The Brooknerian

The much-loved Backlisted podcast ( here ) returns with a 'lockdown' episode that includes a lot of Anita Brookner talk. Prompted by discussion about  Hotel du Lac , never the most representative Brookner, the chat meanders pleasantly on to the potential for compiling an Anita Brookner 'Top Ten'. At a loose end myself, though this week at the chalkface entertaining the children of keyworkers, I considered the question myself. I'm sure there are similar such lists elsewhere on this blog - I forget, and I don't particularly want to consult them anyhow. Of course, Brookner - like Henry James, like Trollope, indeed like many prolific authors - passed through phases. Brookner's novels, I contend, fall into three, neatly divided by the decades she wrote in: the raw, vital 80s; the settled magisterial 90s; the bleak, experimental 2000s. A Brookner novel from the 80s seems very different from any of her final works - just as 'James I', 'James II' ...

The Backlisted Brookner team: John Mitchinson, Lucy Scholes, Andy Miller and Una McCormack. On the bench beside Andy, under the Look at Me paperback, is, I think, a copy  of John Haffenden's excellent  Novelists in Interview . For much of my life as an Anita Brookner fan I never met or had contact with anyone who'd read her, let alone liked her as devotedly as I did. In the broadcast media there was a similar dearth. Over the years, while she was publishing, Anita Brookner was occasionally mentioned on BBC radio arts review programmes,  Front Row  and  Kaleidoscope  and the like, but the tone was often disappointingly slighting. It's only in this age of the Internet that I've become properly aware of other readers, other fans, and it was therefore with enormous pleasure that I listened today to the  Brookner-themed Backlisted podcast . An exemplary programme, packed with insight and not a few anecdotes. I'd never heard the one about t...