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.

'Mute oblongs' Brookner calls the photographs Herz lugubriously sifts in The Next Big Thing . A photo sets the ball rolling in Family and Friends;  and a Brookner favourite, W. G. Sebald, of course, began the vogue of actually interspersing tracts of text with wordless rectangles that at once somehow reveal and remystify the past. All photos, of whatever age, are both accessible and resistant. I've considered this in recent weeks as I've traded a collection of cartes de visite I picked up in a job-lot years ago. Patented in the 1850s, this species of visiting card became extremely popular in the following decade. (Oddly enough, I cannot think of references to cartomania in novels of the time, though the likes of Trollope and Thackeray both trotted down to one of the numerous studios that sprang up everywhere. There is an image of Thackeray wearing trousers so aged they have patches on them.) Suddenly the past bursts into the light. The thousands of people, famous and u...

What are we to make of chapters 10 and 11? The story is over and Brookner's vainly trying to pad things out? Edward visits his shop in London, and a new character, Max Kroll, appears: Mittel -european, his accent both sibilant and cockney, a prototype for Julius Herz in The Next Big Thing or Max Gruber in Falling Slowly ? Then the rather studied detail about the books: Elizabeth Bowen, Rosamond Lehmann (for more, see here  and here ). Then in the next chapter we find ourselves in Eastbourne at the heart of Edward's middle-class family, a world away from Dijon and the rue Laugier. Why? Why all this detail, all this plot? I suggest it's about absence rather than presence: the extended absence of Tyler, a representation of the disappearance he has effected from lives for whom he is the only emotional capital: not just Maud's, but Edward's too.

Chapter 5 finds us at last in the rue Laugier and again on familiar Brookner ground: Paris. Characters free but anxious and disenchanted in Paris abound: Sturgis in Strangers , Herz in The Next Big Thing . Paris is here, as there, bigger and more dangerous than in the characters' dreams and memories. I recognise in myself such feelings. I haven't been to Paris in more than a decade, but I used to be a regular. I think on my last visit, in something like 2009, I was, like Edward in Incidents , debilitated by the unexpected largeness of the place, its monumentalism. In dreams one traverses great spaces with ease, and there is little traffic. John Bayley said of George Bland in Brookner's 1994 novel, A Private View , as he endures a crisis of nerves in Nice, that one might contemplate his situation indefinitely. But the plot must go on. And so it must here too.

Among several scuppered plans was a visit to see the Titian exhibition at the National Gallery, now closed. Seven late masterworks were included, reunited for the first time since they sat in Titian's studio in the second half of the sixteenth century. Paintings would take years, returned to after long absences. 'According to eye witnesses,' writes Martin Gayford, lucky enough to see the show, in this week's Spectator , 'Titian would begin a work, then lean it against the wall. Some time later he would scrutinise what he had done as if it were a "mortal enemy", add a touch or two, set it aside again to dry - and so on until he was satisfied ... there is a controversy about whether some of his late works ... were finished or not.' Brooknerians will know Titian from the much earlier Bacchus and Ariadne , part of the National Gallery's permanent collection. In The Next Big Thing Julius Herz, one of Brookner's later and most debilitated protagon...

Adam Scovell's piece ( here ) about Herne Hill and Brookner's birthplace is highly recommended, not least because it contains some intriguing biographical information. Anita was born, we learn, at 55 Half Moon Lane, a comfortable property Mr Scovell depicts in an appropriately wistful Polaroid; but later, following a decline in their affluence, the Bruckners/Brookners moved to a smaller place, a flat, at 25 Half Moon Lane. Is it in The Next Big Thing  (2002) that the fortunes of the protagonist's family are marked by just such a decline? One remembers Brookner's remark in 2002, in interview ( here ), when the similarities between herself and Julius Herz were put to her: 'He's me, really. You were longing to say that, weren't you?'

The character of Nigel, dignified and likeable at first, but given to psychobabble, gradually falls victim to a sort of novelistic passive aggression. The existence somewhere in his background of an analyst* is inferred by the narrator, indeed imagined in some detail, though never confirmed. For her part she's 'too proud, or too ashamed (they are the same thing) ever to have confided, to have confessed in any company' (ch. 14). Brookner herself was asked by at least one interviewer whether she'd undergone analysis. She hadn't. And she wasn't about to start. It would take too long. And she might doubt the intelligence of the interrogator. It's a breathtaking answer. But she was a devotee of Freud. Her novel Strangers has an epigraph by Freud, a rare honour in Brookner. One thinks of Herz too, in The Next Big Thing , talking to an uncomprehending GP of Freud's experience on the Acropolis, of having 'gone beyond the father' (ch. 7). Or one ...

