This is a chapter-by-chapter guide to Anita Brookner's 1984 Booker Prize-winning novel, Hotel du Lac. It is aimed at both the general reader and the student of literature. Suggestions for further study are included in italics. I hope you enjoy the guide and find it useful.
Contents
First, what can we learn from the cover of the UK first edition? We see a balcony, a palm tree. Where are we? The South of France? The mountains are unclear. But it is a memorable motif. Over the years, and over many subsequent editions, we find it in different iterations:
Study point: Baudrillard's theory of simulacra may be of relevance here. (And we can only imagine the sceptical glint Brookner might have had in her eye at this point.)
Chapter 1
We start passively: 'all that could be seen was a receding area of grey'. A comparable Brookner opening is to be found in Visitors (1997): 'Towards evening the oppressive heat was tempered by a slight breeze'.
Brookner's focalisation is of interest. As in several of her early novels, she seems uncertain of who is doing the looking and whose mind we're in. Is this 'omniscient narrator' or 'close third person'? Middlemarch or The Ambassadors?
After a dense, tranquilising paragraph of setting description, Edith, the watching eye, emerges in the second paragraph. We meet her as if formally: full name, occupation. When is this novel set? Only a reference to an airport indicates we aren't in the nineteenth century.
No dialogue as yet, but soon we're in epistolary form. Did Brookner know how this, of all things - the writing of a letter - would date her?
Edith's tone is whimsical, literary, clever-clever, with glances at T. S. Eliot, Stevie Smith and Shakespeare: 'A cold coming I had of it', 'Not drowning, but waving', 'all these sad cypresses'.
Study point: Brookner's quotes. References to poetry are few and far between in Brookner. Usually she favours European writers - Stendhal rather than Shakespeare. Two of her novels (A Start in Life and A Closed Eye) have titles derived from literature (Balzac, Henry James).
Brookner describes the hotel's austere amenities with similar jaunty irony:
It was implied that prolonged drinking, whether for purposes of business or as a personal indulgence, was not comme il faut, and if thought absolutely necessary should be conducted either in the privacy of one's suite or in the more popular establishments where such leanings were not unknown.Augustan expansiveness is typical of the novel, though not of Brookner's later, more serious style. We might recall Philip Larkin's comment on Anthony Powell:
A formal, slightly absurd view of life requires a matching style: Mr Powell's is Comic Mandarin, a descendant of Polysyllabic Facetiousness. ('Mr Powell's Mural', Required Writing)
In early write-ups, and in several blurbs, it is Brookner's humour that is emphasised. (And the UK blurb of the late austere novel, The Next Big Thing (2002), calls it her 'funniest novel to date', a contravention of the Trade Descriptions Act, if ever there was one.)
Study point: Brookner's focalisation. Is she in control of her shifts in perspective?
Chapter 1 of Hotel du Lac presents us with an interesting situation, a few puzzles, and some engaging characters. There is little sense of jeopardy. But should there be? There's jeopardy aplenty in, for example, A Private View, but A Private View isn't a comedy. That's what Hotel du Lac, at this early stage, wants or promises to be.
The mystery of Edith's presence in Vevey (which is never named) remains strong. We're also treated to a key passage, the famous lines about the hare and the tortoise (recycled on social media with aggravating regularity).
The speech comes during one of the book's many flashbacks. Edith is about to undergo the ordeal of dinner at the hotel. She leans back for a moment and closes her eyes, remembering the last meal she had before leaving England, with her agent. We're deep in Edith's consciousness here, but during the remembered meal something disconcerting happens. We suddenly have access to the private thoughts and observations of the agent. These are useful in that they let us see Edith from the outside, but they're jarring.
Perhaps a similar clumsiness is seen at the sentence level. In the following sentence, the gerund is misapplied:
The chapter proceeds through reflection and flashback. Edith wakes; then her mind returns to yesterday evening, and we see how her meeting with the Puseys developed. There is some high comedy, subtly of a class nature. Of a different, more typical sort, are Edith's memories of her disappointed mother. We find ourselves in heavy Viennese interiors, and later in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, looking at a painting that could be Bruegel's Land of Cockaigne (but that's in Munich) or else The Harvesters (which is in the Met, New York).
