The Brooknerian

Aurora Floyd is an heiress, handsome and rich, with a native cleverness. A year of her life is mysteriously missing, but this is 1860s sensation fiction and the seasoned reader will spot the clues. When she marries a bluff young landowner all seems set fair, till a face from her past appears and the secrecy and double-dealing run out of control. Written hot on the heels of M. E. Braddon's other famous bigamy novel, Lady Audley's Secret , Aurora Floyd is a fast, racy, slangy read. Its atmospherics are notably creepy; Braddon, like Wilkie Collins, is a very visual writer. The novel builds to a climax set in high summer: Braddon is brilliant at night scenes. She owes debts to Dickens too in her fondness for low eccentrics and detailed lists. The higher-class scenes feel a little like Trollope. But of course Trollope also sometimes sounds a little like Braddon, or at least he does in The Eustace Diamonds , his own attempt at the sensation genre. Except that Trollope is too honest, ...

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...

What a joy is this passage from Trollope's The Vicar of Bullhampton. I love the sideswipe at Dickens, and the bit about Wycherley's plays is a sophisticated treat. As to Miss Marrable herself nobody could doubt that she was a lady; she looked it in every inch. There were not, indeed, many inches of her, for she was one of the smallest, daintiest, little old women that ever were seen. But now, at seventy, she was very pretty, quite a woman to look at with pleasure. Her feet and hands were exquisitely made, and she was very proud of them. She wore her own grey hair of which she showed very little, but that little was always exquisitely nice. Her caps were the perfection of caps. Her green eyes were bright and sharp, and seemed to say that she knew very well how to take care of herself. Her mouth, and nose, and chin, were all well-formed, small, shapely, and concise, not straggling about her face as do the mouths, noses, and chins of some old ladies—ay, and of some young ladies ...

A measure of the addictiveness of an author is the quantity of legendary material that surrounds her. Dickens does not inspire the Dickensian life, nor Trollope the Trollopian. One doesn't long to be subject to a Bildungsroman , living in a world where everyone has a funny name*; nor to be a provincial clergyman or a British parliamentarian. But one follows yearningly the course set out by Brookner, odd and unique as it may prove. She is uncompromising: this is the life, and it is the only life to live. To Germany again, for she perversely visited small towns and cities in France and Germany, the more obscure the better. To Karlsruhe, to the Staatliche Kunsthalle, where I saw a Hans Baldung Grien exhibition... ...along with favourites from the permanent collection: this Temptation of St Anthony by Joos van Craesbeeck... ...and this Jan Sanders van Hemessen, Loose Living : The St Anthony , one of the most arresting paintings, is hidden away and uncelebrated. You ca...

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 ...

The novel of sensation, that mid-Victorian phenomenon typified in the novels of Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Mrs Henry Wood and, to an extent, Dickens ( Great Expectations ) and Trollope ( The Eustace Diamonds ), grew out of the earlier success of the Gothic novel, though now the terror and disruption are domesticated, rooted in the modern world of the 1860s: railways, the telegraph, suburbs, the anxious middle classes and the rising lower orders. East Lynne , Wood's breathless blockbuster of 1860, tells a story of murder, jealousy and unwise alliances. There are aristocrats, but they're on the way out. Like Collins, Ellen Wood knows better the grimy world of the middle classes, of anonymous uncertain suburbia. The novel is fast, slangy, sloppy, trashy - quintessentially 'sensational'. Anita Brookner, a regular reviewer in the highbrow journals, once in a way was given a little something to tickle her fancy. Can we believe she was asked to write about ...

…remembering that when FIELDING described Newgate, the prison immediately ceased to exist; that when SMOLLETT took Roderick Random to Bath, that city instantly sank into the earth ; that when SCOTT exercised his genius on Whitefriars, it incontinently glided into the Thames ; that an ancient place called Windsor was entirely destroyed in the reign of Queen Elizabeth by two Merry Wives of that town, acting under the direction of a person of the name of SHAKESPEARE; and that MR POPE, after having at a great expense completed his grotto at Twickenham, incautiously reduced it to ashes by writing a poem upon it… Preface (1850) to Oliver Twist My father had left a small collection of books in a little room upstairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined my own) and which nobody else in our house ever troubled. From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a gl...

'Thank Heaven upon your knees, dear lady,' cried the girl, 'that you had friends to care for and keep you in your childhood, and that you were never in the midst of cold and hunger, and riot and drunkenness, and - and something worse than all - as I have been from my cradle; I may use the word, for the alley and the gutter were mine, as they will be my deathbed.' Further to the previous post: Dickens comes to some kind of specificity late in Oliver Twist in Nancy's conversation with Rose, though the confession is coded. It is only outside the text, in his introduction to the third edition of the novel, speaking perhaps in a different voice, that Dickens throws caution to the wind: ...Sikes is a thief, and Fagin a receiver of stolen goods ... the boys are pick-pockets, and the girl is a prostitute. But that was in 1841. Fast-forward a few Victorian decades to the edition of 1867, and we find those lines omitted from Dickens's intro. It would be left to the ...

