The Brooknerian

When Ford Madox Ford wrote his Fifth Queen trilogy in the 1900s the reputation of historical fiction was on a downward slope. The extreme popularity of Scott in the early part of the previous century had declined gradually but relentlessly. The twentieth century saw the genre consigned to the schoolroom or to those sections of bookshops where the covers are lurid and the often embossed. Then the second half of the century happened and the historical novel was again respectable. Examples won the fledgling Booker Prize. Novels grew in length, scope and depth. Some would no doubt posit Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall novels as the apotheosis. Novels are the product of their own historical contexts, and none more so than historical novels. Mantel's Tudor past is perhaps no more authentic than Ford's. Both cover similar grounds. It is all really a matter of taste. Do you favour Mantel's gritty hyper-realism or Ford and Scott's romance? Do you hate tushery and gadzookery, o...

You may have noticed I'm taking a break from Anita Brookner at the moment. Everything palls after a time, and of course there's nothing new. I remember the years when I read her year by year, the excitement of receiving those Jonathan Cape, later Viking, hardbacks. A Proustian vouchsafement is still mine whenever I hold, say, A Closed Eye , with its view of Lausanne, or A Private View , with its blue Ian McEwanish female silhouette. I get the very touch and taste of youth again. Where now? I'm reading Spenser's The Faerie Queene right now. ('The day is spent, and commeth drowsie night...') But I'm tempted perhaps to sink into middle Brookner sometime soon - A Private View, Incidents in the Rue Laugier ... What extraordinary novels they were and are. Almost unremarked at the time, except for the regulation polite or disparaging notices in the quality dailies. But no one seemed to recognise how truly odd they were, how strange and revolutionary the Brookne...

The character of Nigel, dignified and likeable at first, but given to psychobabble, gradually falls victim to a sort of novelistic passive aggression. The existence somewhere in his background of an analyst* is inferred by the narrator, indeed imagined in some detail, though never confirmed. For her part she's 'too proud, or too ashamed (they are the same thing) ever to have confided, to have confessed in any company' (ch. 14). Brookner herself was asked by at least one interviewer whether she'd undergone analysis. She hadn't. And she wasn't about to start. It would take too long. And she might doubt the intelligence of the interrogator. It's a breathtaking answer. But she was a devotee of Freud. Her novel Strangers has an epigraph by Freud, a rare honour in Brookner. One thinks of Herz too, in The Next Big Thing , talking to an uncomprehending GP of Freud's experience on the Acropolis, of having 'gone beyond the father' (ch. 7). Or one ...

References to the Austrian capital are scattered through Brookner's novels. The following is probably not a full list: Hotel du Lac : Edith Hope has Viennese ancestry. She goes with her English father to the Kunsthistorisches Museum to see 'a picture of men lying splayed in a cornfield under a hot sun'. This is a puzzle. It sounds like Bruegel's Harvesters (which isn't in Vienna, though the museum houses several of the artist's surviving pictures of the seasons). See an earlier post here . There's a Viennese background to that most Freudian of Brookners, A Family Romance , Toni Ferber hailing from (where else?) Berggasse. Later her granddaughter Jane visits the city, drops into Demel's, eats Sachertorte, finds it disappointing. Demel's is extant, but like many such establishments now a touristy Lacanian simulacrum of its probable former self. Getting inside looks to be no mean feat: one would have to elbow one's way through a crowd of snapping...

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...

Friendship sometimes demands less than full disclosure, and it may be more comfortable to abstain from an accountability which may leave one open to criticism. Leaving Home , Ch. 18 Olga Kenyon: ...Which qualities do you value most in a friend? Brookner: I think accountability, that's to say explaining actions with full knowledge of emotions and procedures. You get it in Russian novels: the complete confession. Accountability in friendship is the equivalent of love without strategy, and it is the  Grail . Women Writers Talk  (Lennard, 1989) If such characters persist through my novels that's because I don't know much about them, not because I know them too well. I write to find out what makes them tick. 1994  Independent  interview It's an easy mistake to make, especially with the novels written in the first person. But really Brookner must be given at least a little credit when she says her novels aren't about herself. Of course those first-perso...