One further point: the 'veal-coloured' decor of the hotel. Veal is an unEnglish meat; I never ate it until I went abroad. In the 80s and 90s, UK involvement in the European veal industry was roundly condemned in the tabloids, and I think there was legislation as a result. 'Veal-coloured' is therefore a peculiarly Continental choice of words.
Brookner was ambivalent as to the attractions of a writing life. It was a penance for being unlucky, she said in Look at Me (Chapter 6). Later, in interview, she said writing had saved her from the despair of living. In Hotel du Lac Edith's work is 'obscure and unnoticeable', though her 'labours' are said to 'anaesthetise' her.
The Puseys are again a focus, and a note of seriousness is gestured towards. Their presumed ages rise steadily higher; and 'in a way she could not define [the Puseys] were both out of date'. But it's men who take centre stage now: the man in grey (Mr Neville) in the present of the hotel, and David in another of Edith's reminiscences.
David is initially an exotic figure. He talks of 'the Rooms' where he works, and rather than auction spaces Edith imagines opium dens, Turkish baths, a tiled hammam, the Moorish paintings of Delacroix.
But his exoticism is of another order, as John Haffenden in his early interview with Brookner pointed out:
Chapter 5 of Hotel du Lac is an exception, as well as being a satisfying and exceptional chapter in its own right. It takes place in the hotel over the course of a day, and it centres solely on Edith's viewpoint. Edith wakes from a series of dreams, a favourite device (see here for more on the topic of dreams), though Edith's dreams are 'disjointed' and 'half dream, half memory'. As such they have a narrative function, introducing us further to the hotel guests, especially the 'man in grey' who will soon be known as Mr Neville.
A migraine follows, which confines Edith to the hotel for the day. Migraines and other such eclipses have their place in the repertoire. The speed of the novel, never exactly breakneck, slows, allowing for passages of fine writing. We see the view in its late-summer glory and the scene on the hotel terrace in its Sunday somnolence.
1. Balkanization
4. Time Revealing Truth
David is seen in his auction room, selling a work called Time Revealing Truth, attributed to Francesco Furini. Hotel du Lac is plainly a populist effort, but it is interesting to see Brookner's wider intellectual concerns and interests intruding on the text. This is the theme of an academic article from 2010, 'Anita Brookner's Visual World'.
Chapter 1 of Hotel du Lac presents us with an interesting situation, a few puzzles, and some engaging characters. There is little sense of jeopardy. But should there be? There's jeopardy aplenty in, for example, A Private View, but A Private View isn't a comedy. That's what Hotel du Lac, at this early stage, wants or promises to be.
Chapter 2
A steady pace and sparkling tone are maintained in Hotel du Lac's second chapter. We get to know more about Edith's lover David, and we have further viewings of the hotel's guests. The terrible Mrs Pusey, one of Brookner's monsters (but 'dainty with it,' as Brookner said in interview) comes to the fore.
The mystery of Edith's presence in Vevey (which is never named) remains strong. We're also treated to a key passage, the famous lines about the hare and the tortoise (recycled on social media with aggravating regularity).
The speech comes during one of the book's many flashbacks. Edith is about to undergo the ordeal of dinner at the hotel. She leans back for a moment and closes her eyes, remembering the last meal she had before leaving England, with her agent. We're deep in Edith's consciousness here, but during the remembered meal something disconcerting happens. We suddenly have access to the private thoughts and observations of the agent. These are useful in that they let us see Edith from the outside, but they're jarring.
Perhaps a similar clumsiness is seen at the sentence level. In the following sentence, the gerund is misapplied:
Talking busily to each other, knives and forks flashed as they ate their way enthusiastically through four courses...I grant that these are all rare and minor slips, but perhaps they remind us that Hotel du Lac is a relatively early Brookner. (Brookner herself would probably have dismissed such cavils. She was writing at speed (there was so little time, she said in interview), with little redrafting. And this wasn't her main career. There is a refreshing carelessness to Brookner, so different from her younger peers, with their degrees in creative writing, loading every rift with ore.)
