Anita Brookner's A Private View: reading guide

A chapter-by-chapter reading and study guide to Anita Brookner's most Jamesian novel, the magisterial A Private View (1994).

Click here to jump to chapters:

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapters 3 and 4
Chapters 5 and 6
Chapters 7, 8 and 9
Chapters 10 and 11

Chapter 1

• Blank London windows, hazy indistinct light, a barrier of trees: Pelham Crescent by Robert Buhler. I have a liking for the first UK paperback edition. This is a novel of private life, of retirement, of the end of a public life, of the claustrophobia of home, the ambiguities and ambivalences of home.
• George Bland isn't Anita Brookner, and Brookner was at pains to point this out in her 1994 interview. 'Clearly I'm not a 65-year-old man who has worked in personnel.' But she was a year shy of that age when she wrote it, or when we can assume she wrote it. (The novel is set in the last months of 1992 - a later visit to the Royal Academy exhibition confirms this (see here for more on this detail) - and I take it that Brookner probably wrote it then too.) And something else of interest: when she wrote an intro to an edition of Madame Bovary, A Private View was the only one of her novels cited in her biographical note. George Bland - c'est moi?
• The start of the novel is masterly, and as John Bayley said in his Spectator review, we could go on considering Bland's situation indefinitely. 'He felt a moment of fear, as if he were no longer safe. Darkness, sudden as always, pressed against the window; cars roared along the corniche. He was aware of an alien life, nothing to do with him, utterly indifferent to whether he stayed or left.'
• And how much longer has he got? A 'few more years', he reckons - a few more years before he must rely on the ministrations of strangers. These are preoccupations that would grow and grow in Brookner's later novels - and perhaps too in her life. One reads with a chill.

Chapter 2

My copy of the UK hardback

• The claustral atmosphere intensifies. Inside his block of flats, Bland has 'definitively left the outside world'.
• Bland 'cautiously' watches soap operas, seeking knowledge of other lives, suburban lives like those of his forebears. For more on Brookner and television, search 'television' in the blog's search bar.
• Bland's porter is called Hipwood, which I always thought of as a made-up name - the sort you might find in Dickens. But it is a genuine name.
• The closeness of Brookner's observation: she misses nothing. Like James, she's fully one of those on whom nothing is lost. Take Bland's sudden access of tears at the end of the chapter.
• Also to be remarked is the extreme fineness of the language. Bland and his neighbours' 'Lilliputian concerns'.
• While we may bracket A Private View with the twenty-first century novels The Next Big Thing and Strangers, both also novels about older men, George Bland isn't so much old as on the brink of old age. The first of Brookner's truly old sole protagonists is Mrs May in Visitors (1997). But with A Private View Brookner enters a new phase. Over the remaining decades of her writing career she would commit herself more and more to a topic many novelists avoid.

Chapters 3 and 4

• For so apparently metropolitan a writer, suburbia exerts a curious lure. Lewis Percy was Brookner's explicitly 'suburban novel'. In other works - Visitors - the areas beyond the centre are foci for nostalgia and a sense of lost authenticity. In A Private View, Bland's London home, by comparison with his dreams of the past, seems 'flimsy, meretricious, unconvincing'.
• The encounters with Katy Gibb in her differing guises - hippy, waif, courtesan - crackle with energy. Brookner hates her but is fascinated. The private view is under way.
• Reading Brookner is an education in looking. Some might say she interprets too much from characters' outward appearances. But one would counter-argue that Brookner the art critic is at work - looking, missing nothing. As a child, she said, she was very good at looking.
• Bland isn't Brookner, but, painterly, she puts in little details. He has, for example, large hands. Anita Brookner, one notices, also had large hands.
• By chapter 4, Bland is 'near the edge'. His condition is persuasively depicted. The writer A. N. Wilson in his Daily Mail obituary of Brookner recounted an incident at a party in the 1990s. Brookner was in her sixties; the host was twenty years younger and, Wilson claims, the object of Brookner's love. At one point she disappeared from the party. Wilson found her upstairs, sitting alone on the host's bed, among the guests' coats. She looked quite abject. It was, he thought, the closest she would ever come to the man's bed. An indiscreet, even shocking anecdote. But it shows us that A Private View (1994), rather than being the product of emotion recollected in tranquillity, may have been written instead in the very thick of the action.
• The Sickert exhibition. On Tuesday 1 December, 1992 the diarist James Lees-Milne made one of his regular jaunts to London, where he visited Richard Shone's Sickert exhibition at the Royal Academy (Winter 1992-3). Lees-Milne noted that the later paintings, done from photos, looked like photos, but were still fascinating - transient scenes immortalised. He liked the 'early stuff' -  'Whistlerish'. His main beef - he wouldn't be James Lees-Milne if he didn't have a complaint - was with the gallery lighting. A Private View is set fairly precisely in late 1992. In chapter 4, one Sunday, the protagonist George Bland visits the Sickert exhibition at the RA. Bland's ruminations prove more extensive than Jim Lees-Milne's, though the gallery's lights aren't commented on.
• If the visits to the RA of Lees-Milne and Brookner that winter had coincided, would the pair have acknowledged one another? Probably not. They weren't really acquainted, though Lees-Milne had heard Dr Brookner lecture in the 1980s. Much later, on the posthumous publication of a biography of Lees-Milne, Brookner indicated that she was a 'devotee' of his diaries.

