Top Ten Brookner

The much-loved Backlisted podcast (here) returns with a 'lockdown' episode that includes a lot of Anita Brookner talk. Prompted by discussion about Hotel du Lac, never the most representative Brookner, the chat meanders pleasantly on to the potential for compiling an Anita Brookner 'Top Ten'. At a loose end myself, though this week at the chalkface entertaining the children of keyworkers, I considered the question myself. I'm sure there are similar such lists elsewhere on this blog - I forget, and I don't particularly want to consult them anyhow.

Of course, Brookner - like Henry James, like Trollope, indeed like many prolific authors - passed through phases. Brookner's novels, I contend, fall into three, neatly divided by the decades she wrote in: the raw, vital 80s; the settled magisterial 90s; the bleak, experimental 2000s. A Brookner novel from the 80s seems very different from any of her final works - just as 'James I', 'James II' and 'the Old Pretender' can sound like quite distinct authors.

Another thing: I read Brookner's novels over time, more or less as she wrote them. My affection for certain works is determined by memories of my own life; my preferences at a particular time; associations the novels conjure.

But anyway...

10. A Start in Life (1981). Not actually a favourite, but surely indispensable, if for the astonishing opening chapter alone.

9. Visitors (1997). An elegant character study, and with such a sense of the English summer.

8. A Friend from England (1987). One of Brookner's most disaffected protagonists. Despite all appearances, this is extreme writing.

7. Strangers (2009). Brookner's last, and as bleak as lockdown.

6. Family and Friends (1985). A superior saga, told in the most exquisite and stylish prose.

5. Incidents in the Rue Laugier (1995). A deeply affecting study of regret and missed opportunities.

4. The Next Big Thing (2002). Often so well-heeled, Brookner's protagonists seem immune from real harm. But for Julius Herz the abyss is opening at his very feet.

3. A Family Romance (1993). 'Magisterial' is indeed the word.

2. Look at Me (1983). If only for the heroine's seemingly endless night trek through London: almost apocalyptic.

1. A Private View (1994). Poor George Bland, and his unsuitable passion. Yet Brookner's sympathy is boundless.

Fraud: Vorfrühling

She raised the window and leaned out, trying in vain to catch the smell of turned earth, to sense an emergent spring, but it was too early in the year: the air was sour, lightless.

Anita Brookner, Fraud, ch. 10

In the recent Backlisted podcast Andy Miller spoke persuasively of Brookner's narrative technique, likening it to the work of a painter: Brookner gradually fills her canvas, a touch here, a touch there - focusing for a time on a particular area, perhaps returning to it later, and so on. This is seen very much in Fraud, chapter 10: a dream returns Anna and her creator to the story of Mrs Durrant's disastrous second marriage. We might have thought that part of the story done and dusted, but there is still much to be learnt: Brookner is rarely what might be called a chronological writer.

The chapter is painterly in another sense. The depiction of January, and, relatedly, of Anna's desiccated emotions ('In middle life, she knew, the feelings wither slightly, rancour and disappointment replacing earlier hope and expectation.'), recalls (to me at least) Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Vorfrühling, also known as The Gloomy Day, which is in Vienna. This is surely not too fanciful, as Bruegel is invoked more than once in Dr Brookner's novels, though he wasn't an artist who fell within her Courtauld remit.

Fraud: roman policier

Fraud, Anita Brookner's twelfth novel, was published in 1992. I was then, I guess, in the early stages of my fandom. I ordered the book from the library I worked in part-time, was first on the waiting list. When I met Anita Brookner by chance (or design - see here) a month or so later I was able to tell her I'd finished her latest. She was, I recall, surprised. 'Already?' she said.

Even then, and in spite of the training I was receiving at the hands of my university tutors, I was always on the lookout for parallels between an author's life and works. Fraud struck me as rather interestingly close. The physical description of Anna Durrant in chapter 1, for example, could be of Brookner herself. And then there's the proximity of Anna's and Brookner's flats. Anna moves to Cranley Gardens, a mere stone's throw across the Fulham Road from Elm Park Gardens.

All of which lent a frisson to my first reading of Fraud. Beginning a reread, all these years later, I find it fresh and atypical. It starts like a police procedural. Anna has gone missing, and two detectives are investigating. Maigret is name-checked. Brookner loved her Maigret, was an avid reader of crime fiction. Her introduction to the NYRB edition of Simenon's Red Lights is very fine and was covered brilliantly in the recent Backlisted podcast. As has been pointed out by Ewan Tant on Twitter the following could be Brookner speaking of herself (or indeed of Anna in Fraud):

The formula is simple but subtle. A life will go wrong, usually because of an element in the protagonist’s make-up which impels him to self-destruct, to willfully seek disgrace, exclusion, ruin in his search for fulfillment and a fatal freedom which take on an aura of destiny. […] This divergence from his normal pattern of behavior will lead him to abandonment all safety, all caution, in the interest of that illusory freedom.

Backlisted Podcast: Look at Me

The Backlisted Brookner team: John Mitchinson, Lucy Scholes,
Andy Miller and Una McCormack. On the bench beside Andy,
under the Look at Me paperback, is, I think, a copy
 of John Haffenden's excellent Novelists in Interview.

For much of my life as an Anita Brookner fan I never met or had contact with anyone who'd read her, let alone liked her as devotedly as I did. In the broadcast media there was a similar dearth. Over the years, while she was publishing, Anita Brookner was occasionally mentioned on BBC radio arts review programmes, Front Row and Kaleidoscope and the like, but the tone was often disappointingly slighting. It's only in this age of the Internet that I've become properly aware of other readers, other fans, and it was therefore with enormous pleasure that I listened today to the Brookner-themed Backlisted podcast.

An exemplary programme, packed with insight and not a few anecdotes. I'd never heard the one about the Routemaster bus. And a mention of The Brooknerian! A special day indeed. Dr B would have been 'most gratified'.