Chapter 3
'Incidentally, although I have been thinking of Mrs Pusey as a lady, I have adjusted this downwards: Mrs Pusey is definitely a woman ... And the woman with the dog has to be adjusted upwards to lady, or rather Lady.'Brookner's is a conservative imagination. Characters, however individual, are fitted to established roles and types. The boy Alain, who brings Edith's breakfast, has 'the set expression and also the expertise of a much older servant, a gentleman's gentleman'. Later, in town, there's a reassuring scene in a cafe, with 'sturdy-looking women' drinking coffee and eating cakes, and 'flushed waitresses' hurrying between tables. Brookner, or Edith, looks for the eternal, the unchanging in the human scene.
Study point: Brookner's elusive political stance. By 'conservative', I mean 'small-c'. There is a slighting reference to Tony Blair in one of her interviews; and I remember from the 90s, but can't find, a line in a review in vague praise of John Major's back-to basics campaign. More widely, her critical views on feminism are certainly known. But I really have no idea how Brookner voted.
Study point: Brookner and servants. Brookner may be the last English novelist to write about servants. In Look at Me, there is a family retainer, almost indentured. In later novels there are awkward, nuanced exchanges with cleaning ladies and porters. Hipwood in A Private View is a figure out of Dickens.
The chapter proceeds through reflection and flashback. Edith wakes; then her mind returns to yesterday evening, and we see how her meeting with the Puseys developed. There is some high comedy, subtly of a class nature. Of a different, more typical sort, are Edith's memories of her disappointed mother. We find ourselves in heavy Viennese interiors, and later in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, looking at a painting that could be Bruegel's Land of Cockaigne (but that's in Munich) or else The Harvesters (which is in the Met, New York).
One further point: the 'veal-coloured' decor of the hotel. Veal is an unEnglish meat; I never ate it until I went abroad. In the 80s and 90s, UK involvement in the European veal industry was roundly condemned in the tabloids, and I think there was legislation as a result. 'Veal-coloured' is therefore a peculiarly Continental choice of words.
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| The Harvesters |
Chapter 4
'Are you a writer?' he enquired, in a voice very slightly tinged with amusement.Brookner is to be applauded for writing so rarely about writers. I can think of only a handful of writer-protagonists: Edith, here; Frances in Look at Me; and Jane in A Family Romance. None is quite a Brooknerian artist. Edith is a romance novelist; Frances writes Barbara Pym-style comic short stories for the New Yorker; and Jane is a children's writer.
Brookner was ambivalent as to the attractions of a writing life. It was a penance for being unlucky, she said in Look at Me (Chapter 6). Later, in interview, she said writing had saved her from the despair of living. In Hotel du Lac Edith's work is 'obscure and unnoticeable', though her 'labours' are said to 'anaesthetise' her.
The Puseys are again a focus, and a note of seriousness is gestured towards. Their presumed ages rise steadily higher; and 'in a way she could not define [the Puseys] were both out of date'. But it's men who take centre stage now: the man in grey (Mr Neville) in the present of the hotel, and David in another of Edith's reminiscences.
David is initially an exotic figure. He talks of 'the Rooms' where he works, and rather than auction spaces Edith imagines opium dens, Turkish baths, a tiled hammam, the Moorish paintings of Delacroix.
But his exoticism is of another order, as John Haffenden in his early interview with Brookner pointed out:
The men in your novels ... have the common denominator of being staunch Christians...- and therefore distinct from the implied Jewishness, certainly foreignness, of the classic Brookner heroine. To which Brookner replied:
They are conservative, establishment creations, aren't they? And as such impervious to these dark imaginings, these brooding midnight fantasies.
Novelists in Interview, Methuen, 1985, (also available here)
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Delacroix, Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement Louvre |
Chapter 5
Anita Brookner could never be accused of an over-slavish adherence to the classical unities. She plays fast and loose with her time-schemes (see Incidents in the Rue Laugier, 1995), she sends her characters on vacation at a moment's notice, and not a few of her novels contain several disparate plots. None of which need be considered criticisms.
