The Brooknerian

I haven't yet been able to find the covers, but these are apparently the fresh spines of some Brookner novels to be republished in June: An intriguing selection, focusing on the 1980s ( A Start in Life , Look at Me* , Latecomers ) and the 2000s ( The Bay of Angels , The Next Big Thing ). I am pleased to see The Next Big Thing , a late masterpiece and as raw and edgy as anything she ever wrote. I should perhaps reconsider The Bay of Angels . But what of the great, settled, magisterial novels of the 90s - A Family Romance, A Private View, Visitors ? *Disappointing to see the continuing capitalisation of the preposition, inaugurated in the cover refresh of ten years ago.

Clowns do not make one laugh. Undersized, deliberately grotesque, on the verge of tears, they induce discomfort. Their function is to be humiliated, by powerful men and pretty girls, aided and abetted by the audience, and the process by which this is accomplished is a diabolical set-piece of collusion... We are supposed to identify with clowns because they appeal to the undersized innocents we all know ourselves to be. I suspect this process to be abominable. Brookner, Soundings , 'The Willing Victim' ( TLS review) Witness, there, in 1979, before a single novel was written, perhaps as neat an insight into the Brookner world as one is ever likely to find: think of Frances in Look at Me , trampled underfoot by the careless and effortless Frasers. Yet Frances is clear-eyed, though her knowledge is of little use. In an early interview Brookner said she felt sorry for her characters, poor things, and yet knew as little as they. '[T]he guileless unfortunate from whom nothing is r...

I wish there were a word-count facility on my e-reader: it might yield some interesting results. I noticed during my recent reread of Fraud (1992) something I'd only half-recognised before: how Brookner's chapters have a tendency towards being extremely regular in length. I reckon if I were to count the words in each of Fraud' s chapters the results would be remarkably close. How did she do this? She wrote in longhand, and cleanly, with few corrections (a page of the MS of Family and Friends (1985) is to be found online alongside the Paris Review interview) - so it was probably just a case of her allocating herself a set number of sheets of paper per chapter. But why did she do it? She was certainly a writer, and probably a person, who lived according to her routines. Imposing such structures and patterns on the job of composition would have given momentum to a writing process that, as John Bayley says somewhere, possibly wasn't experienced at the full fever p...

After Undue Influence (1999) there came an unprecedented gap in the publication pattern Anita Brookner had established over nearly twenty years. There was something in 2000, but it was a book of art criticism, Romanticism and Its Discontents . In 2001 the fiction resumed, but  Brookner told Robert McCrum  she hadn't intended to write the novel of that year. Undue Influence might well therefore have been Brookner's last novel. We read Undue Influence now, or I do, as pointing forward to the darker novels of the 2000s. For sure it is a bleak tale, all the more so for the breeziness of its opening chapters. The sly author lulls you into the impression that this is some kind of easy-going Brookner-lite, before steadily turning the screw. Towards the end you realise you're keeping company with a narrator who may well be mentally ill, and a writer who's intent on ruthlessly clearing the decks of extraneous plot so that she can concentrate on heaping the maximum humili...

Undue Influence , which starts out so breezily, so lightly, with its short chapters and rapid character brushstrokes, gradually reveals darker undertones. It's very much a transitional novel. Coming at the end of the 1990s, it says goodbye to the greater substantiality of Brookner's novels during those years. We're heading now into more perilous uncertain territory. Claire Pitt, with her 'black heart' and her secret liaisons in French cathedral cities, never fully revealed or even clearly indicated, is a forerunner of Zoe in The Bay of Angels and far more disaffected and dysfunctional than any of her forebears, Rachel in A Friend from England , for example, or Frances in Look at Me . There's a growing opacity in the writing. Claire, that 'merry adventurer' (ch. 8), brings back from her mysterious holidays postcards and photos for her mother: rood screens, tympanums, choirstalls, misericords, clerestories, elevations: Brookner takes a perverse pleasure...

Rachel, an 'extremely emancipated young woman', as Brookner told the  Paris Review  - and a young woman 'whom they will not be able to think is me!' - seems at first glance an experiment with a new, unfamiliar and possibly unsympathetic character. She's emotionally cold, sexually liberated, ruthless in her 'sensible arrangements', and is spoken of as a feminist. At the time many critics saw Rachel as unBrooknerian, at any rate 'an extreme case in the Brookner hospital', according to Hermione Lee . But knowing the complete oeuvre, we may think differently now. Rachel is atypical only if you don't know your Brookner, if you credit too far Brookner's often disingenuous, stagy pronouncements in the various interviews, and if you think Brookner's some kind of super-sophisticated Barbara Pym. In fact there's nothing unusual about the narrator of A Friend from England . She's Zoe, she's Emma, she's George Bland. In chapter 5, f...