Chapters 5 and 6

• Chapter lengths: Brookner lived by her routines, and in most of her novels (though not the last ones) her chapters noticeably even in length. A Private View is like this but (along with the previous novel, A Family Romance) unlike too, in that its chapters are about double the normal Brookner length (twenty rather than ten pages). It suits A Private View in particular, which focuses on a short period of time in the protagonist's life. Chapter 5, for example, covers a single day. But why impose on oneself a chapter-length format anyhow? Such structure was necessary for the likes of Trollope, who was writing for serial publication, but not in the late twentieth century. I guess Brookner was one of those artists whom restriction rather than freedom made creative.
• Brookner skewers with a passion Katy's 'airy Californian make-believe' of encounter groups and self-affirmation. In this way she places herself in a determinedly English tradition. Kingsley Amis does something similar in Jake's Thing.
• There's a nod to Stefan Zweig in chapter 6, in the line about being 'beware of pity'. Zweig had a vogue in the early twenty-first century, but Brookner was there already.
• Bland's upholstery - pink and green stripes - is jollier than Brookner's grey and white stripes, visible on the National Portrait Gallery website in a photo of the time.
• Bland pays a second, weekday visit to the exhibition, but on a Monday not a Tuesday (failing again to cross paths with Jim Lees-Milne).

Chapters 7, 8 and 9

• By the time she wrote A Private View Anita Brookner was established and in mid-career. The novel shows ease and confidence. Its long passages of introspection are accomplished. In chapter 7 we get a metafictional line she probably wouldn't have risked in an earlier novel: 'It was like a detective story, or a novel by Henry James'. Indeed.
• Bland's walk into the suburbs of Fulham is precisely recorded, and the interested reader can now follow his journey on Google Street View.
• The stakes are high for George Bland - but not as high as they are for later Brookner oldsters: in The Next Big Thing, Strangers and 'At the Hairdresser's'. They're in real jeopardy, and so (perhaps) was their creator.
• Bland's vision of a rakish life with Katy in foreign locales 'might have been the supreme emotional adventure'. Supreme emotional adventure: this is a favourite phrase. See another post here.
• 'The beauty of the plan was that each would think he had the best of the bargain': there's something antique about this sentence, which you probably wouldn't read often now, or indeed then. It's the use of 'he' to refer to 'each'. Here 'each' means George and Katy, male and female. What would another writer write? 'They'? 'She'?
• How much time passes? A Private View is surely the most condensed of Brookners, but so involved and 'exhausting' are George Bland's thoughts that the reader loses track of the days. How much time separates the opening in Nice from the scenes in chapters 7, 8 and 9, more than halfway through the book? Two or three? But no, chapter 1 takes place in November and chapter 9 on 18 December. (See the postcard Bland receives: 'He looked again at the card. "Returning 22nd." That was next Tuesday. Today was the 18th, Friday. That gave him a very small margin in which to conclude this venture.') I could of course go back and trace the time-scheme, but I haven't the will - and in any case I reckon it's completely off-kilter. This isn't the only Brookner novels where time is confused and confusing.
• But the dates given in chapter 9 are very specific to December 1992.

• I note Brookner's use of the phrase 'undue influence', which would be called into service again as the title of her 1999 novel.



Cranach, Das Ungleiche Paar,
Akademiegalerie, Vienna

Chapters 10 and 11

• Bland, with Katy, sees himself almost as a novelist with one of his characters. Compare Bland with Mrs May in Visitors, who experiences a similar creative thrill, though the circumstances of her shipwreck are less extreme, more sublimated.
• One admires the excellence of Brookner's clairvoyance: 'The strange odyssey that he had planned for them had indeed something childlike about it, proof of his own childlike wishes, in which sex and sin played no part.'
• The books we read in our youth retain a special magic, and A Private View is one such for me. I read innocently then, or more innocently than now - by which I mean I 'identified' with George Bland. Reading the novel again, I identify again, sinking back in astonishment at the fineness of the writing, the intensity and ingenuity of the analysis. There are some truly masterful passages. A Private View, like The Ambassadors or The Golden Bowl, is a thing to marvel at, a thing to be grateful for.

UK first edition,
with its uncharacteristic cover