It was Brookner's twelfth novel, of twenty-four. In 1992 I was, I guess, in the early stages of my fandom. I ordered the book from the library I worked in part-time; I was first on the waiting list. When I met Anita Brookner by chance (or design - see here), a month or so after publication, I was able to tell her I'd finished her latest. She was, I recall, surprised. 'Already?' she said.
Even then, and in spite of the training I was receiving at the hands of my university tutors, I was always on the lookout for parallels between an author's life and works. Fraud struck me as interestingly close. The physical description of Anna Durrant in chapter 1, for example, could be of Brookner herself. And then there's the proximity of Anna's and Brookner's flats. Anna moves to Cranley Gardens, a mere stone's throw across the Fulham Road from Elm Park Gardens.
All of which lent a frisson to my first reading of Fraud. Beginning a reread, all these years later, I find it fresh and atypical. It starts like a police procedural. Anna has gone missing, and two detectives are investigating. Maigret is name-checked. Brookner loved her Maigret, was an avid reader of crime fiction. Her introduction to the NYRB edition of Simenon's Red Lights is very fine (and could also be a description of a Brookner novel):
The formula is simple but subtle. A life will go wrong, usually because of an element in the protagonist’s make-up which impels him to self-destruct, to willfully seek disgrace, exclusion, ruin in his search for fulfillment and a fatal freedom which take on an aura of destiny. […] This divergence from his normal pattern of behavior will lead him to abandonment all safety, all caution, in the interest of that illusory freedom.
They were handicapped, and although this might not matter for Amy Durrant it mattered terribly for the daughter, who had, past infancy, never known a father, and was thus eternally unprepared for the rules of engagement between the sexes in the least predictable and sentimental of games.
The rules of engagement... Always interesting to find Brookner utilising or, as here, anticipating the titles of her other novels.
Not that her obverse, Anna Durrant, is in any way not English. Anna is no Kitty Maule, no Edith Hope. There's no Jewishness, no Mitteleuropa, in Anna's background.
But Anna and her mother don't quite fit. They live a fairy-tale life in Albert Hall Mansions; the atmosphere, brilliantly, is described as 'eerily emollient'. Anna's arrival on the scene is preceded by the sound of a sewing machine, as if she were the Lady of Shalott.
Anna's father was a musician in the pit at Drury Lane. One has visions of almost Thackerayan artistic penury. Privately Mrs Marsh considers the Durrants rather common.
One little mystery about Mrs Marsh - whether she's a Catholic - is cleared up in chapter 3. In the previous two chapters we've had mentions of her visits to the Brompton Oratory. But no, she only goes there because it's convenient and she likes the ritual. I'm sure Barbara Pym, in Mrs Marsh's shoes, would have done the same.
Mes ancêtres, dans des appartements solennels, tous idiots ou maniaques.One wonders: what do we gain? what does such a line bring to the novel? Not a great deal, in part because it is unreferenced, unexplained. But this is perhaps the point. Brookner is a writer who is very artful, by which I mean full of art. She is also a writer who's exclusive, elitist, but in the best way. She demands: Keep up with me, meet my standards. She isn't going to condescend, she isn't going to make allowances. And we, as readers, are surely grateful for her forbearance.
Mrs Marsh has more than a little in common with Mrs May in Visitors: similar names, both widows, both fond of the painter Turner. Mrs May is the central consciousness in that later novel, and at the time critics reacted with some consternation to a character whom they were invited to know so well and yet whose authorial denomination seemed so antique, so distancing. But none of this is about propriety but about how such characters think of themselves: some people think of themselves in one way, others in another - a point Brookner makes about Miriam at the start of Falling Slowly:
On her way to the London Library, Mrs Eldon, who still thought of herself as Miriam Sharpe...
***
Mrs Marsh was intrigued in spite of herself. Anna, she reflected, was not without power, even if that power were confined to the mystery which she both contained and partly concealed.
***
Since then Anna had maintained her ambiguous poise, although she knew that it was brittle.
In her middle period - and Fraud sits more or less at the centre of the corpus - Brookner seems to revel in her unexpected second career. She delights in fiction, almost in what we might call storytelling. She writes about characters like Anna Durrant, who might have been invented by that born novelist Henry James. Anna's a lot like Fleda Vetch in The Spoils of Poynton - that deep little person for whom happiness is a pearl-diving plunge - a character who really can only exist and survive in fiction, and Jamesian fiction at that. Henry James of course isn't content with the fairy tale, and at the end of the novel Fleda emerges into 'clearer cruder air'. Brookner too seeks to break into Anna Durrant's ambiguous poise, render it brittle. But as with James it's an affair of style. Style buoys up Anna and Fleda, creating out of almost nothing a complex web we never quite understand, and which their creators also never quite grasp. And that's why they keep on writing: it's why they must write; and it's a duty that compels them. Fleda Vetch advises her friend Mrs Gereth not to 'simplify' too much - for the tangle of life 'is much more intricate than you've ever, I think, felt it to be'.
