The Brooknerian

Is Brookner our contemporary? It might be a strange question to ask of a writer active so recently, whose last work of fiction was published in 2011. But even then there was less labelling, less ready codification of social and emotional malaise. In 2011 we heard talk of mental health less often, though not quite as infrequently as in 1981, when Brookner's first novel came out. Hermione Lee, Brookner's later biographer, offers an insightful, psychoanalytical review ( here ) of A Friend from England , one of Brookner's 1980s novels, inexplicably now out of print. Though the protagonist, Rachel, hasn't read Freud, 'Freud,' says Lee, 'would have wanted to read her': [S]he is an extreme case in the Brookner hospital, off in her own isolation ward. Time and again Brookner's characters worry the reader. Nominatively determined Herz, in The Next Big Thing , endures cardiac discomfort, but his visit to his GP baffles the harassed young doctor, with talk of F...

I can't recommend highly enough Professor Emma Smith's podcast lecture series on Shakespeare ( here ). Emma Smith is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford. She is an active and generous academic whose insights can be enjoyed further on YouTube and on radio programmes like In Our Time . Throughout her lectures Professor Smith poses questions about critical response, genre, style, and intertextuality, all topics of wider relevance. She encourages her students to use their enthusiasms in their work, licensing them to seek comparisons and contrasts between early-modern drama and apparently unrelated cultural phenomena. In her lecture on The Tempest , she says: One association of cultural or aesthetic lateness is as a decline from earlier achievement or prowess . W e might think : Thomas Hardy, Ben Jonson, Alfred Hitchcock, Lady Gaga, Kenneth Branagh, artists who go off rather than on . It sets me thinking. What of Brookner? The first thing to note is that Bro...

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...

Among the nymphs, with their fixed gaze and dowdily coiffed hair, can be seen the last avatar of Mme. Récamier… Brookner, Jacques-Louis David , Ch. 13, 'Exile' David, Mars disarmed by Venus Brussels So in her novels, Brookner would present us with later versions of earlier characters. Emma Roberts is Claire Pitt; Paul Sturgis is George Bland. And Julius Herz? 'He's me, really. You were longing to say that, weren't you? And I thought I was making him up.' ( 2002 interview ) See also  The Brookner Room .

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 ...

Brookner's, like Trollope's, is a conservative imagination. 'George must decide how much - or how little - he can do to transform the status quo ,' reads the blurb to my edition of  A Private View . Many a Brooknerian strives to break free, only to see the old dispensation restored. Not that Brookner doesn't provide final moments of epiphany, largely unearned. We might cite the closing lines of Fraud or what happens in the last sentence of Lewis Percy . Such endings give her work a novelistic shape, though Brookner knows their limitations: There are moments when you feel free, moments when you have energy, moments when you have hope, but you can't rely on any of these things to see you through. (Haffenden interview, 1985) The restoration of the status quo is achieved most memorably in the moments of shock and revelation that end, say, Providence or Undue Influence . The conclusion to Hotel du Lac is of another order. [Haffenden:] [Edith] wins her freedom ...