The Brooknerian

In the absence of more reliable signposts one seeks parallels in literature. In the time ahead, when every day, for many, will seem like Christmas Day, one thinks of Anna Durrant in Anita Brookner's Fraud (1992), the lonely walk Anna takes across a deserted, Pompeii-still London in windless air under a low grey sky. Later in the novel another character, the elderly Mrs Marsh, nurses her son Nick through a bout of the flu. His convalescence is powerfully described, the reduction in his routine, his devotion to the predictable rhythms of the Radio 4 schedule. A recent New Yorker piece ( here ) considered episodes of social distancing in Victorian novels: Bleak House, Jane Eyre . Elsewhere in Brookner there are more than several chapters on illness and recovery. One recalls the end of Look at Me (1983), Frances cared for like a child after her traumatic night walk; or the horribly extended migraine that afflicts the protagonist in A Misalliance (1986) and the blessed ministrat...

...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...

Shortly after Anita Brookner's death, Penguin reissued most of her novels with new covers. Most, but not all. Two novels from the 1980s, A Friend from England and A Misalliance , were missing, but they had been out of print for some decades. I don't know why exactly - except that in an interview in the 2000s Brookner described her early novels as 'crap', and also that she said disparaging things at least about A Misalliance at the time of its publication. But from the 2016 reissue there were several surprising absences. Where was Leaving Home , or Visitors ? Visitors (1997), in particular, has always been considered very highly. 'Almost certainly a masterpiece' - as Brookner once said of another author's novel. I notice similar things happening to the likes of Kingsley Amis. His novels, following a period of neglect after his death in the 1990s, have been reissued under the Vintage label: period classics. But not everything is there. I don't find ...

'No books!' I exclaimed. 'How do you contrive to live here without them? If I may take the liberty to inquire - Though provided with a large library, I'm frequently very dull at the Grange - take my books away, and I should be desperate!' The other day I found myself publicly asked (the circumstances needn't concern us) what I was currently reading. Caught off guard, I replied honestly, adding 'I'm afraid' or 'believe it or not'. That's what you do with Wuthering Heights : you get all embarrassed, all apologetic. It's one of those books. One of those books everyone knows about, but no one actually reads? I read it in my teens and never felt any need to revisit what was, I recalled, a baffling experience of time shifts, multiple narrators, narratives within narratives, and too many characters with similar or identical names. But I've a fondness for those 1990s World's Classics covers. I kind of collect them. So I bought ...

Observer : First, what is The Bay of Angels about? Brookner: It is about the sort of misfortune that can come upon you without warning, which finds you totally bereft trying to get yourself out of it. Obs : Was there a particular moment of inspiration ? AB: Well, the curious thing is that I didn't intend to write it. I didn't know I was going to write it, so it came upon me quite suddenly and quite easily and I enjoyed writing it. I'm sorry if it's very bleak. I'm sorry if it's mournful. I had a good time, that's all I can say about it.  2001 Observer interview The Bay of Angels  (2001) could easily walk away with the award for the bleakest Brookner ever. It terrifies the reader early on with a condensation of various Look at Me -style plots (see also a previous post) . The main plot hasn't got going, and already we have things like: But I also knew what it was to be unconsoled, to go through days which were somehow not on record becau...

One comes back to nineteenth-century novels again and again, largely because of the sheer beauty of the reasoning: happiness at last, achieved through the exercise of faithfulness and right thinking. That this was still possible if one were a lesser, even a fallen being, I doubted; nevertheless it continued to make a forceful impression. And there was always a marriage, seen as the right true end, and this I did not doubt. The fragmentation of present-day society had meant a loss of hope, so that those who harboured traditional leanings were largely disappointed. The Rules of Engagement , Ch. 15 Followers of this blog will recall that I recently read Villette . I had forgotten that Elizabeth in The Rules of Engagement does the same. Elizabeth is one of Brookner's most disenchanted, disaffected heroines, bearing comparison with Rachel in A Friend from England . Yet Elizabeth balks at Lucy Snowe, whose isolation and periods of debility she might have sympathised with, and which...

Comparisons have a bad rep. Reading Villette , I'm reminded of an early review of Look at Me : 'a novel sufficiently distinguished to make you blink twice at "Brookner". Blinked at once, it might be "Bronte".' Other early comparisons included Muriel Spark, Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton and of course Jane Austen - whom Brookner excoriates on more than one occasion. Comparisons with male novelists - Henry James, especially - come a little later. Later still - into the new century - we see references to the great Europeans. '[Brookner's] characters, reflective, displaced and intransigent, are more like those of Camus than of any contemporary British novelist. Her style has a similar purity. Increasingly, Brookner reveals herself as a European novelist, and a major one,' wrote Helen Dunmore of The Bay of Angels (2001), a judgement she repeated in her 2010 Introduction to Latecomers ( Link ): 'Anita Brookner is...

I have been reading Villette , which puts me in mind of A Family Romance . Dolly, the aunt - squat, European - lives in Brussels at the start: Jane Manning remembers a discordant childhood visit to the rue de la Loi. She remembers the menacing arch of the Cinquantenaire, which seemed to mark the edge of the known universe. She remembers thinking there was not another child in the whole of the city. I have stayed in Brussels many times, and one sees Brooknerians there, or their European versions. But I have never seen the Cinquantenaire. I once gave A Family Romance to a girlfriend. It was an ill-judged gift. It is one of the intensest, most Brooknerian Brookners, depicting a clash of cultures between English Jane and European Dolly. (And as ever, whose side is Brookner on?) This novel was, as I say, unappreciated by my girlfriend, who preferred John Grisham. But thereby perhaps I found out what I needed to know. She was not a Brooknerian.