Chapter 5 of Hotel du Lac is an exception, as well as being a satisfying and exceptional chapter in its own right. It takes place in the hotel over the course of a day, and it centres solely on Edith's viewpoint. Edith wakes from a series of dreams, a favourite device (see here for more on the topic of dreams), though Edith's dreams are 'disjointed' and 'half dream, half memory'. As such they have a narrative function, introducing us further to the hotel guests, especially the 'man in grey' who will soon be known as Mr Neville.
A migraine follows, which confines Edith to the hotel for the day. Migraines and other such eclipses have their place in the repertoire. The speed of the novel, never exactly breakneck, slows, allowing for passages of fine writing. We see the view in its late-summer glory and the scene on the hotel terrace in its Sunday somnolence.
Study point: Brookner's use in her novels of illness and especially of migraine. See the debilitating episode suffered by the protagonist of her 1986 novel A Misalliance. Search 'migraine' in the blog's search bar.
We get to watch the hotel guests in greater detail. The woman with the dog is named - Monica - and Mme de Bonneuil's history is sketched in. There's more class-inflected comedy at the expense of the Puseys ('Ma Pusey', as Monica calls her). Mr Neville and Edith have one of their combative conversations. And the sound of a door shutting in the night - a plot point - begins and ends the chapter.
But Brookner isn't a naturally dramatic writer. Here she observes the dramatic unities, but she is perhaps writing against the grain. She much prefers narrative that is interiorised, psychological, and, if the world must be shown, painterly. Not for nothing does Edith describe herself as a 'lay figure ... useful to a painter'.
We get to watch the hotel guests in greater detail. The woman with the dog is named - Monica - and Mme de Bonneuil's history is sketched in. There's more class-inflected comedy at the expense of the Puseys ('Ma Pusey', as Monica calls her). Mr Neville and Edith have one of their combative conversations. And the sound of a door shutting in the night - a plot point - begins and ends the chapter.
But Brookner isn't a naturally dramatic writer. Here she observes the dramatic unities, but she is perhaps writing against the grain. She much prefers narrative that is interiorised, psychological, and, if the world must be shown, painterly. Not for nothing does Edith describe herself as a 'lay figure ... useful to a painter'.
Chapter 6
Study point: Hotels in literature: The Hotel by Elizabeth Bowen, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor, Forster's A Room with a View.
Lotte in Weimar by Thomas Mann is a less familiar hotel-focused story: it takes place in the early nineteenth century but reveals its modernist credentials towards the end, when Mann gives us Goethe's thoughts and feelings in a stream-of-consciousness chapter. Edith, in Hotel du Lac, though she may look like Virginia Woolf, is no modernist, and nor is her creator. Chapter 6, though reflective, introspective, and set deep in Edith's consciousness, could have been written by Jane Austen or Anthony Trollope.
And Brookner continues to give us Edith's letters to her lover. This is a successful and fitting technique, and there will be a smart pay-off at the end of the novel, when Edith reveals she hasn't sent any of the letters. But it is old-fashioned. But again, perhaps fittingly so.
Some additional points on Chapter 6:
1. Balkanization
[Mrs Pusey and Monica] are not on good terms and use me as a buffer state [Edith writes]. I am subject to a certain amount of balkanization.
Brookner uses metaphor sparingly, and speaks of politics even less frequently. Talk of buffer zones and the Balkans is arresting, dragging the narrative slightly awkwardly into the here and now.
Study point: Brookner's titles, and her liking for unpoetic legalistic phrases: 'undue influence', 'fraud', 'the rules of engagement'.
2. Haffennegger's
This seems to be a cafe in Vevey, although I can find no mention of it on Google. For more on Vevey, see my blog post, 'Swiss Notebook', about my 2017 stay at the hotel.
Mr Neville 'looks rather like that portrait of the Duke of Wellington that was stolen from the National Gallery some time ago'.
Goya's portrait was in fact stolen in the early 1960s, when Edith would have been a very young woman. In early Brookner, Brookner's protagonists are often much younger than their creator.
