Aside from a novella two years later, Strangers (2009) brought the Brookner project to an unsettling and unconsoling conclusion. Here is a reading and study guide to this important and fascinating novel.
Covers first: The UK first edition, followed by reprints of 2016 and 2026.
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Was Brookner well served by her covers? The original edition of Strangers seems a case in point - a lazy cover, depicting a vaguely Brookner-style building, but one that, to me at least, looks too suburban. I don't like the lighting either. Brooknerians don't burn the midnight oil. The image has a sense of Philip Larkin's high windows. Paul Sturgis, the main character of the novel, is a little Larkinian, but only a little.
Later covers are an improvement. We move from London to Venice, a minor setting in the novel but perhaps its touchstone. Brookner, as has been noted, is nothing if not European. One is reminded of those frontispiece photographs Henry James commissioned for his New York Edition, e.g. this, for The Wings of the Dove.
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For all its glory England is a land for rich and healthy people. Also they should not be too old.
Sigmund Freud, London, 1938
Epigraph to Strangers
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Throughout the obedient years of childhood he had privately observed that God was unjust, or, even worse than that, He was indifferent. To the pronouncement, I am that I am, went the unspoken addendum, Deal with it. Boasting to Job of His omnipotence, His superiority to Job's peaceable sinless life, He offered no justification for any of this, merely issued a report. And Job had acceded, perhaps because it is preferable to be inside than outside, silently making his accommodation with the idea of injustice, of disproportion. And had been rewarded for his docility with the restoration of his fortune, as if he had let bygones be bygones.
Strangers, Ch. 1
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The Heat of the Day
Elizabeth Bowen, title of 1949 novel
The sun rose on a landscape still pale with the heat of the day before.
Bowen, A World of Love (1955), Ch. 1
Leaving Home
Anita Brookner, title of 2005 novel
...fantasies about the life he would lead when old enough to seek his freedom. Or indeed to leave home, though, strangely enough, home it had remained.
Brookner, Strangers (2009), Ch. 1
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He had been immersed in a reverie ... He had been back in the old house, although this time the house had a wider context, was grounded in the neighbourhood of his childhood ... a greengrocer, a chemist...
Strangers (2009), Ch. 6
I go back in my mind to all the rooms I have slept in, remember in detail the streets of my earliest perambulations: that chemist on the corner...
'At the Hairdresser's' (2011 novella, available on Kindle), Ch. 2
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...it seemed to him a terrible thing to live without witnesses, as if he had failed to make good the inevitable deficiencies of both past and present, had never created a family of his own, so that he was haunted by a feeling of invisibility, as if he were a mere spectator of his own, his only life, with no one to identify him, let alone with him, in the barren circumstances of the here and now.
Strangers, Ch. 3
Later in Strangers Brookner quotes Larkin's 'Home is so Sad', last referred to in A Private View. This time she acknowledges Larkin, actually uses his name. For a Larkin fan like me, it's a moment to treasure. In the quote above, too, I get a Larkinian thrill. His only life. I'm not sure what Larkin means exactly by 'an only life' in the following lines from 'Aubade', nor indeed why Brookner makes the point as she does. But some connection is surely in operation.
The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
- The good not done, the love not given,time
Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever ...
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And there were the compensations: the high standards of care. Roland would have been soothed by the fine housekeeping, the attention paid to his comfort. He himself was almost persuaded that such a bargain, such an arrangement, could be justified. But it was light years away from the real thing. It was the sort of marriage that no romantic worth his salt could contemplate. There would be consolation in the prospect, but little sincerity. The absence, or loss, of sincerity might in the long run prove too high a price to pay.
Strangers, Ch. 3
There is a sense, in Strangers, probably only because it turned out to be her last full-length novel, of Brookner taking a last walk around the block, of her stating her case for the last time. Her allegiance, finally, is with Romanticism. That's the message. Or it's the message in this particular passage. As she goes on, she always twists and shifts. Nothing is quite for keeps. The conflicts, to the last, remain unresolved. But there is, as I say, here, strongly a feeling of accounts finally being rendered.
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Some sort of reluctant sympathy had been drawn out of him, but he recognised this for what it was, the residue of unused feelings from earlier times.
