The Still Small Voice 
 Great novels may speak to universal human concerns, but they do so by means of particulars, and those particulars interlock in different ways with the experience of each different reader. We come to books by different routes in terms of personal background, literary expectations, or cultural climate; it is only reasonable to acknowledge them. For example, I was initially attracted to the book by its resonance with my own Oxbridge days, the seduction of people from older families or greater wealth, and late adolescent confusion about sexuality and religion. More recently, I come to Brideshead Revisited after reading a number of earlier Waugh books, together with those of his fellow convert to Catholicism, Graham Greene; this perspective casts a different light on a book that I knew only from the now-iconic BBC serial of 1981. And more recently still, there is stimulus of the new Miramax movie, a magnificent experience whose significant differences from the book nonetheless help to focus on what Waugh was actually doing. Personal, literary, and cultural: let me address these points in the opposite order. I shall try not to give any outright spoilers, but I am writing for people who already know the general outline of the story. 
 The movie first: splendid acting, fine period detail, and a feast for the eyes--although Castle Howard in Yorkshire, one of Britain's grandest buildings, is surely at least twice the size of Brideshead. My greatest surprise in reading the book was to discover how many liberties the screenwriters had taken with the dramaturgy of the original. It was not just a matter of removing discursive passages and tightening things up; significant events had been taken out of order and others inserted, with invented dialogue to go with them. In both film and novel, the middle-class narrator Charles Ryder falls under the spell in turn of Lord Sebastian Flyte, his ancestral home Brideshead, and his sister Julia. The movie makes much more of the implied homoeroticism between Charles and Sebastian (which Waugh probably could not have done even if he had wanted to), but it also introduces his awareness of Julia quite early as a counterpoint to this, culminating in an episode in Venice which effectively causes a break with Sebastian. By the time Sebastian and Charles have parted in the book, however, Julia has made only peripheral appearances and has barely shown on Charles' radar. Similarly near the end of the movie, the scene where Charles bargains for Julia with her Canadian husband Rex Mottram has no equivalent in the book whatsoever; Waugh simply glides over the transition as though it didn't matter. But then Waugh treats Julia's marriage to Rex as a hole-in-the-corner affair; he is a divorced man whom, as a Catholic, she can marry only in a state of sin. In the movie, by contrast, Rex too is Catholic and a splendid catch; the grand scene of Julia's engagement ball makes a dramatic climax, at which Sebastian disgraces himself by appearing drunk, and Charles is banished from the house. 
 So did Waugh himself not have the trick of the big dramatic moment? On the contrary, he could manage this perfectly well, as his other novels show, but here seems to aim at something entirely different. In every case, the adjustments in the movie tend towards a more conventional drama, in terms of social tensions, personality struggles, and the cavalcade of events. Much is made, for example, of Charles' lower social status, but there is nothing of this in the book, whose characters are grace itself. Emma Thompson has a virtuoso grande dame role as Lady Marchmain, the mother of Sebastian and Julia, but the character is the book is altogether gentler; she works through persuasion, not by force of will. Things that happen in the movie like a coup de theatre, such as Charles coming together with Julia or Lord Marchmain returning home to die, take days or weeks in the novel. The movie is in the moment but earthbound, while Waugh has another dimension. His rhetoric is not that of a Hollywood actor; he is trying to represent the still small voice of God. 
 Brideshead Revisited (1944) is an often funny book, with satires of upper-class twits, sanctimonious hypocrites, and posing aesthetes, but it is rooted nonetheless in a basic sense of civility. Waugh's earlier books, such as 
 Put Out More Flags 
 (1942), were more obviously satirical and not so rooted, but you can see the author struggling to give them moral ballast. This occurs most obviously in 
 A Handful of Dust 
 (1934) where, in an attempt to resolve the frivolous immoralities of the novel, the author tacks on an ending that belongs to a different world altogether. Here, although the religious themes are introduced as a matter more of biography than belief, they are nonetheless pervasive. Compare Waugh to Graham Greene, who converted to Catholicism four years before him. Greene's fascination with sinful characters who nonetheless find salvation, as in 
 Brighton Rock 
 (1938) or 
 The Power and the Glory 
 (1940), is an assertive statement of a doctrinal paradox; Waugh is more subtle. Indeed, it would be possible to come away from the movie believing that it was an anti-Catholic tract. And yet in the book, Lord Marchmain, Julia, and especially Sebastian in his later years as movingly described by his younger sister Cordelia, emerge as just such prodigals returned to the fold. Even the agnostic Charles appears at the end to be at least half-way towards conversion. Brilliant though the movie's final scene in the chapel was, the ending of the book goes deeper. 
 So what are those universal themes I mentioned? You don't need to have been at Oxford to respond to such a fine description of the springtime struggle to define one's place in society, one's sexuality, one's talents. You don't need to have lived through a war to lament the passage of time and feel the need to honor the past even when hailing the future. You don't need to come from a noble family to recognize the importance of roots, something essential that comes through no matter what. Dysfunctional though the Brideshead family may be, it is no accident that Charles is presented as being virtually without a functioning father at all, deprived of the very roots that make them who they are. And you do not need to be Catholic or even Christian to seek some guiding principle in life, or find a means of living without one.