If I were to live the life of an exile I could do so much more comfortably by remaining where I was, surrounded by familiar possessions, my position unambiguous. The Rules of Engagement , ch. 9 Brookner's novels, as well as falling into phases (I propose the 1980s, the 1990s and the 2000s as reasonably distinct periods: not quite James I, James II and the Old Pretender but just a little along those lines), can be grouped thematically into pairs and groups. The reader who might baulk at the notion of a well-heeled Englishwoman feeling like an exile in the heart of London should read Brookner's previous novel The Next Big Thing about a real exile. The two novels are in communication with one another: it's a kind of auto-intertextuality.

For the sense of exile I had experienced in Paris had a maturity about it which I had begun to recognise at the time: perhaps adulthood is a sense of exile, or rather that in exile we are obliged to act as adults. The Rules of Engagement , ch. 3 Brookner's novels, especially the contiguous ones, are often in dialogue with one another. Exile, true exile, was the major theme of her previous, The Next Big Thing . Here, in The Rules of Engagement , she discusses a more figurative sort of exile. Elizabeth, the narrator, is profoundly alienated, but as often with Brooknerian disaffection it isn't easy to say exactly what's wrong with her or where her malaise has its origins. Indeed such questions might take up a whole book, and at the end we're scarcely any the wiser. A fine example of late-Brookner obliquity comes a little later in the chapter: I had achieved the kind of stasis that my situation demanded, and if I ever again wandered haplessly through uninhabited a...

The other photographs were of lesser interest, mainly postcards of his travels, souvenirs from which the original attraction had faded, and reproductions of favourite paintings, only some of which he had seen... Anita Brookner, The Next Big Thing , ch. 9 It always surprises me that museums and galleries still sell postcards. Why do we buy them? Our own photos, on our smartphones, are often superior. Postcards not invariably get the colour or the lighting wrong. And we certainly don't send postcards any more. When was the last time I sent a postcard? I used, on my travels, to write them assiduously. And when was the last time I or indeed anyone received one? Answers on a postcard, please. And yet I still buy them. I even collect them. I use them as bookmarks. I like handling them. They're real, solid; they retain something of the magic of foreign climes. I like to take them out and sort them by artist or by gallery. They form for me a little private autobiography. I fi...

I last saw [Anita Brookner] in the summer of 2010, when the publisher Carmen Callil brought her to lunch. She was frailer, and needed a stick. I had made potted crab, to which she said she was allergic, to my embarrassment (should I have known?). Instead she took a little cheese, some green salad and a roast tomato; she declined the beetroot. We asked about her life. She said that she went out early every morning to her Sainsbury's Local for 'a croissant, a petit pain and a loaf'. 'Every day, Anita?' 'I eat a lot of bread.' She had been rereading Stefan Zweig and applauded that most Brooknerianly-titled novel  Beware of Pity . She agreed with Carmen that the one advantage of age was that the trials of the heart were behind you. She stated that she had no religious feelings or beliefs at all. She still rented her television (no digibox or Freeview), and still smoked eight or 10 cigarettes a day. 'Do you have your first after breakfast, Anita?' 'O...

References to the Austrian capital are scattered through Brookner's novels. The following is probably not a full list: Hotel du Lac : Edith Hope has Viennese ancestry. She goes with her English father to the Kunsthistorisches Museum to see 'a picture of men lying splayed in a cornfield under a hot sun'. This is a puzzle. It sounds like Bruegel's Harvesters (which isn't in Vienna, though the museum houses several of the artist's surviving pictures of the seasons). See an earlier post here . There's a Viennese background to that most Freudian of Brookners, A Family Romance , Toni Ferber hailing from (where else?) Berggasse. Later her granddaughter Jane visits the city, drops into Demel's, eats Sachertorte, finds it disappointing. Demel's is extant, but like many such establishments now a touristy Lacanian simulacrum of its probable former self. Getting inside looks to be no mean feat: one would have to elbow one's way through a crowd of snapping...

She had always been an unashamed reader of novels, but if she hoped to find one which reflected her own sort of life she had come to realise that the position of an unmarried, unattached ageing woman is of no interest whatever to the writer of modern fiction. Barbara Pym, Quartet in Autumn (1977), ch. 1 A look at the subject matter of several novels of the time may suggest otherwise. But this was Barbara Pym's personal experience; it's a  cri de coeur . Pym, writing Quartet in Autumn after years of rejection, saw little prospect of its being published. The novel has a recklessness: she's perhaps writing for herself alone, or for a coterie of fans such as Philip Larkin, who read and commented on the manuscript. The heartening and miraculous story of the novel's eventual publication, after Pym was celebrated in a TLS article, is well known. A Booker nomination followed, and the reissue of her 1950s novels, along with the release of several works that had failed t...

