The Brooknerian

What are we to make of chapters 10 and 11? The story is over and Brookner's vainly trying to pad things out? Edward visits his shop in London, and a new character, Max Kroll, appears: Mittel -european, his accent both sibilant and cockney, a prototype for Julius Herz in The Next Big Thing or Max Gruber in Falling Slowly ? Then the rather studied detail about the books: Elizabeth Bowen, Rosamond Lehmann (for more, see here  and here ). Then in the next chapter we find ourselves in Eastbourne at the heart of Edward's middle-class family, a world away from Dijon and the rue Laugier. Why? Why all this detail, all this plot? I suggest it's about absence rather than presence: the extended absence of Tyler, a representation of the disappearance he has effected from lives for whom he is the only emotional capital: not just Maud's, but Edward's too.

Brookner on James is always fascinating and often provoking, not least in her 1987 review of Leon Edel's classic biography of the writer ( Spectator , 1 August 1987 here ). Henry James crops up more than once in Brookner's novels. In Falling Slowly (1998), for example: She marvelled that Henry James knew so much about women and children, yet remained a bachelor, and by all accounts a man of the greatest integrity. She liked that about him, that and his reputation for modesty. He had deferred to worldly friends, as if he were not more worldly than any of them. (Ch. 16) I agree with the last bit, but take issue with the rest. Integrity, yes - but modesty is perhaps a step too far. Similarly in her Edel review her reading goes askew. Henry James: 'essentially timid, prudent, virginal, secret and pure'?! She seems at pains to absolve him of any accusation of impropriety; she seems to want to limit What Henry Knew: [E]ven when using libidinal language, as he does in th...

That world no longer existed, or if it did would have undergone a change... Anita Brookner, The Next Big Thing , ch. 6 With almost Nabokovian ardour Brookner conjures Herz's past, that ride down the Lichtenthalerallee in Baden-Baden, coffee in the Kurhaus gardens. A remarkably similar scene occurs in Falling Slowly , suggesting perhaps an autobiographical origin. Baden-Baden is indeed different now: a resort for the super-rich, no longer for the merely bourgeois. The bourgeois past, Herz finds, is to be found only in his reading: in Thomas Mann's short stories or in  Buddenbrooks . Elsewhere in The Next Big Thing the modern world intrudes. Mobile phones, email. Globalisation. People trafficking? The seamstresses who work in a neighbouring flat at the start of the novel appear to be illegal immigrants. Their employer, Mrs Beddington, admits as much to Herz. He notices the girls' absence during the summer: perhaps they've gone home ('to homes he had difficult...

What's your favourite Brookner line? Something positively freighted with many things Brooknerian. Something perhaps only Anita Brookner could have written. Look at Me A novel replete with quotability. I'm going to choose one of the most extreme, almost self-parodic lines, from the truly chilling chapter 11: Frances's desolate trek through a hostile nighttime London: This must be the most terrible hour, the hour when people die in hospitals. (Larkinian too. Think 'Ambulances' or 'The Building' - each room farther from the last and harder to return from.) Falling Slowly Miriam is imagining the thoughts of her contemporaries, those with lives more conventional than her own. You are not one of us, she imagines them thinking. You do not shop for cornflakes, fish fingers, baked beans. You will not grow fat. You do not take family holidays, the car loaded with junk. You only look astonishingly young, but you must be getting on. Too late for you, then. Y...

Mrs Marsh. Let's think for a moment about that name. To refer to a character so formally, and a character to whose inner life the reader is given full access, is surely unusual and even subversive. It's determinedly old-fashioned. Its male equivalent is the simple surname, as in the cases of Bland in A Private View or Sturgis in Strangers . Mrs Marsh   has more than a little in common with Mrs May in Visitors : similar names, both widows, both fond of the painter Turner. Mrs May is the central consciousness in that later novel, and at the time critics reacted with some consternation to a character whom they were invited to know so well and yet whose authorial denomination seemed so antique, so distancing. But none of this is about propriety but about how such characters think of themselves: some people think of themselves in one way, others in another - a point Brookner makes about Miriam at the start of Falling Slowly: On her way to the London Library, Mrs Eldon, who stil...

The second of my interview discoveries, 'Great Expectations', is from the Observer on 27 March 1983, marking the publication of Brookner's Look at Me . The interview was conducted by Lucy Hughes-Hallett, who would continue an interest in Brookner's works. Here she is on Brookner's 1998 novel Falling Slowly : She is one of a handful of living writers who can turn a sentence so graceful that to read it is a lascivious pleasure, and she can string those sentences together to make paragraphs - whole chapters even - that unfurl surely and musically until they climax, or fall away into silence with a superbly exact authority to which it is delicious to submit. There is a constant delightful tension between the austerity of her message and the voluptuousness of her medium. Brookner interviews have ritualistic tendencies, and Hughes-Hallett's certainly covers the usual ground: 'I regard myself as being completely invisible'; how the young Anita learnt false l...

