The Brooknerian

Series 5 of the BBC's A House through Time,  available on the iPlayer in the UK, features Montagu Mansions, home to Claire Pitt in Undue Influence. The first UK edition of the novel shows the location on the cover.

It is hardly surprising that even such an eminent life-writer as Lee might wonder whether Brookner would have given this book her blessing. Brookner was as secretive as a heron. The fine mystery of the writer, to quote Dickens on Shakespeare, must surely be left undisturbed. ー From an excellent review ( here ) by Laura Cumming in the Observer of Hermione Lee's forthcoming biography.

In a post a while back ( here ), I recalled pitching unsuccessfully a volume of Brookner's essays... *** Anita Brookner Mme de Blazac and I: Memoirs, Essays and Reviews 1981-2011 1.      ‘Mme de Blazac’, memoir, LRB , 19 June 1997 2.      On Abel Gance’s film Napoleon, film review, LRB , 16 April 1981 3.      ‘The Bibliotheque Nationale’, essay/memoir, TLS , 5 October 1984 4.      ‘The People and the Place’, review of Parisians by Graham Robb, Spectator , 10 April 2010 5.      ‘Repose is Taboo’d by Anxiety’, review of Migraine by Oliver Sacks, Spectator , 23 October 1993 6.      ‘Even Less Fiction than Stranger ’, review of Le Premier Homme by Albert Camus, Spectator , 14 May 1994 7.      ‘The Master of the Indirect’, review of Henry James: Collected Stories , Spectator , 11 Dec 1999 8.      ‘Sexual Tour...

I've been listening to a couple of Brookner audiobooks. Joanna David's take on The Rules of Engagement is competent, and her middle-class tones suit the character of the novel's narrator. But there's a complacency to her reading, too cosy for a novel as dark and late as this. Diana Quick is the ideal reader of  Undue Influence . Her accent is RP, but less strident than David's. Quick's tone has a lowered, falling quality, appropriate for this sad novel. There's also a slight accent, not traceable, possibly just the effect of clipping. There are other actresses who display this: Eleanor Bron, say, or Siân Phillips. Quick's is an older woman's voice. Claire, the narrator of Undue Influence , is meant to be twenty-nine. Yet her storytelling always feels as if long in retrospect, though the novel is set in the modern day. This isn't the only example in Brookner of an unsettling freewheeling as to chronology. There's no evidence of Anita Brookner...