The Brooknerian

Brookner was a reviewer and an essayist long before she picked up her pen to write fiction. As an established academic, she was a go-to for editors in search of a piece on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture, French painting in particular. From the 1980s onwards, by then a novelist, Brookner's focus was more on fiction and literary biography. She appeared in the Observer , the Telegraph , the LRB , the TLS , prolifically in the Spectator . In the latter, for example, she wrote a yearly column called 'Prize-winning Novels from France'. She was often to be found contributing to 'Books of the Year' and 'Summer Books'. Her tastes were both predictable and surprising. She revered James, Wharton, Proust, Stendhal. She also valued the middlebrow women's authors of her youth, Margaret Kennedy, Barbara Pym. She was a significant fan of Updike and Roth. There are many essays I've never read or found. No one, as far as I know, has made a list of her outp...

'Kazuo Ishiguro joins Jeanette Winterson and Ian McEwan in the AI debate'? Not quite. Ishiguro, in Klara and the Sun , is only really debating with himself. Klara, an 'Artificial Friend', is his latest defamiliarising narrator. Quite what the purpose is of all Ishiguro's defamiliarising has never been clear, but the ride is often pleasantly disconcerting. Ishiguro has learned from the reaction to The Unconsoled , and scaled back his subsequent narratives. Critics complained The Unconsoled induced nightmare and debility. Skewed perspectives and bizarre quests persist into Klara and the Sun , but jeopardy is lacking, possibly because Klara remains uncanny and unrealised. Is it allegory? Is it about autism? Is it about visual disturbance? It may well be that. I suspect Kazuo Ishiguro suffers from classic migraine. Klara's vision frequently pixelates, and she is driven to perform weird tasks in spite of the oncoming storm. At the centre of the novel is a long, long...

My thing with Brookner goes back exactly 25 years ago when Hotel du Lac won the Booker prize. To an aspiring literary critic, this frail, thin book about a frail, thin heroine coming to terms with loveless solitude at a Swiss hotel seemed the epitome of the bloodless, sexless, plotless English novel that had led us to study American literature at college.  Subsequently, one of the subjects for my debut appearance on the Radio 3 chatshow Critics' Forum turned out to be the latest Brookner, in which another west London spinster didn't quite get it together with a semi-comatose widower. What passed for a plot twist was the heroine experiencing a severe migraine. I have a memory of a moment when the central character was forced to return early from a stroll because the weight of the spectacle frames on her nose had become unbearable. Mark Lawson, Guardian , 2009 Mark Lawson's review of Brookner's 2009 novel Strangers isn't the only example of a critic recanti...

Anita Brookner's hack work output was prodigious. Here's a selection from three decades of her  Spectator reviews and articles. Many more are freely available on the Spectator archive and main sites. (Click on the titles below to link to the original articles.) 'A Stooge of the Spycatcher', July 1987 The painful astonishment of a deceived soul: that line from Adolphe , via Brookner's Providence , might well be applicable here. Her dismay at being mentioned in Peter Wright's notorious  Spycatcher is palpable even at this distance. But the dignity with which she sets out her 'great and steady anger' in this Spectator reply awards Brookner the undoubted moral victory. 'Repose is taboo'd by anxiety', October 1993 This piece on Oliver Sacks's Migraine is magisterial. An essay both restrained and candid. 'Even less fiction than Stranger ', May 1994 Brookner, Kafka, Camus, Existentialism: who could ask for more? The ...

Anita Brookner could never be accused of an over-slavish adherence to the notion of the classical unities. She plays fast and loose with her time-schemes, she sends her characters on vacation at a moment's notice, and not a few of her novels contain several disparate plots. None of which need be considered criticisms. Chapter 5 of Hotel du Lac is an exception, as well as being a rather satisfying and exceptional chapter in its own right (at least in an 'early Brookner' sort of way - and I'm really trying to get over my mild prejudice against her early work). The chapter takes place in the hotel over the course of a day, and it centres solely on Edith's viewpoint. Edith wakes from a series of dreams, a typical Brooknerian device (see an earlier post on the topic of dreams), though here the dreams are 'disjointed' and 'half dream, half memory'. As such they have a narrative function, introducing us further to the hotel guests, especially the ...

Brookner was a migraine sufferer, as she revealed in 1993 in a review of Oliver Sacks's treatise on the condition. 'The neural tumult,' we read, 'may produce a feeling of such dread and helplessness as to encompass certain elements of the human condition.' Brookner continues with 'a report from the front': I learn from this book (and I allow that this may occur from actually reading the book) that my headaches are in fact migrainous and not untypical, and that the sensation of waking from a dream with the onset of a migraine is fairly standard. In fact it is probable that the precipitating dream, which is accompanied by a feeling of panic or horror, may be implicated in the migraine itself. Waking, which is always abrupt, is not caused by anything as specific as the alarm going off or the radio coming on. A rapidly beating heart may continue for an hour, to be succeeded by a pain over the left eye. More interesting than the pain, which is unpleasant bu...