The Brooknerian

Too often disappointing, sometimes one's reading truly works, in the way it worked in childhood. How often as an adult does one experience that? When I first read Hotel du Lac , at seventeen, one summer. When I read The Small House at Allington , another summer, in Rome. When I read Anthony Powell, tears smarting in my eyes in an Amsterdam hotel breakfast-room as I learned, via a throwaway remark, of poor Stringham's death. Rereading almost never matches up. Or else one identifies with new things. In Great Expectations I am cold now to the story of Pip's love for Estella. But I break down when Pip tells Magwitch, at the last, that his lost child lives and is now a lady. Or when old Pip returns to the forge to find Jo and Biddy and their own little son - and Pip sees himself: 'sitting on my own little stool looking at the fire, was - I again!' Guilty reading can be compulsive too. I'm halfway through May at 10 , Anthony Seldon's almost day-by-day account ...

I'll admit at the start that I find myself resistant to Hotel du Lac . This may be a result of having watched the BBC film fairly recently . I keep hearing Anna Massey's arch tones. The tone of chapter 1 is of interest. At times it's whimsical, clever-clever. 'A cold coming I had of it,' writes Edith to her lover. And later in the letter, 'Not drowning, but waving' and 'all these sad cypresses'. 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. The Augustan expansiveness of that sentence seems typical of the novel. One recalls Philip Larkin's comments on Anthony Powell's style: A formal, slightly absurd view of l...

Who does not enjoy a set piece, by which I guess I mean an extended scene depicting a social occasion? Brookner goes in for them infrequently, but usually memorably. Disastrous meals are a feature: one thinks of Look at Me 's climactic meal, or the dinner party in Fraud . Such scenes, with their food, their clothes, their vulgar demotic dialogue, can unbalance a novel as finely woven as an Anita Brookner. In A Friend from England , for example in the engagement party and wedding scenes in chapter 3, Brookner seeks a middle way: dense paragraphs, indirect speech, a painterly attention to detail and manner and impression. This is in keeping with the estranged, disillusioned mood of the narrator. Rachel has things in common with Anthony Powell's almost disembodied narrator in his Music of Time sequence. Powell also has a fondness for a set piece, but his are on an epic scale. I remember a scene in one of the early novels, A Buyer's Market or The Acceptance World,  that goe...

I am, I suppose, a Powell fan. Lovers of Mencken will remember how it was accepted in the editorial office of the American Mercury that a delivery from the bootlegger should suspend all work until the treasure had been unwrapped, fondled, and even tasted. A new Powell affects me in much the same fashion. I hang the equivalent of 'Gone Fishing' on my door, and tear at the wrapping with a connoisseur's anticipation and a schoolboy's greed. Philip Larkin, 'Mr Powell's Mural', Required Writing The word 'fan' derives from the nineteenth century and was widespread from the 1920s and 30s. Nowadays, in our fractured world, where many of us know a lot about increasingly isolated areas of knowledge, almost everyone aspires to some form of fandom. Some fans are of course more organised than others, and I guess it also depends on the nature of the object of interest. Barbara Pym, for example, inspires merchandise ranging from tea towels to hand-thrown ce...

David Lodge, in The Art of Fiction , discusses Nabokov's 'fancy prose'. ('You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.' - Lolita ) Philip Larkin, in Required Writing , speaks of Anthony Powell's style: A formal, slightly comic view of life requires a matching style: Mr Powell's is Comic Mandarin, a descendant of Polysyllabic Facetiousness. [...] it imparts a glaze to the action, as if one were not getting it first hand, an illusion most novelists strive to preserve. Anita Brookner has been described as mandarin, also Augustan, Jamesian, dandyish. 'Nobody else will ever write like Anita Brookner,' said  Michele Roberts  of The Rules of Engagement . I have looked at 'Brooknerese'  in a previous post . Brookner herself, however, was careful not to be presumptive: Interviewer: I would like to talk about your style, which has rightly been praised as exceptionally elegant, lucid, and original. You explain it somewhat in  Provi...