'Bill Sikes and the prostitute Nancy', reads the blurb of the current Penguin edition of Oliver Twist , promising spice that isn't quite warranted. Dickens's text is altogether less specific - indeed not specific at all. The most we hear is that Nancy has been groomed by Fagin into a life of thieving, like the Artful Dodger, from a young age. And George Cruikshank's famous illustrations present her as a somewhat homely figure, certainly older than she is suggested to be in the novel. David Lodge has marvelled at Dickens's capacity to avoid in his writings any mention of the sexual life; and the question of Dickens's own illicit experiences in London and elsewhere have puzzled biographers, though Claire Tomalin's book about Nelly Ternan dredges up a letter to a friend, a letter in which Dickens speaks of 'conveniences of all kinds at Margate (do you take me?) And I know where they live'.

The serial publications of Dickens's very early novels  The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist overlapped, confounding some readers. The easy geniality of the former was at odds with the harshness and cynicism of the latter much shorter, less expansive novel. 'It's all among Workhouses, and Coffin Makers, and Pickpockets ... I don't like those things; I wish to avoid them,' commented Lord Melbourne, the prime minister. I haven't read Pickwick for some years, but I remember a happy time. A heavenly Christmas episode stays in my mind. I marked it down as a reread for future times of strife; I've had need of it since, but somehow haven't returned. Oliver Twist is indeed rather relentlessly bleak and dispiriting - and therefore, perhaps, unDickensian - but one seems to reach an interlude at the beginning of the second Book, when Mr Bumble visits the appalling Mrs Corney, the workhouse matron. The tone shifts throughout the scene, starting with Bumbl...

The Picture of Dorian Gray Some people never write negative reviews. It is their policy. They tactically ignore the offending book, or damn it with faint praise, or try to like it, or... There's probably an epigram in there somewhere. Oscar Wilde would have turned a pretty phrase, as he does tirelessly and tiresomely in The Picture of Dorian Gray . Lord Henry shrugged his shoulders. “My dear fellow, mediæval art is charming, but mediæval emotions are out of date. One can use them in fiction, of course. But then the only things that one can use in fiction are the things that one has ceased to use in fact. Believe me, no civilised man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilised man ever knows what a pleasure is.” (Ch. 6) Ignore the rhetorical dazzle - of specious value at the best of times - and consider the meaning, which is where Wilde's epigrams come a cropper. Their meanings are either facile or confused. But he keeps on trying. More, he thinks, means more. More chance...

Remainer? Brexiter? Here's a fun if rather silly way of beguiling the time. Henry James? Remainer. Dickens? George Eliot? Remainers. Thackeray? Brexiter. Trollope? Not sure about him. Sir Walter Scott? The knee-jerk response would be to say: High Tory, therefore Brexiter. But many such are Remainers. Scott exalted - indeed, exulted in - the notion of a United Kingdom. He championed the Glorious Revolution and the Hanoverian settlement. He cherished above all else the status quo that had been achieved, and was at pains to show how it might be, and had been, threatened. I confess my knowledge of Scottish history is sketchy. Before reading Old Mortality (1816) I had no idea the English Civil War in effect continued in Scotland into the 1670s and 80s. I didn't know about the Covenanters and the Killing Time. It was all new to me, and I was glad to be taught. Scott is brilliant at depicting periods of conflict and divided loyalties. Henry Morton, the son of a Civil War pa...

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 ...

Read Trollope . For decent feelings, she said. In her own novels she references  He Knew He Was Right and Orley Farm . I'm not keen on either. I love the later works, not all of which are the gloomy old things of repute. I think the likes of Ayala's Angel are among my favourite novels of any writer. Read Roth and Updike . And the rest of the great American warhorses. Brookner always made a thing of her devotion to these most unBrooknerian writers. She was putting it on a bit, no doubt; but she made a good case. Read Wharton . Brookner made a case for Wharton too. But I'm not sure she was right. She said she thought of herself as much more like Wharton than James. Again, I don't think she was right. Read Sebald . She valued Sebald's sudden emergence, fully formed, on to the literary scene. She liked especially his evocation of old-style life and feelings. For much the same reason, read Mann . The bourgeois past, European angst - and Switzerland. Read Stendha...

