You go away for a week and the world goes batty.

I see from Enoch Soames that Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited is being remade (gulp). Now the BBC's 1982 made-for-TV version was darn good and pretty faithful to the book. In fact, I watched the TV version first (marathon fashion, over two days) and then read the book.

Yet now I see that the remake will actually take out the Catholic bits, and make religious faith the problem rather than Waugh's intention of making it the inexorable attraction, the everlasting thing never to be escaped. Remember Lady Marchmain reading Chesterton's Father Brown mysteries, especially that magnificent quote about God tugging on the thread? Remember Lord Marchmain dying, fighting faith all the way, finally giving in to the inevitable and making the Sign of the Cross?

Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom.

Good Lord, how can you take God out of Brideshead and still call it by that name? That is like saying, "but for Napolean and all those boats, Patrick O'Brian books are ok." What is Waugh without God?

CHARLES: I suppose they try and make you believe an awful lot of nonsense?

SEBASTIAN: Is it nonsense? I wish it were. It sometimes sounds terribly sensible to me.

CHARLES: But, dear Sebastian, you can't seriously believe it all.

SEBASTIAN: Can't I?

CHARLES: I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and the ass.

SEBASTIAN: Oh yes, I believe that. It's a lovely idea.

CHARLES: But you can't believe things because they're a lovely idea.

SEBASTIAN: But I do. That's how I believe.

And yet, and yet. Can we perhaps be the optimist here? It is hard. Can the movie bring a remnant few to the original book (much like myself several years back), to read those concluding lines when Charles returns to the Marchmain chapel, to see the small red flame -- a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design, relit before the beaten-copper doors of the tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones.

Perhaps that's all we can ask.