The Brooknerian

I haven't yet been able to find the covers, but these are apparently the fresh spines of some Brookner novels to be republished in June: An intriguing selection, focusing on the 1980s ( A Start in Life , Look at Me* , Latecomers ) and the 2000s ( The Bay of Angels , The Next Big Thing ). I am pleased to see The Next Big Thing , a late masterpiece and as raw and edgy as anything she ever wrote. I should perhaps reconsider The Bay of Angels . But what of the great, settled, magisterial novels of the 90s - A Family Romance, A Private View, Visitors ? *Disappointing to see the continuing capitalisation of the preposition, inaugurated in the cover refresh of ten years ago.

Brookner's novels fall into groups, with thematic as well as actual contiguities. Incidents (1995) follows  A Family Romance (1993) and A Private View (1994). In chapter 9 Edward is cast as a voyeuristic shepherd: one thinks of the shepherds and shepherdesses in the lesser Bouchers in the Wallace Collection, visited by Jane in A Family Romance , in the summer of 1976. (The rue Laugier incidents take place in a similar summer five years earlier.) Meanwhile Tyler is again mythic - mythic to the 'earthbound' Maud - as was Katy Gibb to poor George Bland in A Private View . Crucially Tyler is Apollo, who of course features in A Family Romance 's 'great Bouchers', at the top of the main staircase. Boucher, The Setting of the Sun , Wallace Collection UK first edition

Chapters 7 and 8 comprise the 'incidents'. Masterly and languid, the chapters lengthen, like those monsters in the immediately previous two novels, A Private View and A Family Romance . Brookner plays on familiar themes: the 'mythical status' of Tyler recalls any number of earlier godlike characters on whom Brookner, fascinated though appalled, turned her basilisk stare, most recently the terrible Katy Gibb in A Private View ; and the moment of a life's turning point, here, as in Family and Friends , taking place in Paris. Recruited to the cause is great art, a Samson and Delilah in the Louvre (Moreau?) and Masaccio's Eve, in Florence, the latter a fine representation of the fallen world Edward and Maud, sans Tyler, must now inhabit.

Chapter 5 finds us at last in the rue Laugier and again on familiar Brookner ground: Paris. Characters free but anxious and disenchanted in Paris abound: Sturgis in Strangers , Herz in The Next Big Thing . Paris is here, as there, bigger and more dangerous than in the characters' dreams and memories. I recognise in myself such feelings. I haven't been to Paris in more than a decade, but I used to be a regular. I think on my last visit, in something like 2009, I was, like Edward in Incidents , debilitated by the unexpected largeness of the place, its monumentalism. In dreams one traverses great spaces with ease, and there is little traffic. John Bayley said of George Bland in Brookner's 1994 novel, A Private View , as he endures a crisis of nerves in Nice, that one might contemplate his situation indefinitely. But the plot must go on. And so it must here too.

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 is lost in admiration at 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 I might now - by which I guess I mean I 'identified' with George Bland. Reading the novel again, I identify again, and again sink back in sheer admiration at the fineness of the writing, the intensity and ingenuity of the analysis. There really are some masterful passages. Is it, then, my favourite Brookner? I couldn't say. I thought that was The Next...

By the time she wrote A Private View  Anita Brookner was well established and in mid-career. The novel shows great ease and confidence. Its long passages of introspection are masterly. 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 Earth. 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 an earlier post here . 'The beauty of the plan was that each would th...

Chapter lengths: Brookner lived by her routines, and in most of her novels (though not the last ones) her chapters are noticeably even in length. A Private View is like this but (along with the previous one, 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. Sickert. For more on the Royal Academy's 1992 Sickert exhibition, click on the label below. (I find Bland pays a second, weekday visit to the exhibition, but on a Monday not a Tuesday, so, again, he failed to cross...

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, looking, looking, and missing nothing. As a child, she said, she was very good at looking. Bland isn't Brookner, but she sneaks in little details. He has, for example, large hands. Anita Brookner, one notices, also had l...

My copy of the UK hardback The claustral atmosphere intensifies. Once inside his block of flats, Bland feels he 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, click on the label below. 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. I'm rereading  A Private View alongside a piece of more recent literary fiction, which is lots of fun but reads like a children's book. (The title and author shall remain unsaid.) Brookner absolutely is an author for grown-ups. The closeness of Brookner's observation is remarkable. She misses nothing. 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 lang...

Blank London windows, hazy indistinct light, a barrier of trees: Pelham Crescent by Robert Buhler. I have a great 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. With reference to a previous post (see here ), I find that the character who drops dead at Kempton Park is in this novel. 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 P...