The Sum of Her Books

The Spectator Annual 1992

Lived through, the Nineties seemed a dull and disappointing decade after its glitzier predecessor. Now one looks back with longing on an era of civilised quietude and gentility.

The cover says it all: Mr Major temporarily distracted from a game of cricket on a sunny afternoon. Within: a time capsule; names long-forgotten or still very much with us; antique attitudes (Auberon Waugh's 'Why we over-50s are quite happy with Europe'); Jeffrey Bernard's incomparable 'Low Life' columns; and a piece by Anita Brookner, 'How to be very, very popular', a review of a novel by Mary Wesley.

(I get confused between Mary Wesley and Rosamunde Pilcher, whose nostalgic countrified books were also once very, very popular. They continue to be so, oddly, in Germany: at Christmas in Stuttgart I had a stilted conversation with an old lady who knew little of England other than what she had gleaned from the work of Rosamunde Pilcher.)

I find Mary Wesley, about whom, and about whose popularity, Brookner is unusually sniffy - I find Wesley more or less out of print now. Whereas Brookner...

I guess the Spectator editors had a small laugh when they gave Brookner A Dubious Legacy to read. Brookner knows the joke is on her, depicting herself as a 'critic, perhaps a little morose at being excluded from what seems to be universal enjoyment and appreciation'.

She finds the novel slight, unreal and tedious. 'A certain doggedness is needed to keep one's eye on the page.'

And yet she admires Wesley, her determination, the 'sheer grit of composing a novel a year'. A novel a year? Perhaps Brookner is comparing herself, just as prolific, with Wesley? If so, it is Wesley who comes off worse. Mary Wesley, also a late starter, and later than Brookner, older than Brookner too, may seem worldly and cynical, with her ancient eye, but Brookner detects a soft sentimentality beneath the facade. She has a lot of fun at the expense of Wesley's swaggering appearance in press photos. But Brookner's own portraits were just as stagy.

'The lady herself is clearly more than the sum of her books,' Brookner concludes. One would hardly know where to place Anita Brookner herself in such an equation.

The Next Big Thing: Memento Mori

Liliane Louvel's scholarly essay 'Reading with Images: Anita Brookner's The Next Big Thing as Memento Mori' is recommended. It takes an 'intermedial' view of the novel, comparing it with a range of memento mori artworks. The essay sheds fresh light on several key relationships in the book - with Herz's brother and with his neighbour Sophie Clay. It is heartening to find such a sympathetic and respectful reading of a Brookner novel, and intriguing that it comes from outside the anglophone literary world.

Understanding Anita Brookner

I've been re-reading Cheryl Alexander Malcolm's excellent book Understanding Anita Brookner (University of South Carolina, 2002).

Malcolm examines, in sequence, Brookner's first nineteen novels, which were published yearly from 1981 to 1999. She breaks them into contiguous groups, headlining them as follows:

• Can't Buy Me Love: A Start in Life, Providence, Look at Me, Hotel du Lac
• What Child Is This...: Family and Friends, A Misalliance, A Friend from England, Latecomers
• Happily Ever After? Lewis Percy, Brief Lives, A Closed Eye
• Starting Over: Fraud, A Family Romance, A Private View
• Journeying to the End: Incidents in the Rue Laugier, Altered States, Visitors
• Back to the Beginning? Falling Slowly, Undue Influence

In 2000 there was a break. The five novels of the 2000s were published in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2005 and 2009. It would be interesting to see how Malcolm might characterise these works. They seem less easily categorisable, less homogeneous. In fact they're the Brookner novels that currently interest me most, though I didn't much like them when I read them on publication. The Bay of Angels and The Next Big Thing may perhaps be thought of as companion pieces insofar as they feature protagonists with genuine housing problems. But really I think each of the novels of the new century breaks new ground. Brookner was, as it were, in the words of the title of her 2005 novel, 'leaving home'.