No wonder A Misalliance , when it was praised, as it was in the US, was called Jamesian. As the child Elinor is introduced in chapter 3 we get a flurry of literary vibrations: not just of James's Maisie but also, in her name, of Jane Austen, and in a mention of foundlings, of Tom Jones and Dickens's Esther Summerson. Blanche finds herself thinking with 'something like a creator's imagination'. One remembers James again, The Sacred Fount , and 'the joy of determining, almost of creating results'. It's a heady brew, and all the while there's the art: those nymphs in the Italian Rooms of the National Gallery, mocking Blanche's progress. Tiepolo, An Allegory of Venus with Time

Where was Anita Brookner during the Paris événements of May 1968? Evidently not in Paris, to judge from her review of Mavis Gallant's Paris Notebooks ( Observer , 10 January 1988). (Brookner was probably in Cambridge, working out her year as Slade Professor.) Brookner knew about revolutions - the French kind in particular - and was in no doubt that this was one. But was it, in Wordsworth's words, 'very heaven'? Probably not, but it makes for 'excellent reading'. And so too does the Brookner account, even if not firsthand, of that strange Parisian moment from fifty years ago: Certain scenes were so surreal that they seem to have been enacted from 'A Tale of Two Cities', such as the incident in Les Halles when truckdrivers, wading through crates of overturned cherries, fought with manifestants , then gave up and pressed the fruit to their mouths, chins running with juice, to be joined by the whores of the district: Dickens shading into Zola. Most ...

'I never thought he would marry, like the others,' thinks Sofka of her son Alfred in chapter 9 of  Family and Friends . 'I thought he had passed the age of danger.' It's a markedly literary novel, in the sense of its allusiveness to other works. The set-piece scene in Wren House with Dolly (a soon-to-be self-allusive choice of name for Anita Brookner) and the scrambled eggs suggests several such rural house-parties in English literature. Howards End , perhaps? L. P. Hartley? There is, additionally, specifically a reference to Dickens. Brookner disdained comparisons with Jane Austen. But doesn't the quote above recall a line from the opening of Persuasion -  Elizabeth Elliot hoping to be propositioned by a baronet within a twelvemonth, recognising as she does her approach to 'the years of danger'?

Reviewing with disfavour a book about fathers and daughters ( Fathers: Reflections by Daughters , ed. Ursula Owen, London Review of Books , 22 December 1983), Brookner is moved heavy-heartedly to offer her own report from the front: My father, who has been dead for some years, was a man for whom I felt none of the standard daughterly emotions, either ancient or modern. An exile, modest, diffident, as honest as a child in a world of adult considerations, he seemed to me to compare unfavourably with the capricious, handsome, successful men of my mother’s family. These uncles, as tirelessly expansive as he was reticent, could not bother with a man whose only comment on his translated life was that he missed the smell of pine forests. It seemed to me that he was completely unhappy. This unhappiness did not recommend itself to me, for his vision of the world appeared unlovely when set beside the exciting games of favour, of pleasure, of cynical appraisal, to which the men of my mother’s f...

The 'great flood-gates of the wonder-world' are swung open: the reader is 'world-wandering' like the crew of the Pequod through the 'lashed sea's landlessness': 'How I snuffed that Tartar air! - how I spurned that turnpike earth!' I do not read only Anita Brookner. I like to have, in the background, a monumental, old, preferably nineteenth-century novel on the go. This has long been my habit. I don't think any of us would really cope if we were actually transported back to that long-lost time, but I like to think some of us would know some of the ropes. Moby-Dick, or The Whale , which I'm about a third of the way through, is a departure for me. It reads like Dickens, Joyce and Shakespeare. It's a deeply strange and addictive book. It's also very straightforward, with, as Martin Amis says in his recent essay collection, an enormous amount of padding. It's highly literary ('I have swam [ sic ] through libraries and sailed th...

Some final comments on Brookner's Fraud : It's a novel about care and caring. This struck me only towards the end. Anna cares for her mother. Mrs Marsh is wary lest her own daughter become her carer (ch. 15). Even the predatory Vickie has 'a child's right to care and constant attention' (ch. 16). The novel's conclusion is markedly hard, cold, less than compassionate. Was Anna, in caring for her mother, truly a victim of fraud? I'm unconvinced by Anna in her final iteration. How long will she remain so blithe, so uncaring? Where is she now? Fraud is also a novel about food. It brings together themes from previous novels, and advances them: Anna is all but anorexic. The set-piece scene in chapter 16 - the Hallidays' dinner party - compares with the restaurant episode at the end of Look at Me . There's terrible food - a terrine, cold and slippery as ice cream - and much horrifying conversation. There may not be a revelation, but the scene is neverthe...