Who does not enjoy a set piece, by which I guess I mean an extended scene depicting a social occasion? Brookner goes in for them infrequently, but usually memorably. Disastrous meals are a feature: one thinks of Look at Me 's climactic meal, or the dinner party in Fraud . Such scenes, with their food, their clothes, their vulgar demotic dialogue, can unbalance a novel as finely woven as an Anita Brookner. In A Friend from England , for example in the engagement party and wedding scenes in chapter 3, Brookner seeks a middle way: dense paragraphs, indirect speech, a painterly attention to detail and manner and impression. This is in keeping with the estranged, disillusioned mood of the narrator. Rachel has things in common with Anthony Powell's almost disembodied narrator in his Music of Time sequence. Powell also has a fondness for a set piece, but his are on an epic scale. I remember a scene in one of the early novels, A Buyer's Market or The Acceptance World,  that goe...

Indirection: a Brooknerian word: One had simply to exist, in a state of dreamy indirection, for the plot to work itself out. The Bay of Angels , Ch. 1 And in a review of William Trevor's stories , she praises their Chekhovian plotlessness, discretion, indirection. She might, of course, be speaking of her own fiction, but for the moment I want to think about reading. Having recently reread Brookner's twenty-first century novels, I find myself like Elizabeth Warner in 'At the Hairdresser's' at a loose end with 'nothing to read'. Some re-readers proceed chronologically; others follow leads. I might be tempted, for example, inspired by the Venetian scenes in Strangers , to read A Friend from England next - alongside The Wings of the Dove , say. I don't know. Perhaps I shouldn't be so ordered; perhaps I should, like Polonius, by indirections find directions out.

What he was after was something smaller, a landscape, his own, from which he could view a mystical sunset, and where he might capture that fabled rayon vert , that brief streak of light before the darkness closed in. Strangers , Ch. 7 The rayon vert , though never so named, and here given metaphorical force, will be familiar to Brooknerians. In A Family Romance Jane walks down a London street and the sky is of the palest green. Or else, from The Bay of Angels , Zoe and Adam wandering out into a 'beautiful greenish dusk'.

For her spiritual death had taken place some time ago. Her removal to unfamiliar places, one after the other, had so undermined her that only a memory of home, or an illusion of home, had kept her intact for a while. The Bay of Angels , Ch. 15 The Bay of Angels (2001) and The Next Big Thing (2002) are companion pieces in their way. Zoe's mother's exile is of a lesser order than that experienced by the Herz family, but it is exile all the same. In both novels, too, the dispossession continues into the present. One thinks of Herz's anxieties over the lease on his flat, or Zoe's expulsion from Les Mouettes. These are terrifying novels, edgier than what has gone before. One thinks of Zoe's nightmare, of being imprisoned in a dilapidated, roughly papered room, which has a 'breach in one of the walls, rather like a cat-flap, covered with yet another strip of wallpaper, but of a different pattern' ( Ibid .). This is writing of a new kind, inducing unease in...

And so, to borrow David Copperfield's words, I lost her. The Bay of Angels , Ch. 15 Zoe's mother dies, of course, just as Jane's mother also died in A Family Romance . In both novels the narrator conjures David Copperfield's words. Is this self-plagiarism? Or is it a reward for the attentive Brooknerian reader? I think the latter. Reading of Zoe's plight, one is reminded of Jane's and in turn of David Copperfield's. One has a sense of being some kind of honoured guest in the rambling mansion block that is Anita Brookner's fiction, or in the great house that is English literature itself.

Observer : First, what is The Bay of Angels about? Brookner: It is about the sort of misfortune that can come upon you without warning, which finds you totally bereft trying to get yourself out of it. Obs : Was there a particular moment of inspiration ? AB: Well, the curious thing is that I didn't intend to write it. I didn't know I was going to write it, so it came upon me quite suddenly and quite easily and I enjoyed writing it. I'm sorry if it's very bleak. I'm sorry if it's mournful. I had a good time, that's all I can say about it.  2001 Observer interview The Bay of Angels  (2001) could easily walk away with the award for the bleakest Brookner ever. It terrifies the reader early on with a condensation of various Look at Me -style plots (see also a previous post) . The main plot hasn't got going, and already we have things like: But I also knew what it was to be unconsoled, to go through days which were somehow not on record becau...

Was Anita Brookner an Existentialist? As a young woman in Paris in the 1950s she must often have seen the principle actors. In her fiction she takes Existentialist positions, more than once adapting for her own purposes a famous proto-Existentialist line from the nineteenth century: 'Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.' 'And my own recovery? That, I feared, would have to be postponed indefinitely. It would be safer, and wiser, to assume an endless vigilance,' says Zoe in The Bay of Angels at one of her lowest points. Providence is the novel that explores Existentialism most blatantly. Brookner discusses the novel and the movement at length in the  Paris Review interview : INTERVIEWER All your heroines follow 'an inexorable progress toward further loneliness,' as you say of Kitty Maule in  Providence . It seems to me very deterministic. Is there nothing we can do to alter our fate? BROOKNER I think one’s character and predisposition determine one’s f...