I chose out of the way places, out of season: almost any town in France or Germany, however devoid of scenic interest, provided the sort of ruminative space which I seemed to require. Anita Brookner,  A Family Romance , ch. 8 1. To Düsseldorf: out of the way, though in season. To the Kunstpalast, in rain, under a heavy sky. Some Cranachs, older and younger, some Rubens, one or two Caspar David Friedrichs, some very engaging nineteenth-century history paintings, some Kirchners. But altogether the collection seemed slightly at a low ebb. Unprepossessing building: red-brick, monumental, 1930s: 'degenerate art' was exhibited here once, for purposes of ridicule. 2. Chapter 40 of  David Copperfield . Mr Peggotty - a wanderer in search of Little Em'ly - speaks of his journey through France and into Italy. He returns via Switzerland, responding to a tip-off. As with other pre-aviation era narratives, one is aware here of the great distances involved, the sense of the Alps...

I had not been walking long, when I turned a corner and met her. I tingle again from head to foot as my recollection turns that corner, and my pen shakes in my hand. David Copperfield , ch. 26 A dread falls on me here. A cloud is lowering on the distant town, towards which I retraced my solitary steps. I fear to approach it. I cannot bear to think of what did come, upon that memorable night; of what must come again, if I go on. Ch. 32 Dickens is clear. David writes David Copperfield at some distant point in the story's future - ostensibly the contemporary reader's present. He recollects the events of his life - though not quite always in tranquillity. At times, as above, we see him at his desk, affected in the here and now by the events of long ago. Anita Brookner's handling of I-voice narration is, in places, a little less certain. Let's consider the closing pages of Look at Me, where Brookner, like Dickens, 'breaks frame': After that la...

Traditional or progressive? Brookner is commonly described as the former. A study of Brookner's endings can be instructive in this regard. A number of her novels begin in a notional present and then move into the past. By the end the narrative has returned to the beginning. The ending isn't perhaps in a lot of doubt, though there may be shocks and surprises along the way. Falling Slowly is an example of this kind of novel. Others - A Private View , for example - are presented more chronologically. George Bland has his adventure, and at the end at least a version of the status quo is restored. At the sentence level, several of the novels attempt a moment of epiphany (e.g. Fraud ), often delivering a not always persuasive, or earned, sense of hope ( Leaving Home  ends like this). What we don't find, except possibly in Incidents in the Rue Laugier , is ( Middlemarch -style) a rundown of the Nachgeschichte , details of the various characters' ultimate fates. Aspe...

She is one of a handful of living writers who can turn a sentence so graceful that to read it is a lascivious pleasure, and she can string those sentences together to make paragraphs - whole chapters even - that unfurl surely and musically until they climax, or fall away into silence with a superbly exact authority to which it is delicious to submit. There is a constant delightful tension between the austerity of her message and the voluptuousness of her medium. Lucy Hughes-Hallett on Falling Slowly, Sunday Times (1998) Lucy Hughes-Hallett, the Brooknerian salutes you.

Brookner's, like Trollope's, is a conservative imagination. 'George must decide how much - or how little - he can do to transform the status quo ,' reads the blurb to my edition of  A Private View . Many a Brooknerian strives to break free, only to see the old dispensation restored. Not that Brookner doesn't provide final moments of epiphany, largely unearned. We might cite the closing lines of Fraud or what happens in the last sentence of Lewis Percy . Such endings give her work a novelistic shape, though Brookner knows their limitations: There are moments when you feel free, moments when you have energy, moments when you have hope, but you can't rely on any of these things to see you through. (Haffenden interview, 1985) The restoration of the status quo is achieved most memorably in the moments of shock and revelation that end, say, Providence or Undue Influence . The conclusion to Hotel du Lac is of another order. [Haffenden:] [Edith] wins her freedom ...

[Max] had even bought a loose-leaf notebook at Ryman's, but then it occurred to him that what the world expected was a fully fledged biography, with details of the illustrious persons he had known, whereas he desired to recall sweet small incidents, family dignity, unassuming love. No publisher would be interested in such a thing; refugees' stories were all too common. The notebook was empty, although he had thought of a title: The Statue of Beethoven.  Falling Slowly , Ch. 10 My mind returns to Mitteleuropa . I have a forthcoming holiday, between Christmas and Silvester, not to Baden-Baden this time but Frankfurt and Cologne, and shall be offline for the while, reliant instead on my trusty Moleskine. Max in Falling Slowly seems at first glance a forerunner of Julius Herz, not least because he shares an identical memory. But Max Gruber is more of a showman, potent and mercurial, somewhat akin to the Ostrovski figure in the latter novel. Nevertheless the following two ex...