The Brooknerian

I reread Elizabeth Taylor's Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1971) as part of my 'Hotels in Literature' series (see previous post ). But I was resistant to the 2005 film, largely because I knew it wasn't set in the early Seventies. The producers had made the decision to update the story to the present, and I felt this might be an issue. Within the first ten minutes we get references to Mrs Thatcher and Sex and the City , which sound incongruous. And there is of course a central problem with the set-up: old people simply don't live as residents in hotels any longer. The bigger bugbear is with the film's tone. The supporting players plainly think it's a comedy and are hamming it up. We have the porter Summers, whose face is vaguely familiar from a hundred minor character roles, and Mrs Post is played by Marcia Warren, whom I remember from a forgettable Eighties sitcom called No Place Like Home . Then - God help us - there's Anna Massey (Edith Hope hersel...

However often I watch it, I'm always surprised. A film of an Anita Brookner novel seems as outlandish as an adaptation of, say, late James. But The Golden Bowl and, more skilfully, The Wings of the Dove have been successfully translated to the screen in recent decades. Their plots, though, underneath the verbiage, are very simple, even sensational. Hotel du Lac , similarly, is one of Brookner's more structured, plotted works. Rights to the novel were bought before its Booker success. Initially Anita Brookner had been approached to write an original screenplay, but she said she wouldn't know how to. Instead she offered the soon-to-be published  Hotel du Lac . (This is revealed in the 2002 commentary that accompanies the DVD of the 1986 TV film. The commentary is a dull, low-powered affair. No Brookner, of course.) Anna Massey plays Edith. I've often found Massey a distractingly distinctive actor. Like Judi Dench she manages somehow, in any role, alwa...