The Brooknerian

What a subversive joy it is to discover Muriel Spark. Of course I knew The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie , but I left it at that. But this Spark centenary year I've delved further, and Loitering with Intent (1981), Spark's sixteenth novel, is easily the most pleasurable so far. On one level it's because of the story, a social comedy about a fairly ridiculous organisation called the Autobiographical Association. Why has Sir Quentin Oliver set it up? Why does he want to entice old friends to commit their scandalous secrets to paper? Has he blackmail in mind? And what are the connections between these events and those to be found in the novel the beady-eyed narrator is writing? The plot is intriguing; the atmosphere of post-war London is precisely evoked; the characters ('which resembled more and more the bombed-out buildings that still messed up the London street-scene') are funny and surprising; and the narrator, a true Spark avatar, is sharp and engaging. But it is...

And so we come to the end of A Misalliance . A minor Brookner in some ways, a little under-powered, and tonally variable. A novel other writers probably wouldn't have written. Others would have let a fallow year go by. But not Anita Brookner. And yet I'm glad we have it. The closing chapter is a classic Brookner conclusion, though you probably wouldn't have known it in 1986. But now we see all the familiar things. The urgent desire to travel. Seasonal change. The wistful ending of a misalliance and the throwing in of one's lot with altogether safer concerns. And a sudden last-paragraph reversal. No, I rather like A Misalliance . Unlike its creator I wouldn't dismiss it with the Ratner word.

He is far gone, she thought. A Misalliance , ch. 11 Early Brookner, later Brookner. What are the differences? Chapter 11 of A Misalliance comprises a three-way conversation between Blanche, her ex-husband, and her old admirer Patrick Fox. The tone, typical of the early novels, is witty, comic, sarcastic, aphoristic. It reads a little like Wilde or Coward. And Patrick Fox's love with Sally, one of the novel's several unsuitable attachments, is played for laughs. But fast-forward just a few years to A Private View , and we have George Bland and his obsession with Katy Gibb - and few laughs, and no repartee. A Misalliance summarises several early Brookner themes - flirting with other lives, mismatched pairs - but we must look to later novels for truly serious analysis.

Je redoute l'hiver, parce que c'est la saison du confort. Arthur Rimbaud,  Une Saison en Enfer Brookner, like Scott, had a well-stocked mind, and she had her favourite quotes, just as we Brooknerians have favourites of hers. Lines recur interestingly in the novels. This Rimbaud line ('I dread the winter, because it is the season of comfort') is invoked in both  A Misalliance  (Ch. 10) ...the temperature had noticeably dropped; perhaps the season had ended. The darkness that had filled her vision the night before had perhaps been the true darkness of night falling, rather than the fading vision brought about by her headache. ' Je redoute l'hiver, parce que c'est la saison du confort,' thought Blanche... and  The Rules of Engagement  (Ch. 16): Je redoute l'hiver, parce que c'est la saison du confort.  Rimbaud had said that, and, perhaps wisely, cut his winters short. But death, even when not entirely involuntary, was not the ideal solut...

My thing with Brookner goes back exactly 25 years ago when Hotel du Lac won the Booker prize. To an aspiring literary critic, this frail, thin book about a frail, thin heroine coming to terms with loveless solitude at a Swiss hotel seemed the epitome of the bloodless, sexless, plotless English novel that had led us to study American literature at college.  Subsequently, one of the subjects for my debut appearance on the Radio 3 chatshow Critics' Forum turned out to be the latest Brookner, in which another west London spinster didn't quite get it together with a semi-comatose widower. What passed for a plot twist was the heroine experiencing a severe migraine. I have a memory of a moment when the central character was forced to return early from a stroll because the weight of the spectacle frames on her nose had become unbearable. Mark Lawson, Guardian , 2009 Mark Lawson's review of Brookner's 2009 novel Strangers isn't the only example of a critic recanti...

'Life is not a night club,' says Blanche to her old friend Patrick in chapter 8 of A Misalliance when he reveals unwise feelings for the flaky Sally and an even flakier association with an analyst. It's a good line, and I've pointed out before that A Misalliance is a quotable novel. And here's Anita Brookner herself in interview in 1994: ...if someone said to her, not that she was gloomy and sad, but that her novels were, how would she reply? 'I'd agree. I don't intend them to be like that, but I think they're an accurate reflection. Life is not a nightclub, and some of the reviews I've had, particularly from women, which assume that it is, seem to have been quite defensive. These women are angry. They believe they can get what they want from life. Maybe they're just lucky enough not to have found that out that they can't.'

A Misalliance , disowned by Brookner, out of print for years in the UK, is a minor but significant novel. It might be called transitional. The character of Sally, feckless, sybaritic, entitled, is a preparation for the monsters to come: Julia in Brief Lives , Dolly in A Family Romance , both more fully realised. Blanche's marriage lays the ground similarly for those stories of marriage Brookner would tackle in later books: in Lewis Percy , in A Closed Eye , to name only two. A Misalliance is not to be lost. And it is very quotable. One seems to hear Brookner working out her very philosophy. The unease she felt at the National Gallery, the curious faintness that had overcome her at the sight of the archaic smile of the kouros in the Athens Museum, seemed to her an essential commentary on her own shortcomings. I could have saved my own life, she thought. But I was too weak, shackled by the wrong mythology. (Ch. 7)