I chose out of the way places, out of season: almost any town in France or Germany, however devoid of scenic interest, provided the sort of ruminative space which I seemed to require. Anita Brookner,  A Family Romance , ch. 8 1. To Düsseldorf: out of the way, though in season. To the Kunstpalast, in rain, under a heavy sky. Some Cranachs, older and younger, some Rubens, one or two Caspar David Friedrichs, some very engaging nineteenth-century history paintings, some Kirchners. But altogether the collection seemed slightly at a low ebb. Unprepossessing building: red-brick, monumental, 1930s: 'degenerate art' was exhibited here once, for purposes of ridicule. 2. Chapter 40 of  David Copperfield . Mr Peggotty - a wanderer in search of Little Em'ly - speaks of his journey through France and into Italy. He returns via Switzerland, responding to a tip-off. As with other pre-aviation era narratives, one is aware here of the great distances involved, the sense of the Alps...

New to Anita Brookner? Let me suggest a route into and through what a critic (unfavourably but memorably) once called the long dark corridor of her fiction . Start with a late-period novel. Brookner's fiction divides roughly but usefully into three phases: the 1980s, the 1990s and the 2000s. The early work is inconsistent but often brilliant; the middle period is more settled, more even. In Brookner's last works we see a return to the unpredictability she started with, now allied to a greater assuredness of form and style. Start with The Next Big Thing ( Making Things Better ) (2002). Also try The Bay of Angels (2001) and The Rules of Engagement (2003). Scarier than the scariest horror story. Next try the essential early Brookner: Look at Me (1983). A remarkable and quite extreme laying out of the Brookner manifesto. The final chapters contain some of the bleakest and most unsettling passages in the whole of English literature. Temper this with the novel of the followi...

...this country, by all measures one of the wealthiest in the world, appears to be so dilapidated, destitute, shorn of hope ... The UK is rich; there is wealth inequality, but that alone doesn't explain why the country is so mean . Robinson , ch. 3 Just over a year ago the UK voted to leave the EU. There are still some who celebrate this decision. Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe was published in 1719. Many people still think of it as a charming and harmless tale, even a book for children. Jack Robinson's Robinson , with quiet subtlety and in detail, links and dismantles both these conceptions. 'Jack Robinson' is Charles Boyle of CB Editions  and this is the companion volume to An Overcoat , earlier appreciated on this blog . It is as good and as brilliant as An Overcoat . Each is the A-side of the other. Novel? Memoir? Literary criticism? Diatribe?  Robinson politely requires that we abandon such labels. But what is the book about? It's certainly a...

Anita Brookner acquired a forbidding reputation during her writing career. Critical reception was strongly divided. So - where to start? It was possibly easier then, while she was still writing. If you had never read her, and wanted to, you could read her latest. Now that she's gone, and her body of work is complete, the uninitiated can be daunted by her sheer fecundity, the sheer volume of her fiction: twenty-four novels and a novella over thirty years. Where to start? It is a difficult question. There's no obvious stand-out novel, by which I mean one that stands out in terms of, say, length or critical appreciation. The obvious answer is Hotel du Lac , which won the Booker Prize in 1984. But Brookner herself didn't think it should have won. Her surprise or shock is clear in a press picture from the Booker event. She thought  Latecomers (1988) should have got the prize - a book with a serious and indeed Booker-friendly theme: the lifelong effects of surviving the Holo...

Art doesn't love you and cannot console you , said Anita Brookner. It's a discomforting assertion. When I examine my own intake or uptake of art - by which I mean my reading, for primarily I'm literary, verbal - I realise consolation is one of the chief things I look for. My sudden blogging, my sudden and tardy engagement with the Internet, after years of silence, has somewhat changed my reading habits. I now read more, and with more purpose. I look at what others are reading and am influenced. Or else I'm reduced, made to feel subtly inferior. These other folk - how quickly and how widely they read! Much of my reading is now rereading. I read new things infrequently. I try new authors hardly at all. I favour books about certain types or classes of character and set in certain locations. I'm really very choosy, very small-minded. I've come to the end of Trollope, an almost exclusive preference of mine through my twenties and thirties. I never thought I'd e...

Beyond the bridge lay the Paris I had known and loved, and perhaps should never see again with that lift of the heart that had once attended me every morning of my life. Altered States , ch. 10 Chapter 10 of Altered States is one of the most accomplished in the whole of Brookner. Significantly it is about Paris and significantly it's about a character travelling on his own. Alan goes to Paris, planning a clandestine meeting with Sarah at the George Cinq, but things go farcically awry. There's a bizarre travel-phobic man on the plane; it's raining heavily; the hotel is overbooked. From that point, Alan's attempts to meet Sarah develop from farce into Kafka-style nightmare. He reflects again on her unavailability; he's practically never had a proper conversation with her. She's rather like the love object in Mann's Magic Mountain , the woman with the Kirghiz eyes, whom Hans Castorp never so much as speaks two words to. The chapter ends in full-blown hor...

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...