Strangers, Ch. 5
He saw his madness for what it was, the final upheaval of an unlived life...
A Private View, Ch. 10
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He remembered asking directions of an elderly man once in Paris, to be met with the words, 'Monsieur, il ne faut pas partir d'ici.' That was the nub of the matter, a false start...
Strangers, Ch. 7
My own life was disappointing - I was mal partie, started on the wrong footing; so I am trying to edit the whole thing.
Paris Review
The rayon vert, though never before named, and here given metaphorical force, will be familiar to Brooknerians. In A Family Romance Jane walks down a London street and the sky is of the palest green. Or else, from The Bay of Angels, Zoe and Adam wandering out into a 'beautiful greenish dusk'.
Sturgis's story corresponds with Mrs May's in Visitors, especially in this passage:
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... he thought he might have done better, even prospered, in another era, or even another place, where the natives, the citizens, were more helpful, more curious, and indeed more candid. He longed to have lived in one of those confessional novels he had read as a young man - The Sorrows of Young Werther, Adolphe - in which whole lives were vouchsafed to the reader, with all their shame, yet as if there were no shame in the telling. Here, now, one was consciously checked by a sort of willed opacity, a social niceness that stalled one's attempts to make real contact.
Strangers, Ch. 7
Once more, in Strangers, Brookner takes stock of her strange second career. Werther returns us to Family and Friends, Adolphe to Providence. Brookner herself, though private, was not known for the kind of vapid small-talk she deplored in the English. A diary piece by Julian Barnes amusingly makes this point:
Towards the end of the first year of Anita Brookner’s deathtime, I was remembering my meetings and conversations with her. What we talked about: art, books, the literary world, France, friends in common. What we didn’t talk about: her early years, her personal life, politics (I never knew whether or how she voted), or anything practical. No exchange of recipes. No mention of sport. ‘Anita, what do you think of Ireland’s chances in the Six Nations?’ was not a question that ever came to my lips. I remember her telling me that she had just finished a novel and so, for the moment, was ‘doing exactly what I like’. I said, teasingly: ‘Well, in your case that probably means rereading Proust.’ Her eyes widened in alarm: ‘How did you guess?’
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What he was after was something smaller, a landscape, his own, from which he could view a mystical sunset, and where he might capture that fabled rayon vert, that brief streak of light before the darkness closed in.
Strangers, Ch. 7
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...the fascination of a character encountered in a book. He regretted the questions he had not asked, but had respected her preoccupations as belonging to a quasi-fictional 'Vicky Gardner', who, in the fullness of time, would be explained to him. This, he was forced to conclude, was the extent of his attraction to her. Nothing could be less sensual, less sexual. He was interested only in the unfolding of the story...
Strangers, Ch. 10
...she realised that this journey might have to be repeated, and she could not repress a very slight feeling of interest. This was surely the stuff of fiction? A strong plot, unusual characters, a threatened outcome: who could ask for worthier diversion?
Visitors, Ch. 4
Such passages carry risks. We're in a hall of mirrors, something a little close to the madness of James's Sacred Fount, in which the narrator doesn't just observe the other characters, 'as if I were trapping a bird or stalking a fawn' (Ch. 8), but seems to construct them, so that the reader has no chance of knowing what's 'real', nor who may be trusted.
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Strangers is not a funny book. There is a caretaker, Arthur, who seems to have stepped out of a 1950s comedy, but little else. There is, though, an exchange between Sturgis and his old girlfriend about loneliness. Sarah is affronted at being asked whether she's lonely - 'Are you lonely, indeed' - and Sturgis says, 'I sometimes wish that someone would ask me the same question. It would give me a chance to...' And of course Sarah knows him too well, and Brookner knows herself too well: 'That's why they don't ask you,' Sarah rejoins. 'It would set you off for hours.' (Ch. 14)
One is reminded of this, from Julian Barnes:
Reason and Romanticism: a key Brooknerian binary. That reason might have as many limitations as its obverse is plain from the start: Brookner knows she has 'lost her faith'; she knows reason 'doesn't work' always. Years later, in Strangers, she's still revolving these conflicts round and round, and their irresolution keeps her project potent and viable, and could have kept it going indefinitely.
