The Brooknerian

In Fraud 's second chapter Brookner focuses on Mrs Marsh, sturdy, viable, rough-hewn, taciturn, sensible. Mrs Marsh, one senses, isn't quite a self-portrait. Mrs Marsh is a character who turns up from time to time in Brookner: the no-nonsense Englishwoman. Not that her obverse, Anna Durrant, is in any way not English. Anna is no Kitty Maule, no Edith Hope. There's no Jewishness, no  Mitteleuropa , in Anna's background. But Anna and her mother don't quite fit. They live a fairy-tale life in Albert Hall Mansions; the atmosphere, brilliantly, is described as 'eerily emollient'. Anna's arrival on the scene is preceded by the sound of a sewing machine, as if she were the Lady of Shalott. Anna's father was a musician in the pit at Drury Lane. One has visions of almost Thackerayan artistic penury. Privately Mrs Marsh considers the Durrants rather common. One little mystery about Mrs Marsh - whether she's a Catholic - is cleared up in chapter 3. ...

Throughout the obedient years of childhood he had privately observed that God was unjust, or, even worse than that, He was indifferent. To the pronouncement, I am that I am, went the unspoken addendum, Deal with it. Boasting to Job of His omnipotence, His superiority to Job's peaceable sinless life, He offered no justification for any of this, merely issued a report. And Job had acceded, perhaps because it is preferable to be inside than outside, silently making his accommodation with the idea of injustice, of disproportion. And had been rewarded for his docility with the restoration of his fortune, as if he had let bygones be bygones. Strangers , Ch. 1 I see this passage as a companion piece to Brookner's earlier  essay on the Book of Job . Her interpretation, her indignation, remain consistent, though her language has grown refreshingly modern: Deal with it. It is interesting too to get Brookner's view on a key Brooknerian theme: insiders and outsiders. It's bet...

Anita Brookner, secular in everything she said and did, views The Book of Job dispassionately as a literary narrative ('God's Great Wager', 1980 TLS essay, reproduced in Soundings ). God is a character among many; she brackets Him with the impulsive gods of the classical world whose caprices will be both praised and feared in several of her novels to come. But what begins as sardonic bafflement, determined incomprehension, becomes by the end of Brookner's essay an acknowledgement of the story's mysterious and sophisticated power - 'a key text for those in crisis'. Brookner's sympathies, as ever, remain absolutely human. God she dismisses as wilful, childish, rather boringly unpredictable. It is Job who emerges not as the tale's victim but as its true hero, Job alone who retains that essential Brooknerian prize: his own personal dignity.