The novel begins during the war, when Charles is posted to Brideshead, requisitioned as a military headquarters. His memories come flooding back, bittersweet, mournful. Time rolls back to the autumn day at Oxford, when Charles has moved into his ground-floor rooms just in time for Sebastian to throw up through the open window. Sebastian is a dazzling youth, witty, beautiful, the center of a gay coterie. Charles is not his type, is apparently not even gay, but that for Sebastian is the whole point, and he takes the boy under his arm.
The friendship between Charles and Sebastian during a summer holiday at Brideshead is enchanted, and platonic until a tentative but passionate kiss. Then Lady Julia comes into view, and during a later holiday in Venice, she and Charles fall in love -- and Sebastian is shattered when he realizes it. To blame his disintegration on lost love would be too simple, however, because from being an alcoholic, he rapidly progresses into self-destruction in the hashish and opium dens of Morocco, his youthful perfection turned into a ghastly caricature.
At the center of all of this is Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson, in a superb performance). Of her son's proclivities, she professes a certain vagueness. Of her daughter's love for Charles, she makes it clear that it is not the matter of his lower caste that is the problem (that could be lived with) but the fact that he is an atheist, and the Marchmains have been Roman Catholic from time immemorial.
This theme must have attracted Waugh because he was a Catholic convert, and was fascinated by the division between Catholics and Protestants as a social as well as a religious issue. Catholicism was once a practice punishable by death in England, and no doubt hidden somewhere in the stones of Brideshead is an ancient "priest hole," used by aristocratic Catholic families to conceal a priest if royal troops came sniffing. Lady Marchmain (and Julia) are not casually Catholic, but believe firmly in the dogma of the church, and that any unbaptized children would be forbidden the sight of God. Since Charles will not renounce his atheism, he loses Julia, although not before first going as an ambassador for Lady Marchmain to Sebastian -- one of the film's best scenes.
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