I cannot emphasise enough the complex pleasures of Strangers. I wonder what a reader new to Brookner would make of it. On almost every page there are echoes of earlier novels. As for the plot, what there is of it is stretched so thinly that Brookner must rely at times only on her formidable style. This is, of course, what we really want.
This connects with an over-quoted remark of Brookner's, about real love being a pilgrimage, carried out without strategy. (It comes from either the Haffenden or the Kenyon interview, and crops up with dreary regularity on social media.)
One is reminded of this, from Julian Barnes:
When she won, she went up to the dais, received the cheque, turned to the audience with immaculate poise, and began: 'Usually, when I stand up, I go on for about 50 minutes' – then a pause of perfect length, before she added – 'with slides.'
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Quite obstinately, I prefer the stately dance of reason to any conclusion more rapidly arrived at, however persuasive the display ... And so difficult is this prejudice to shake off that I now look upon myself as one of those unfortunates who have lost their faith but are still unable to recant...
TLS, 5 October 1984
Kitty Maule [in Providence] says about Romanticism that in certain situations reason doesn't work, and that's the most desolating discovery of all.
Haffenden interview, Novelists in Interview, 1985
If only he could fall in love again! Only in that climate of urgency could he make decisions ... He was left with reason, which, at his stage of life, would propel him in directions which were uncertain, and which he would have to negotiate alone.
Strangers (2009), Ch. 15
Against his expectations the age of reason was proving something of a disappointment.
Ibid., Ch. 20
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... I decided that I could only get by on style ...
Look at Me, Ch. 10
He would go to Paris, if only to prove himself as good as his word. It was all a question of style.
Strangers, Ch. 26
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She admits to having periodically suffered from depression. That might have made some people seek an analyst. But friends speak of Brookner's 'rich interior life'. And she doesn't find depression a thing to feel depressed by.
'Depression can be quite fruitful if it leads to thoughtfulness, inwardness. Certainly my parents' deaths, certainly disappointments in love have led to periods, yes, quite long periods of depression - but they haven't been entirely defeating, you see, they've been quite nourishing. Because you're very receptive when you're in that state: in fact, it's invaluable.'
She had no inner life, it seemed. This to him was phenomenal, he to whom the inner life was all.
Strangers (2009), Ch. 16
Mrs Gardner, who, crucially, Sturgis does not fall in love with - she is no second Katy Gibb - has, phenomenally, no inner life. Hers is a 'vagrant personality'; she has a 'curious blitheness'. As such she is quite beyond the pale. But Brookner's allegiances are always to be doubted. Blitheness is evidently a significant word:
Didn't Plato say the unexamined life is not worth living? [Brookner] gives the faintest smile. 'Plato could be wrong too. I think the unexamined life is much better. Much more comfortable.' So you wish you had been… 'Blithe…' It rolls off her tongue, wrapped in longing. A lovely word, I say. 'It's an old-fashioned word. You don't hear it much.' So you envy the blithe? 'Oh yes.'
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He saw that his acts of good will, towards both Helena and Mrs Gardner, had been interpreted as something of an insult, an act of charity which both had rejected with hauteur. He felt a renewed distaste for his own calculations.
Strangers, Ch. 20
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Brookner possibly didn't expect Strangers to be her last, yet it has a conclusive, a summative, air. She revisits themes, references, locations, character-types. Paul Sturgis may be traced to George Bland in A Private View (1994) most obviously, but he has antecedents in all those Brooknerians who find themselves flirting with other lives (an earlier example is Blanche in A Misalliance (1986)). On the other side there's Mrs Gardner, a fairly hateful figure - hateful in a way Katy Gibb never was. Katy Gibb (A Private View) I've always found rather fascinating (but I'm probably as morally susceptible as George Bland). Katy Gibb and George Bland are both tremendously 'there', as John Bayley remarks; Sturgis and Mrs Gardner somehow aren't as substantial. Strangers is a thinner, more exiguous novel: one can see this superficially in the briefness of its chapters, in comparison with the denser, longer chapters of earlier novels. In Strangers Brookner wishes to finish and have done. She always wants to do that, but never is it so obvious. Or rather she finds, towards the close, that she's run out of plot, and must invent a trip to Nice and then a return via Paris. Sturgis's seemingly never-ending, protracted, frustrating travels are experienced, as they are by the reader, on the edge of an abyss. Nevertheless, a lesson is earned:
The evidence was all too clear: he could undertake no more excursions. He lay down on the bed, let himself drift off into sleep, not without a sense of nightmare. But this was standard now... (Ch. 25)He has arrived, like Bland, at the end of his adventures, and Brookner has too. There will be no more excursions, no more novels. There will be 'At the Hairdresser's', her 2011 novella, but that will be a much more limited affair. With Strangers we all but finish the Brooknerian journey, grateful for a final fling, a rayon vert before the darkness comes down.
