The Brooknerian

The skill with which John Banville deploys Jamesian vocabulary and syntax in his recent James-inspired novel Mrs Osmond  (2017) is constantly stimulating and often brings a smile to the grateful reader's lips. It is the principle pleasure of the book. I'm interested by Banville's use of the word 'vastation', meaning spiritual emptying. Has he been reading Brookner? Brookner uses the word in her novel Visitors (1997) .  A character lies sunk in an armchair, as though subject to a 'Jamesian vastation'. In a review in 2005 of Hilary Mantel's Beyond Black , Banville refers to Mantel experiencing 'by her own account' a Jamesian vastation at the age of seven. I cannot date Mantel's account. But Henry James doesn't use the word (though in Notes of a Son and Brother we read of the author being 'vastated of my natural vigour'). ('Vastation' in fact derives from the work of Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish mystic to whose do...

Not to Disturb by Muriel Spark A very short novel, told almost entirely in dialogue, Not to Disturb (1971) has much in common with The Abbess of Crewe (1974) (see here ). Both have preposterous plots, a devious central character, and themes of surveillance and control. In Not to Disturb , Lister is the butler of a grand Swiss establishment. Relations among his employers are such that a murder or murders are imminently expected. The servants - theirs is the only view we get - must make future plans, which include deals with the newspapers and unlikely marriages. Structured in five chapters over the course of a night, the novel is an exercise in form, with debts to the Elizabethan dramatists as well as to moderns like Ivy Compton-Burnett and Henry Green. I didn't much like it. Mrs Osmond by John Banville A 'niche' read, this, if ever there was one. Mrs Osmond, formerly Isabel Archer, has left Italy to attend the funeral of Ralph Touchett. As she wanders a midsummer ...

I have been reading John Banville's The Untouchable , which was inspired by the life of Anthony Blunt. I was hopeful of finding in its pages a character based on Brookner. None is detectable. She herself  reviewed the novel , maintaining as ever an obliquity, not to say an opaqueness, in her references to her former boss. I have heard it said she was the only one of his colleagues who didn't realise he was gay. This was advanced as proof of her maidenly unworldliness. It was surely anything but - for was there ever more of a worldling than Anita Brookner? It was evidence, rather, either of an admirable discretion or of a respectful incuriosity. One would hope for more of her kind in this intrusive, over-sharing age.