***
She was aware that she was uncomfortable to be with, had little to offer but her maidenly accomplishments and her letter-writing and her too careful clothes. [...] Within that carapace she was an adult woman, but one who had no voice because of her lifelong concealment, which now no one would question.
Let me compare Fraud's Anna Durrant with Look at Me's Frances Hinton of nine years before. Frances too, in a famous passage, has 'no voice at the world's tribunals' (Look at Me, ch. 6), but arguably her 'accomplishments' are more substantial than Anna's: she works, she enjoys success in her writing. Whereas Anna's life is more isolated and reduced.
This is a pattern in Brookner. Character types recur, but supports are stripped away. When reading Fraud for the first time the reader may wonder whether Anna will survive. She has disappeared. Her disappearance has come to the attention of the police. She may be dead, by whatever means. (She has, for example, her sleeping pills, though later in the novel she explicitly rejects suicide.) The blurb on my paperback copy of the novel shuts down any such possibility, but I remember the summary on the original hardback being more reticent. Fraud felt then, as first-time Brookners often feel, genuinely dangerous, a sense that piquantly lingers during a reread.
***
Once more, rereading Brookner, one comes across intriguing repetitions and anticipations. Take Mrs Marsh's 'night thoughts' in Fraud (ch. 7). Lying in bed, with (like George Bland in A Private View) the World Service playing in the background, she entertains memories of shopkeepers she remembers from her earliest youth. Sturgis recalls such stores in Strangers, and Mrs May in Visitors similarly conjures the neighbourhood of her childhood.
Then, in Fraud, but briefly, there's 'Dolly', Mrs Marsh's mother's glamorous friend. So there are three characters with that name in Anita Brookner. There's the legendary aunt in A Family Romance / Dolly of course, but there's also a woman named Dolly Edwards who appears in a dream at the beginning of Leaving Home. As I say, intriguing. Are there other Dollys?
***
This day would end, like all the others, and she would look back in pity at the person who had endured it.
'The loneliest Christmas Day on record,' said one reviewer of the eighth chapter of Fraud.
There are episodes in many novels - Trollope has not a few - when the plots are up and running and the author simply marks time. These can be interesting moments, and Anna Durrant's lonely Christmas has its perverse charms.
What comes across now, in comparison with the harsher, more raw novels of the succeeding decade, is the evenness, even the gentleness of the tone. 'Like all successful characters, [Anna] could only exist in a book, but the author is perhaps too wryly conscious of the fact,' said John Bayley in the London Review of Books, and I can see what he meant: there's an enchanted, unreal, fairytale aspect to Anna's terrible Christmas Day.
She wakes early, at 5.45, after a blessedly chemical sleep. For a moment she considers staying in bed; but for all Brooknerians this is an intolerable fantasy.
She bathes, dresses, drinks tea, aware all the while of the 'oppressive silence of the streets'. She remembers the undemanding, harmonious Christmases she spent with her mother. 'Fatal alliance!' comments Brookner.
A marvellous thought comes to Anna: 'there is no need to live like this!' This, then, after all, is a chapter that advances the plot, such as it is. She thinks about living in France, remembers boyfriends of the distant past: 'She would walk by the Seine, alone now, but no longer lonely'.
There follows, at ten o'clock, a meeting with a neighbour, a Mr Harvey. Mr Harvey has plans for the day, and doesn't want to waste time with Anna. But he's also achingly desperate not to give offence. The pair enact an elaborate, comic pavane about one another, hovering at one point behind their respective front doors, as a second meeting would be embarrassing.
Miss Carter, Anna's mother's old dressmaker, lives with her cats in a basement flat in Brompton Square. The streets, we learn, are 'as still as Pompeii'. Miss Carter, 'more timid than anyone knew ... really only comfortable when undisturbed', struggles to appreciate Anna's visit, which is brief and ends in awkwardness and indignation.
Anna, 'resigned now to the empty day', returns home across the park. It isn't yet two o'clock, but the sky seems to be darkening towards evening. There are one or two determined joggers. It starts to rain. 'Bleak, bleak, she acknowledged, under the leaden sky...' But she knows she need spend no further winters in this way.
At home she boils two eggs, but can eat only one; she gets ready for bed and listens to a concert on the radio. She feels 'almost at peace, but dangerously so, as if waiting for death'. At last she judges it acceptable to retire, allowing herself the luxury of a pill. Thus a 'beautiful peace began to loosen her limbs, and she lay back on the pillows, a smile of anticipation on her face'.
The chapter reads like a collection of Brookner's greatest hits. We have early waking, a flat that's never quite warm enough, striped upholstery, tentative confrontations with neighbours and old acquaintances, flâneurism, obsessive rumination, a cup of tisane, a struggle to eat the smallest of meals, and all the while the marking off of the empty hours as they go by.
I also see the following chapter, covering Mrs Marsh's less than successful Christmas, as a sort of companion piece. Mrs Marsh longs, as Anna might, for her independence, her 'cherished little habits', her 'little eccentricities', the 'quiet brooding life' of her own thoughts, her own silence.
She raised the window and leaned out, trying in vain to catch the smell of turned earth, to sense an emergent spring, but it was too early in the year: the air was sour, lightless.
