Undue Influence: a Certain Opacity of Behaviour

I was disheartened by the fact that he was entirely at home in this place, and furthermore in places where a certain opacity of behaviour was the norm - restaurants, luxury hotels, sojourns in other people's houses. There would be little room for spontaneity, for direct exchange, even for a kind of honesty.

Anita Brookner, Undue Influence, ch. 11

Claire Pitt has at last cornered Martin Gibson, but he's insisted on squiring her to a top restaurant: she feels awkward; he is in his element; the evening is the typical Brookner meal-related disaster.

I wonder: was the behaviour of the guests at the Hotel du Lac similarly opaque? But that was in 1984, and this is 1999. Brookner, in her critique of the luxury lifestyle, is acknowledging a new world, quite divorced from the sort of traditional establishment she celebrated in her earlier novel. It's the world of big business, the world of corporate wealth. 'Money would have schooled these people,' she says a little later; '...money, rather than anything as vulgar as class.' As vulgar as class? The old Hotel du Lac was riddled with class, but now it would be quite different. (And indeed it is, as my visit this summer attested.)

Brookner moves on. With Undue Influence we're leaving the old century, but Brookner isn't fazed. She mightn't have kept up to date with all aspects of the modern world, but like Virginia Woolf she did know that things change, even human nature.