The Brooknerian

I had a James wobble not so long ago. James's last, unfinished novel,  The Ivory Tower , in a nice NYRB edition, had been sitting on my shelves for some years, and at last I gave it a try. The first couple of chapters were OK, but then James started introducing characters willy-nilly, and when I'd read a dozen or so pages thinking 'Gussy' was a man, only to find she wasn't, I decided life was too short for what Martin Amis once called the arctic labyrinth of late James. I don't elsewhere concur with Amis's views on James, but he seems to nail it when it comes to The Ivory Tower . And so? Give up? No! I chose The Spoils of Poynton , an old favourite - and it had only grown richer and more elegant and delightful. Published in 1897, it's a transitional novel, cementing the 'late style' and 'scenic method' that characterise James's last major phase. Mrs Gereth, a recent widow, must leave Poynton, her home for more than twenty years ...

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. ...

Observer : Where do you think your ideas come from? Anita Brookner: I wish I knew. I'd tap into them straight away. I think it's mostly dreams and memories, isn't it, as with all novelists? […] Obs : Where will the next idea come from? AB: I don't know, that's the point. I have no control. I'm a great believer in unconscious processes. They usually work. Observer interview, 2001 ( Link ) Dreams are potent if mysterious motors in the novels, especially the later fiction. The Next Big Thing , Leaving Home and 'At the Hairdresser's' all begin with dreams. Information is received, considered, and not always found to be of use. Visitors ends with a dream, but it is a vouchsafement earlier in the novel - of a field of folk - that stays in the memory, lambent, puzzling. Brookner invokes not so much Piers Plowman as a Forties and Fifties heaven, a lost England, old decent values, kindness... Martin Amis, though not a Brooknerian, s...