'Look at it from his point of view, Zoe. He is of a different generation. As, I suppose, I am.'  'That argument doesn't hold water. All women are in the same boat now. The Women's Movement...'  'Yes, I have heard of it,' she said drily.  'We're free now,' I went on. We don't have to respect men, be grateful to them. It's their turn to respect women, to allow them some space...'  'Oh, yes, I've heard of that space. What will you all do in it, apart from complain?' We know from interviews that Anita Brookner did not identify as a feminist ('I don't read Spare Rib or anything like that,' she told John Haffenden), and indeed was at times dismissive of the movement. Zoe and her mother's telephone quarrel in Chapter 5 of The Bay of Angels summarises something of the debate Brookner engages in elsewhere in her fiction. Fiction is one thing, interviews are another. In fiction Brookner has the leave...

The plots of several early Brookners focus on deluded central characters whose romantic hopes are dashed by cruel revelations. The novels end on or soon after the moment of revelation, which figures for the protagonist as a species of primal scene. A later example is found in Chapter 19 of  Undue Influence (1999): This was the one connection I had failed to make. It was the greatest failure of my life and no future success could ever obliterate it. Such plot structures probably had a personal resonance for Anita Brookner, a significance we can only guess at. There was, perhaps,'some jamming of the emotions' that forced the reenactment of a particular situation, as Larkin said in his essay on Housman ('All Right When You Knew Him', Required Writing ). But in The Bay of Angels (2001), when the familiar plot is given another outing, it is in radically telescoped form. All in the course of a single chapter, Zoe Cunningham begins a deluded relationship, experiences a ...

...these were the virtuous prerequisites for vindication of some sort, for a triumph which would confound the sceptics...  ...approaching some beneficent outcome which would make even my father's death assume acceptable proportions.  ...I resigned myself to a lesson in reality which would be instructive but largely unwelcome. The Bay of Angels , Ch. 1 The grammatical difference between that and which is subtle, and often inconsistently observed, even by the best writers. Kingsley Amis, one of the best, also a pedant, defined the distinction well in his grammar book The King's English (Harper Collins, 1997), adding that plenty of good writers have got it wrong from time to time while many bad ones have got it right. That Brookner's so Augustan prose isn't after all without its imperfections is one of the many adorable things about her. Jane Austen is another example of a flawed stylist - employing, for example, superlatives when comparing only two items, and ...

Outside the line of duty I reread Henry James's Portrait of a Lady , and once again found it matchless, a grave description of one of life's great traumas, the passage from innocence to experience. Spectator , 17 November 2001 Brookner's own characters are rarely depicted in a condition of innocence. We might watch them experience a moment of revelation, a moment of horror; the ending of Undue Influence comes to mind. But were they innocent before? No, more often than not they were beady and watchful, already (at however young an age) denizens of a fallen world. Family and Friends , in the character of Mimi, is an exception. We see Mimi sitting hopefully in a Paris hotel, waiting for Frank, who will not come. We witness what seems like a genuine loss of innocence, something that colours Mimi's whole life. Nothing afterwards is ever glad confident morning again. ...since that morning when, dry-mouthed and dry-eyed, she got up and dressed herself and lef...

I return to the topic of an earlier post (‘Comparisons’). One writer whom Brookner was never compared with was Dickens. Yet he was one of her favourite writers. In almost every interview she spoke of how at the age of seven she was set to read Dickens’s novels, which were advertised to her by her uncertain and uprooted family as the key to Englishness. That Dickens felt himself to be excluded from the happy years of his early childhood; that the Dickensian world was itself one of deracination; that that world was ever far from being a reliable portrait of any reality – must have sent out confusing messages to the young Anita. When she went to school, she said, she was quite surprised to find that everyone didn’t have a funny name. She continued to read Dickens at the rate of a novel a year, and throughout her adulthood she pursued the habit. Dickens features significantly from time to time in her fiction: in the Dickensian porters and comic domestics; in the helpful older char...

James had three incarnations: James the First, James the Second, and the Old Pretender. The novels of Anita Brookner (a writer who, at first glance, doesn't seem to 'develop' - to borrow a term from Larkin) fall perhaps into four phases. The four novels culminating in the Booker win ( A Start in Life , Providence , Look at Me and Hotel du Lac ) are sombre reads, solid, not starry, never presumptuous. Seemingly in receipt of dithyrambs for every subsequent effort, Brookner became in her second phase (beginning with Family and Friends ) a little - shall we say? - smug, a little complacent. Those novels of the mid to late Eighties feel over-assured, at times too ambitious. Brookner worked best in reaction against the prevailing culture. Critical opinion turned sour in the 1990s. Thus, with Brief Lives , begins her third phase. These are masterly books, Jamesian, the language as mandarin as James's, the themes unfashionable but enduring. The last phase comes i...