The Brooknerian

...an art, if not of actual improvisation, then of rapid execution, of kaleidoscopically swift movement across a mental landscape of remembered physical reality, imagined characters and events and literary texts, quotations and narrative figures both actual and postulated. Tony Inglis, Introduction to Scott's The Heart of Mid-Lothian , Penguin, 1994 Who cannot fail to be seduced by such a depiction? It's the dreamlike vividness of Scott that fills my imagination as I read further and deeper into his world. And the relationship with literature. When literature is one of the most important things in your life, you can't help but call Scott a kindred spirit. And it's the three-dimensional quality he conjures in your mind - like Dickens, but less ordered, more reckless than Dickens. Things, you feel, might go absolutely anywhere. Or rather, perhaps, the four -dimensional - for Scott is all about time. I'm reminded of Virginia Woolf's peerless comment on Th...

Three years at Oxford and nearly five in Paris should have alerted me to the notion of courtly love, but I rather think that even if I had been acquainted with it, had grown up believing in minstrels and troubadours, I should not have recognised my own behaviour, which had more in common with the Middle Ages, even the Dark Ages, than with the twentieth century. Altered States , ch. 5 I quote this passage largely as an excuse to share one of my favourite paintings. I saw it again in Berlin recently. It is one of Moritz von Schwind's 'picture novellas': The Rose, or the Artist's Journey (1846-7). 'The hero', wrote the painter, 'is the last musician, a man of lofty ideas' and yet 'a ruined genius'. My guide to the Alte Nationalgalerie reads: The viewer can guess what longing will be awakened by the dropped rose. Disillusion was a central theme in Schwind's work.

Latecomers (1988), Ch. 13: It was dusk when he reached Berlin,and a huge dark blue sky, moonless and starless, stretched over the curiously silent city. He realised that he was unaccustomed to these quiet wide streets, these blank-faced apartment houses with their austere windows, this isolation of a landlocked place far from the winds of the sea and the subtle odours of grass and river water ... His taxi took him efficiently to the Kurfürstendamm, where the sky was momentarily obliterated by city lights, high buildings bearing advertisement signs like heraldic devices or the badges of ancient guilds, the outline of a ruined church which reminded him of a rotten tooth, and cautious tables outside cafes at which nobody sat. At the Kempinski the welcome was efficient, smiling, deft, but lacked, he thought, effusiveness. ... Dahlem was much more like what he expected to remember, a suburb of silent villas painted yellow, with pitched roofs and green shutters. The museum, like a gia...

Brookner rated Latecomers highly. It, rather than Hotel du Lac ,  she said in interview , should have won the Booker. Latecomers is for sure a confident book, and it has an 'important' Booker-pleasing theme. But I find it, along with Lewis Percy , published a year later, a little  over -confident: Olympian, indulgent. There is less sense in these books of Brookner's affinity or kinship with the lives she so omnisciently appraises. There is some dilution too, some sense of a diffuse focus. There are too many characters, too much multi-plottedness. But Fibich's realisation towards the end of Latecomers , that he wishes he had stayed with his mother rather than getting on the Kindertransport , is finely handled and powerfully affecting: 'I should have gone back,' whispered Fibich. 'I should not have left. I should have got off the train.' (Ch. 14) But it is Fibich's return visit to Berlin in Chapter 13 that interests me currently. I've been t...