...those who did not rely on their inner resources, as she had been obliged to do, were forever condemned to weep in other women's drawing-rooms... Incidents in the Rue Laugier , Ch. 13 There is often much to be said of, much to be learned from, even a single line. Maud's emotional continence, not to say her chilliness, is succinctly expressed. It is interesting that it is women, not men, who provide the venue for undignified prostration: Brookner is not, we may recall, a member of the sisterhood. And such outbreaks take place, Brookner implies, not in living-rooms or lounges, but in drawing-rooms: there is, as so often in English fiction, a class aspect to the thing. Varied attitudes and assumptions are thus constructed and communicated. Finally there is the line's mandarin structure or style, which gives it the force of a quotable maxim. Brookner's messages are always austere, but the elegance of her medium shores her against absolute ruin.

There is no virtue in confession, although it is said to be good for the soul. Incidents in the Rue Laugier , Ch. 15 Anita Brookner interviews (I know of seven, five of which are on the web) are remarkable affairs, and may sound confessional. But they're also cle ver performances, full of artifice. There's a degree of repetition between exchanges, as though over the years she were issuing and riffing on a set of prepared statements. One is reminded of Samuel Johnson's comments on the eighteenth-century familiar letter, a form that at first appears open and honest and artless but is in fact highly premeditated and contrived (see Johnson's 'Pope', The Lives of the Poets ). Brookner, however much she might value a simpler approach ('I shall try to change,' says Blanche at the end of A Misalliance . 'Try to live a little more carelessly. Artlessly.'), nevertheless maintains a very careful carapace, a defence against all comers. As she told  ...

From the terse to the lyrical, Anita Brookner’s opening lines are often memorable. A Start in Life (1981) Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature. With concision and aplomb Brookner sets out her stall. This is how to get yourself noticed. Brief Lives (1990) Julia died. I read it in The Times this morning. My French friend, Marie , never a Brookner fan, disliked Brief Lives , especially the opening; she objected to its bleakness and negativity. ‘Yes – and?’ I probably replied. It’s certainly a startling start to a novel, and if this almost gnomic line hasn’t found its way on to a T-shirt somewhere, then someone is missing a trick. Incidents in the Rue Laugier (1995) My mother read a lot, sighed a lot, and went to bed early. A beautiful, rhythmic sentence, with Proustian resonances – and that second comma is surely the mark of a stylist (Brookner, in one of her book reviews, praises an author’s use of such a comma). O...

Interviewer: So far all your novels have been the same length, around two hundred pages, with the same group of characters and more or less the same circumstances producing the same results. (Although  Family and Friends  has a bigger cast of characters.) Are you not afraid of being accused of writing to a formula, even though of your own creation? Brookner: I have been so accused! But the latest book,  The Misalliance , is much longer and has a broader canvas. It is quite different from the others... Paris Review  interview, 1987 We have spoken of Richardson's Clarissa , which comes in at around a million words. We have mentioned Dickens and Trollope, some of whose novels are more than three hundred thousand words long. Such vastness suits them. Shorter novels such as Great Expectations can seem too pacy, even rather rushed. A teacher from my university years,  Alison Light , in her studies of Interwar fiction, has talked of shell-shocked readers a...

Brookner tended to avoid conflict, not to say contact, with her literary peers, but Martin Amis expressed deep annoyance at her review of his novel Night Train . Brookner had written: It may be post-modem; it is certainly post-human. There are few facts that are without disclaimers, few acts that are unambiguous. To read it is to undergo a temporary brain dysfunction […] a narrative which sets out to celebrate the demotic but ends up so out of hand that it is experienced as an assault on the reader's good faith. Spectator , 26 September 1997 Brookner distrusted postmodernism ('Updike goes post-modern,' ( Spectator   27 February 1993) she commented uncertainly, in her review of Memories of the Ford Administration ). One hears less about postmodernism nowadays, but it was all the rage when I was young. And Brookner's postmodern novel? Surely Incidents in the Rue Laugier ? ...those few notations - ' Dames Blanches. La Gaillarderie. Place des Ternes. Sang. ...