So he delivered the papers before he went to school, getting up at five in the frozen winter mornings, before it was light, and going home again to the fuggy warmth of the shop, with its cloying gas heater, and warming himself in the back room while his mother cooked him a huge fried breakfast.Chapter 11 of Fraud begins with a depiction of Dr Halliday's Leicester youth. I'm not sure whether the ugly word 'Londoncentric' existed in 1992, but Fraud, like much of Brookner, is definitely it. The reader is always on the alert when Brookner strays into the English provinces. The tone of this passage is not quite condescending, but certainly indulgent, soft-focus. It works to an extent, but probably only insofar as it's a portrayal not so much of a place as of a time: the postwar period, that fabled era of kindness and solidarity Brookner celebrates most powerfully in Visitors, in Mrs May's dream of a field of folk.
One such vacation is enjoyed or endured by Anna Durrant in chapter 12 of Fraud. It's January, and brightly cold ('sunshine as ruthless as the workings of the human heart'), and Anna is visiting her old friend Marie-France. But dissent and deception are in the air. Marie-France, after a lifetime's nunlike spinsterhood, has contracted to marry a faintly dubious friend of the family. Anna, excluded, must spend much of her time alone - for which we're surely grateful. Brooknerian wanderings follow, including (of course) a trip to the Louvre.
Eschewing the Romantics' 'great discordant machines', Anna focuses on the portraits of Ingres: Mme Rivière, 'reclining fatly on her blue velvet cushions'; Mme Marcotte, 'in unbecoming brown, her large sad eyes speaking of a physical rather than a metaphysical unease'. Anna can 'almost sense the processes behind' the eyes of the portrayed: the 'discreet gurglings and shiftings in those flawless bodies'. They are, she later realises, portraits of the 'sexual battle fought and won...' We're reminded, in Brookner's reading of the paintings of Ingres, and in her depiction of Marie-France's less than ideal liaison, of this writer's sometimes overlooked commitment to the fallen world, the physical world, the world of the flesh.
So we get Mrs Marsh and her friend Lady Martin 'taking tea' together in chapter 13. I wonder, reading this, what another writer would have made of the same circumstance; if Barbara Pym were writing the scene - or Jane Austen. But this being Brookner, the chapter soon descends into pitiless analysis, bleak self-knowledge, and existential anxiety. Embracing Lady Martin at the end, Mrs Marsh cannot but be aware, beneath her friend's Jolie Madame, of 'the smell of mortality'.
Then we have Dr Halliday and his terrible wife. Another stock situation given the Brookner treatment, and highly literary: by mistake I typed 'Dr Lydgate' a moment ago.
He was strangely contented. Every morning he devoted to being ill, and every afternoon to getting better. He listened to The Archers and the afternoon play. This was his favourite time. With the advent of the news and the more serious programmes he was reminded that he was fifty-one, a responsible citizen, and a businessman who was due in New York the following week, all of which information struck him as highly unwelcome.
- It's a novel about care and caring. Anna cares for her mother. Mrs Marsh is wary lest her own daughter become her carer (ch. 15). Even the predatory Vickie has 'a child's right to care and constant attention' (ch. 16). The novel's conclusion is markedly hard, cold, less than compassionate. Was Anna, in caring for her mother, truly a victim of fraud? I'm unconvinced by Anna in her final iteration. How long will she remain so blithe, so uncaring? Where is she now?
- Fraud is a novel about food. It brings together themes from previous novels, and advances them: Anna is all but anorexic. The set-piece scene in chapter 16 - the Hallidays' dinner party - compares with the restaurant episode at the end of Look at Me. There's terrible food - a terrine, cold and slippery as ice cream - and much horrifying conversation. There may not be a revelation, but the scene is nevertheless climactic. After this point, Anna ('pleine de pouvoir') makes her decision about her future. One other thing about the dinner party: Anna is the moral victor, regarding her hosts with something like pity. The tables are turned on the appalling Vickie Halliday: 'To be so transparent!' The reader cheers.
- Fraud, better than any of Brookner's previous novels, handles narrative perspective expertly. The text's shifting eye gives us a kaleidoscope of views on Anna and her intriguing mystery. She comes in and out of focus. No sooner have we felt close to Anna, sympathetic to her plight, than we see her differently and less amenably. Fraud is probably the closest Anita Brookner comes to omniscient narration.
- The title gives me pause. So dry, legalistic, brutalist: a curious Brookner characteristic as far as titles are concerned. Here's a parlour game. What would other novelists have called Fraud? Jane Austen: Self and Selflessness? Ivy Compton-Burnett: The Lost and the Found? Henry Green: Rejecting? Elizabeth Taylor or Barbara Pym: An Emergent Spring
They went quietly down into the roaring streets, inseparable and blessed; and as they passed along in sunshine and shade, the noisy and the eager, and the arrogant and the froward and the vain, fretted and chafed, and made their usual uproar.
Then she turned resolutely, and followed the path which Anna had taken, out into the bright, dark, dangerous and infinitely welcoming street.
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| The cover of the UK first edition, showing Titian's Sacred and Profane Love |
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