a book whose pages sprung open in an equal and opposite reaction. 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 called still. 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 agitated human condition, as expressed by the literary greats now long dead. In his own book, Zada recounts a harrowing standoff with a mother grizzly bear, which he survived. Evelyn Waugh was not as lucky in his encounter with the lavatory in which he was initially rumoured to have drowned. In actuality, it was an affair of the heart… a coronary thrombosis to be exact… that took the great man. I cannot speak as to the position in which he was found.

Full disclosure, I have watched the 1980s Granada Television adaptation of 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 how 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, divided by a decade. 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 Bridget Jones types. It was a club I was invited to join for the last days of a lifestyle that was libertine only in its pretension and which overtook London and certain ‘colonial’ outposts during the brief Cool Britannia phase. 

Like Lord Marchmain, my father lives in exile in a hot country 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. Every stroke is in vain. BRIDESHEAD REVISITED is, by many reviewers’ standards, the finest novel of the 20th Century. It is also very much about our present day. Every tale is destined to come back around to relevance. 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 wore a visage of immortality well, didn’t she? As long as that particular demigod walked the earth, we fooled ourselves into believing that a collective global security based on shared values would go on forever. Some things would never change. Monsters could be contained and vanquished through coalitions of the willing. But then the relative consequence-free (for the invaders) invasion of Ukraine reminded us all that we have been living through a blip in history… and the rock of continuity turned out to be mortal flesh and blood. As the British Empire began its languid dismantling in the era of Charles Ryder, as shepherded by Elizabeth R, 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 its people turn against one another, the comforts of yesterday are still so very close at hand, that alarm has not yet eclipsed melancholy. It’s a false reassurance.

At the fall of the Roman Empire in 476AD, the German Barbarian Odoacer declared himself King of Italy. Yet, Byzantium continued to thrive 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 an easy 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 elicits thoughts on the failures 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. If you are in the mind to prepare for such reflection, I suggest starting with the original.