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Unpicking a Brookner time-scheme can be a queasy business; the extreme case is Incidents in the Rue Laugier, in which the narrative purports to conclude some considerable time after the book's publication date. Some works, however, have distinct, controlled chronologies. Bland's trip to see an exhibition of Sickert's works allows us to date the action of A Private View.
That novel has much in common with Strangers (2009), and we can use a surprisingly similar means of dating its events. In Chapter 23 Sturgis and Sarah visit an exhibition dedicated to the Camden Town Group at Tate Britain, a show that ran from February to May 2008. It concentrated on the core of the Group - Gore, Gilman, Bevan, Ginner - with Sickert as a key player.
That novel has much in common with Strangers (2009), and we can use a surprisingly similar means of dating its events. In Chapter 23 Sturgis and Sarah visit an exhibition dedicated to the Camden Town Group at Tate Britain, a show that ran from February to May 2008. It concentrated on the core of the Group - Gore, Gilman, Bevan, Ginner - with Sickert as a key player.
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Anita Brookner is probably the last English novelist to write about servants. As late as Strangers (2009) we meet a comic caretaker ('Call me Arthur'), with his plans to retire to Essex and possible ambitions in the direction of underfloor heating. Such details carry all sorts of class-conscious freight. Essex, for the benefit of foreign followers of this blog, has a reputation in the popular British imagination, and as for underfloor heating... We're back in the territory of the Livingstones in A Friend from England, and all their pools-funded vulgarity.
Arthur himself has forebears, notably the Dickensian Hipwood in A Private View. Then there are all the female chars and retainers, with their comic ramblings and salty turns of phrase. 'Class and caste distinctions were the lingua franca of insult and comedy,' writes my old tutor Alison Light of Interwar mistress-servant relations, real and fictional, in Mrs Woolf and the Servants (Fig Tree / Penguin, 2007). Dr Light was, I recall, no fan of Brookner. She didn't much approve of Virginia Woolf's attitudes towards her servants, but was a serious Woolf fan, and a fan will forgive almost anything.
Arthur himself has forebears, notably the Dickensian Hipwood in A Private View. Then there are all the female chars and retainers, with their comic ramblings and salty turns of phrase. 'Class and caste distinctions were the lingua franca of insult and comedy,' writes my old tutor Alison Light of Interwar mistress-servant relations, real and fictional, in Mrs Woolf and the Servants (Fig Tree / Penguin, 2007). Dr Light was, I recall, no fan of Brookner. She didn't much approve of Virginia Woolf's attitudes towards her servants, but was a serious Woolf fan, and a fan will forgive almost anything.
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I remember being admonished at uni for praising Sidney's sincerity in Astrophil and Stella. 'Sincerity is undemonstrable,' intoned my professor.
One can go too far in the other direction - make authors too knowing, too self-conscious. Hilary Mantel in her otherwise brilliant review of Strangers fashions for us a cynical, detached Brookner, a Brookner who, with an 'authorial snigger', coolly observes the misfortunes of her characters:
We hear the barely suppressed sound of the author laughing up her sleeve ... In this book as elsewhere, she subverts her characters ruthlessly and exposes them to humiliation, not only in the eyes of other characters but the eyes of her reader.
Mantel speaks of Brookner's 'subtle, uncomfortable high comedy'. Comedy? That old thing again. As for sincerity, as for authorial detachment, Brookner's own ambivalent feelings towards her characters (or 'personages', as she calls them), expressed in the early Haffenden interview, are relevant:
Poor little things, I feel sorry for them. They're idiots: there's no other word for them. And I don't know any more than they do.
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