The Brooknerian

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...

Silence, exile, and cunning, James Joyce's desiderata for an artist's life, seemed to have been discovered by Heather with the rapidity and the inevitability of one who led a charmed existence. A Friend from England , ch. 8 The famous Joyce quote, from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , serves Brookner's purpose here, at least to an extent (more relevantly we might recall Jane in A Family Romance , exiling herself to Dijon and 'stealthily' beginning to write); but it is still surprising to see such an unBrooknerian writer being recruited on to Brookner's team.