2. Haffennegger's
This seems to be a cafe in Vevey, although I can find no mention of it on Google. For more on Vevey, see my blog post, 'Swiss Notebook', about my 2017 stay at the hotel.
Mr Neville 'looks rather like that portrait of the Duke of Wellington that was stolen from the National Gallery some time ago'.
Goya's portrait was in fact stolen in the early 1960s, when Edith would have been a very young woman. In early Brookner, Brookner's protagonists are often much younger than their creator.
4. Time Revealing Truth
David is seen in his auction room, selling a work called Time Revealing Truth, attributed to Francesco Furini. Hotel du Lac is plainly a populist effort, but it is interesting to see Brookner's wider intellectual concerns and interests intruding on the text. This is the theme of an academic article from 2010, 'Anita Brookner's Visual World'.
Chapter 7
Interviewer: Despite their subtlety and variations, all your books so far have been basically about love. Do you think you will go on writing about love?
Brookner: What else is there? All the rest is mere literature!
Interviewer: Where do you see yourself in the tradition of English literature?
Brookner: I don't know anything like that. I'm a middle-class, middle-brow novelist. And that's it. It amuses me.
'You write about love,' says Mr Neville. 'And you will never write anything different, I suspect, until you begin to take a harder look at yourself.' Anita Brookner, in interview, purported to be on Edith's side, even to the extent of pretending she herself was Edith's kind of novelist. Yet in none of Edith Hope's novels would we find the sort of exchange that takes up much of Chapter 7 of Hotel du Lac. The conversation is a deconstruction of the terms underpinning Edith's writing, and generally of the romantic life her writing advocates. It is by far the best scene in the novel so far, not least for its challenging metafictional qualities.
Mr Neville, seen as the Duke of Wellington in the previous chapter, is here commended for his 'eighteenth-century face'. There's something rigorously antique about the whole encounter. We might recall Brookner's comment in her exchange with Olga Kenyon in Women Writers Talk (1989):
Probably this is the first time since the Regency that men and women can converse on equal terms.So what does Brookner believe? Is she on Mr Neville's side, or Edith's? It's a tension found throughout her work, the careless against the careful, the wicked against the virtuous. I don't think we'll ever decide - though she also told Kenyon she shared 'practically all' of Edith's characteristics, that Hotel du Lac was a very personal story, and that she 'meant it. Every word'.
Chapter 8
Chapter 8, the first part of which comprises another extract from one of Edith's letters to David, focuses on themes of appearance and reality. Mrs Pusey, so spry, is revealed to be seventy-nine, and possibly deaf, and her daughter, who looks about fourteen, is in fact Edith's age, thirty-nine. Edith's disappointed Austrian mother is pictured reading innocent romances ('Perhaps that is why I write them'), while dressed in an ancient peignoir.
My mother's fantasies, which remained unchanged all her life, taught me about reality. And although I keep reality in the forefront of my mind, and refer to it with grim constancy, I sometimes wonder if it serves me any better than it served my mother.
Such reflections are occasioned by the elaborate fantasy of Mrs Pusey's birthday party, the artificiality and theatricality of which Edith compares and contrasts with her own memories and also with the less than enviable lives of the other guests - Mme de Bonneuil, for example, dutifully attending the entertainment but 'a stranger to such elaborate games of make-believe'.
'Suddenly', writes Edith, 'I had the uncanny feeling that this was all for show, that everything was a pretence, that this had been a dinner of masks, that no one was ever, ever going to tell the truth again.' The lightly comic ironic tone of much of the novel so far begins here to be undermined. 'Unsound elements seemed to have crept into [Edith's] narrative,' comments Brookner. David, we are told, likes to be amused by Edith's 'news from Cranford'.
The chapter finishes on a note of true sobriety. Edith is at last ready to review in her mind the events that led to her exile at the Hotel du Lac. The novel's revels are at an end.
The Puseys are no longer comic characters. The scene isn't played as farce, as might have been the case earlier. Instead we see the Puseys' carelessness, their misrule, their disregard of others, and also Mrs Pusey's fear of change. That Jennifer Pusey may have secrets is hinted at. The mystery of the opening and closing door is invoked. 'I wonder,' thinks Edith. 'I wonder.'