The Paris we all know, or think we know, came into being with the arrival of the Métro, much admired by Proust, who never used it. This was followed a few years later by the telephone (Proust’s number was 29205). The Paris we can remember, or think we can remember, was the Paris of the 1950s and 1960s, when Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir held court at the Flore, and when a new novel by Simenon appeared regularly every few months.  These were the last of the glory days, when it was possible to feel like a provincial, newly arrived, and undergoing a longed-for transformation, much as Robb, armed with his map and his gift voucher must have felt at the start of his own apprenticeship. New Paris, the Paris of today, is part of Europe, and its concerns are global. The charms of discovery must yield to a different kind of loyalty, to the planet, to the environment. The true Parisian will, of course, shrug this off, and remain embedded in his quartier, will be on polite if not ...

He seemed to be writing it in a life parallel to the real life he lived with his wife ... Sometimes he felt himself to be more truly authentic when contemplating a shift in the fortunes of a fictional character than when talking to Tissy... Lewis Percy , Ch. 8 This was surely the stuff of fiction? A strong plot, unusual characters, a threatened outcome: who could ask for worthier diversion? And she was, after all, an observer. Visitors , Ch. 4 Now that the Brookner oeuvre is complete and we can view it as a whole, we begin to see new and interesting patterns in the carpet. Preceding posts reveal to me a minor theme she pursued during the middle part of her career. In Lewis, Lizzie, Jane and Maffy we see several kinds of young writer. In Dorothea May we see an old non-writer but also a woman living the same sort of life as her younger Brooknerland compatriots. The writing lives of Lewis (1989), Lizzie (1991), Jane (1993), Maffy (1995) and Dorothea (1997) are, one notes, n...

She was not aware of loneliness so much as of endeavour: her future career as a writer, of which there was as yet no sign, would, she thought, in time validate her entire existence. Until then she would adopt - had already adopted - a regime which would steel her against rejection and disappointment ... friends were a burden for which she had neither the time nor the inclination. Her own silence, her own solitude seemed to her entirely preferable. It was with relief that she entered the empty flat in the evenings; after eating her yoghourt and her apple she was free to read or to write in her diary ... She had a vision of a writer's life as clean, economical, controlled. The lack of a subject bothered her until she remembered that she did not need to think about this matter until she was forty. In the meantime she composed a list of aphorisms and quotations ... She trained herself to be cynical although she still missed her mother,of whom she thought with pain and terror. A Clos...

The rue Laugier, Paris, sometime in the late 1990s

There are problems in Brookner's work: her attitude towards narrative point of view, for example. Let's consider, for instance, focalisation, the angle of vision through which a story is focused. It – along with its derivative, focaliser – is a modern term; Henry James spoke of reflectors. Brookner tends to switch among three methods: the first-person narrator; the third person narrator with a single focaliser (i.e. when everything in the novel is filtered through that character's consciousness, with no access possible to the thoughts and impressions of other people); and, lastly, the third-person narrator with access to the thoughts and feelings of a range of (though not all) characters. An example of this last method is Fraud , in which each chapter is given over to a particular focaliser. The characters to whose impressions the reader has no recourse are, importantly, those bold predators with whom the author has no empathy, though perhaps a lot of sympathy: the volcani...

Brooknerians dream of France - of Paris in particular. Lewis Percy always longs to return. A whole life, for Maud in Incidents in the Rue Laugier , is predicated on a youthful episode in that unremarkable Parisian street (which I visited once - and it was adamantine, very Right Bank, giving little away). But the novels that concern themselves with more mittel -European themes and places are also to be considered. Julius Herz in The Next Big Thing , for example, remembers the Thirties in Germany. The horror that prompted his childhood translation to England remains all but undefined, even unspoken, so subtle is Brookner's technique. But a whole world is lamented. Herz recalls holidays in Baden-Baden, rides in a fiacre along the Lichtenthaler Allee, coffee at the Kurhaus. I vacationed there one summer. Ah, Mitteleuropa - so solid, so gracious! Mitteleuropa - which somehow survives a century of torment! One feels, there, very far from England and its brutality, its vulgarity. Br...