The Brooknerian

New to Anita Brookner? Let me suggest a route into and through what a critic (unfavourably but memorably) once called the long dark corridor of her fiction . Start with a late-period novel. Brookner's fiction divides roughly but usefully into three phases: the 1980s, the 1990s and the 2000s. The early work is inconsistent but often brilliant; the middle period is more settled, more even. In Brookner's last works we see a return to the unpredictability she started with, now allied to a greater assuredness of form and style. Start with The Next Big Thing ( Making Things Better ) (2002). Also try The Bay of Angels (2001) and The Rules of Engagement (2003). Scarier than the scariest horror story. Next try the essential early Brookner: Look at Me (1983). A remarkable and quite extreme laying out of the Brookner manifesto. The final chapters contain some of the bleakest and most unsettling passages in the whole of English literature. Temper this with the novel of the followi...

In Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont ( Virago , 1971) Elizabeth Taylor evokes a 60s/70s England - postwar, post-Empire, pre-Thatcher. It's a time of reticence, discretion, austerity, decline. Mrs Palfrey has her rules, her code of behaviour. 'Be independent; never give way to melancholy; never touch capital' (ch. 1). It's an England I remember, yearningly, from my childhood. I find it too in Barbara Pym's 70s masterpiece Quartet in Autumn, though both novels were contemporary in their time. Nostalgia is a slippery concept, and it's different for different people. For Mrs Palfrey the 'honeycomb housing and the isolation' of modern bed-sitters represent a world that is hostile to her interests. She recalls instead the era of her youth: cooks attending ranges, 'rattling dampers, hooking off hot-plates, skimming stock-pots, while listening to housemaids' gossip brought from above stairs' (ch. 6). Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont is a novel about old...

I had ... been told that a boarding-house is a capital place for the study of human nature. I had a fancy for a literary career, and a friend of mine had said to me, 'If you mean to write you ought to go and live in a boarding-house; there is no other such place to pick up material.' I had read something of this kind in a letter addressed by Stendhal to his sister: ‘I have a passionate desire to know human nature, and have a great mind to live in a boarding-house, where people cannot conceal their real characters.’ I was an admirer of  La Chartreuse de Parme , and it appeared to me that one could not do better than follow in the footsteps of its author. I remembered, too, the magnificent boarding-house in Balzac’s  Père Goriot  – the ‘ pension bourgeoise des deux sexes et autres ’, kept by Madame Vauquer,  née  De Conflans. Magnificent, I mean, as a piece of portraiture; the establishment, as an establishment, was certainly sordid enough, an...

The carnations, among which, walking slowly, she now was burying her face, were scentless, but gave one an acute pleasure by the chilly contact of their petals. She had an armful of two colours - sulphur with a ragged edge of pink and ashy mauve with crimson at the centre, crimson-veined. Elizabeth Bowen, The Hotel (1927), ch. 9 Could anyone else have written those lines? I first read Elizabeth Bowen in my youth. I worked in a library and was attracted by several old hardback editions of Bowen's novels. They had woodcut illustrations and magnificent titles. The House in Paris !  The Death of the Heart ! It's even possible I read Elizabeth Bowen before I read Anita Brookner. Truth to tell, I think I found both authors hard to 'get into' at first. I loved, at seventeen or eighteen, Hotel du Lac , but found other Brookners difficult. But I persisted. Likewise I kept trying with Elizabeth Bowen, even when my progress through her novels slowed to a glacial pace....

...this country, by all measures one of the wealthiest in the world, appears to be so dilapidated, destitute, shorn of hope ... The UK is rich; there is wealth inequality, but that alone doesn't explain why the country is so mean . Robinson , ch. 3 Just over a year ago the UK voted to leave the EU. There are still some who celebrate this decision. Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe was published in 1719. Many people still think of it as a charming and harmless tale, even a book for children. Jack Robinson's Robinson , with quiet subtlety and in detail, links and dismantles both these conceptions. 'Jack Robinson' is Charles Boyle of CB Editions  and this is the companion volume to An Overcoat , earlier appreciated on this blog . It is as good and as brilliant as An Overcoat . Each is the A-side of the other. Novel? Memoir? Literary criticism? Diatribe?  Robinson politely requires that we abandon such labels. But what is the book about? It's certainly a...

So I come to the end of my trek through Brookner's most famous novel. I accorded it this treatment in acknowledgement of its undoubted preeminence, and not because I have any particular fannish zeal for it. But it is special to me insofar as it was the first Brookner I read. Rereading it now, nearly thirty years later, I tried to be objective. But I found recent memories of the BBC film of the novel intrusive. And I found the novel's tone a little too ironic, too almost whimsical at times. Surely among the unlikeliest things ever to have appeared on a TV screen It's certainly a comic novel overall, perhaps a reaction against the darkness of its immediate predecessor, Look at Me . The resolution of the Mr Neville plot does have similarities with events in the previous novel, but the effect on Edith is infinitely less devastating than what is suffered by Frances Hinton. The two books also draw similar conclusions on the subject of writing, the first markedly more ser...

One of the several things this chapter-by-chapter survey has shown me is the extent to which Brookner elegantly varies her narrative methods. The interleaving of group scenes, two-handers, passages of individual introspection, letters and flashbacks gives an agreeable sense of structure and substance to an otherwise fairly slight novel. Chapter 11, in which Mr Neville and Edith take a trip on a pleasure steamer, reads like a novelisation of a well-made play by Noel Coward, or even Oscar Wilde. The tone and the treatment are oddly superficial and at odds with the content. Brookner never quite gets to grips with Mr Neville. He's a 'curiously mythological personage'. The terms of his debate are satisfyingly and reassuringly antique, but his patriarchal condescension perhaps demands greater scrutiny than the novel is prepared to offer. Edith unpicks his argument to an extent, but her critique is weakened by her weakened mood. Brookner herself is all but silent, almost ambival...