'My patience with this little comedy is wearing a bit thin,' she tells herself, confirming the alteration that has been in the air of the novel for some time.
Breakfastless - the hotel is at sixes and sevens - she heads into town, turning into Haffenegger's (last mentioned in Chapter 6, with a slightly different spelling), where she meets Monica. The themes are feminism, exile and homesickness. The tone is glum. The changed circumstances are acknowledged:
It's worth pointing out here that one isn't quite sure how long Edith Hope has been at the Hotel du Lac. Everybody seems institutionalised. One recalls the inmates of the Swiss sanatorium in The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, and the unsettling vagueness with which days, months, years go by.
'Suddenly', writes Edith, 'I had the uncanny feeling that this was all for show, that everything was a pretence, that this had been a dinner of masks, that no one was ever, ever going to tell the truth again.' The lightly comic ironic tone of much of the novel so far begins here to be undermined. 'Unsound elements seemed to have crept into [Edith's] narrative,' comments Brookner. David, we are told, likes to be amused by Edith's 'news from Cranford'.
The chapter finishes on a note of true sobriety. Edith is at last ready to review in her mind the events that led to her exile at the Hotel du Lac. The novel's revels are at an end.
The careful pretence of her days here, the almost successful tenor of this artificial and meaningless life which had been decreed for her own good by others who had no real understanding of what her own good was, suddenly appeared to her in all their futility.
Chapter 9
What do we think of flashbacks? Generally I'm not a fan. I was disconcerted when I read Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night in the original version, Bowen's The House in Paris, and Larkin's A Girl in Winter, all of which contain flashback sections centrally placed. In Hotel du Lac the key flashback comes later, two thirds of the way through, and elements of it have already been hinted at. As such it works, but only just.
Edith's misgivings about marriage are about love and its absence: she isn't content with the 'kind looks and spectacles' model of mature romance favoured by the likes of Barbara Pym. But more than that she worries about her writing. Married, she would not be writing. Writing may be 'illicit', rather shamefully 'orgiastic', but it is authentic. We are reminded (again) of Larkin in the poem 'Vers de Société', labouring under a lamp, looking out to see the moon 'thinned / To an air-sharpened blade': 'A life, and yet how sternly it's instilled / All solitude is selfish'.
This is to be no 'noble jilt' of the Trollopian kind. Geoffrey Long, Edith's ill-fated fiance is dismissed out of hand, condemned for the 'totality of his mouse-like seemliness'. He is, in a word, unBrooknerian, and to Edith's rejection of him the true Brooknerian can only raise a cheer.
Edith, who seems at times mousy herself, has become a genuine malcontent - nowhere near as extreme as, say, Frances in Look at Me, Rachel in A Friend from England or any number of figures in the later novels. But as the full story of her wedding day is revealed, the novel finds its feet, sharp not only in details of food, clothes, the surrounding streets, Larkinian in their sentimental ordinariness, but also in its depiction of Edith's emotional rebellion and refusal to be bowed - its setting out of Edith's rejection of the sort of modern inauthentic life her friends have earmarked for her, and which they themselves are happy to live. There's a telling detail buried in the middle of the chapter. Amid the modish vol-au-vents and asparagus rolls of the proposed wedding-breakfast is a Nesselrode pudding, an archaic and unfashionable confection, but with significance for Edith, loaded with notions of a better past.
'Pudding, Edith? You must be mad,' said Penelope. 'My mother loved it,' countered Edith, and thought, privately, that her mother would have considered this a puny alliance.
Chapter 10
The novel's new tone - darker, less ironic - continues. The season has changed; we're heading towards winter. Then there's a scene with the Puseys: Alain, the young waiter, has been (wrongly) accused of impropriety. 'Of course, he'll have to go,' says Mrs Pusey.
The Puseys are no longer comic characters. The scene isn't played as farce, as might have been the case earlier. Instead we see the Puseys' carelessness, their misrule, their disregard of others, and also Mrs Pusey's fear of change. That Jennifer Pusey may have secrets is hinted at. The mystery of the opening and closing door is invoked. 'I wonder,' thinks Edith. 'I wonder.'
'My patience with this little comedy is wearing a bit thin,' she tells herself, confirming the alteration that has been in the air of the novel for some time.
Breakfastless - the hotel is at sixes and sevens - she heads into town, turning into Haffenegger's (last mentioned in Chapter 6, with a slightly different spelling), where she meets Monica. The themes are feminism, exile and homesickness. The tone is glum. The changed circumstances are acknowledged:
It seemed to both of them in their separate ways that only the possession of this day held worse days at bay, that, for each of them, the seriousness of their relative predicaments had so far been material for satire or ridicule or even for amusement. But that the characters who had furnished that satire or that amusement were now taking on a disturbing life of their own...Time in Chapter 10 passes alarmingly quickly. Soon it is afternoon and the day is wasted. We finish in the hotel again, preparing for dinner. Like Chapter 5 the chapter has taken place, classically, over the course of a day.
It's worth pointing out here that one isn't quite sure how long Edith Hope has been at the Hotel du Lac. Everybody seems institutionalised. One recalls the inmates of the Swiss sanatorium in The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, and the unsettling vagueness with which days, months, years go by.
Chapter 11
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 play by Noel Coward. The tone and the treatment are 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 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 ambivalent.
'Please don't cry,' says Mr Neville at one point. 'I cannot bear to see a woman cry; it makes me want to hit her.' But there is no challenge, and the narrative glides opaquely on.
Chapter 11, in which Mr Neville and Edith take a trip on a pleasure steamer, reads like a novelisation of a play by Noel Coward. The tone and the treatment are 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 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 ambivalent.
'Please don't cry,' says Mr Neville at one point. 'I cannot bear to see a woman cry; it makes me want to hit her.' But there is no challenge, and the narrative glides opaquely on.
Study point: Neville's 'mythological' status. Throughout her oeuvre, Brookner references the ancient world, aligning her antagonists with the pagan gods. They serve as a contrast to her ostensibly virtuous heroines (and heroes), but Brookner's allegiances are never clear. This is a central tension in Brookner, potently unresolved.
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| 'And I have a rather well-known collection of famille rose dishes. I am sure you love beautiful things.' |
Chapter 12
I come to the end of my trek through Brookner's most famous novel. I gave 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, decades later, I tried to be objective. But I found memories of the BBC film intrusive. And I found the novel's tone a little too ironic, too whimsical at times.
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 has similarities with events in the previous novel, but the effect on Edith is 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 serious and defeatist:
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| 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 has similarities with events in the previous novel, but the effect on Edith is 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 serious and defeatist:
It was then that I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is for me. It is your penance for not being lucky. (Look at Me, Ch. 6)
Why does the recipe no longer work? Is it because the whole process now seems too much like the hair shirt of the penitent, angling to get back into God's good graces? (Hotel du Lac, Ch. 12)But Hotel du Lac finishes in a sombre key - a more characteristically Brooknerian key. Even before the truth about Mr Neville is revealed, Edith is contemplating change:
Looking back, she saw that [on her first evening here] she had been braver, younger, more determined ... It had seemed, at the time, almost a joke ... Since then she felt as if she had acquired an adult's seriousness...I find the transformation in the novel's tone one of its saving graces, even one of its triumphs. It makes us feel we've come a long way. It's a surprise to discover in this final chapter that Edith has been at the hotel for only two weeks.
Study point: 'as if I had acquired an adult's seriousness': Hotel du Lac as Bildungsroman. Many Brookners end with the acknowledgement of learning having taken place. But is it illusory?
Photos of the Hotel du Lac, Vevey
Visiting the Hotel du Lac, Vevey, Switzerland, in 1993, I picked up the following promotional material. Probably little changed from the 1980s, the hotel had much of the atmosphere of the venue in the novel. When I visited the place again in 2017, it was very different. (Search 'Swiss Notebook' in the blog's search bar for my account of this stay.)
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