The Brooknerian

Brookner: I read a lot in French and I read the Russians. Here's my favourite novel. Observer :  Oblomov . AB: Yes. It's about a man who fails at everything. Obs : I confess I've never read it. AB: It's great. He fails at everything - not through any fault of his own, but through sheer inactivity. I learnt a terrific lesson there. Obs : Do you think failure is a subject to which you're drawn in your fiction? AB: Much more interesting than success.  2001 Observer interview Brookner, ruefully playful, time and again makes a show of objectivity. She writes about failure because, objectively, it is an interesting subject. These personages are not reflections of herself. As she told  Blake Morrison in 1994 : Well, I am a spinster. I make no apologies for that. But I'm neither unhappy nor lonely. I am interested in people who live on their own, people who get left behind, who drop through the net, but who survive. They seem to me qui...

What will be Anita Brookner's future literary existence? It seems unlikely either that she'll sink without trace like the once-lauded Angus Wilson, or that she'll benefit from a series of posthumous publications, as in the cases of Barbara Pym and W. G. Sebald. Authors usually experience a dip in the period after their deaths. Kingsley Amis was all but out of print for a while, before being reissued with new covers that recast him as a writer not of the present but of some vaguely 'classic' or vintage yesteryear. The same may already have happened with Brookner.  As I've noted previously,  the new Penguin covers depict Fifties and Sixties scenes, even for novels plainly set in more recent times. Jane Austen didn't become established until the mid-Victorian era. Trollope went into decline after his death, only to go through a renaissance in World War II, when his tales of a gentler world were newly attractive. And Sir Walter Scott, in his day one of the...

I grew cold and sick reading this remarkable narrative, which embodies a sense of displacement so radical that it would seem to preclude a safe return to everyday existence. This is not vulgar Holocaust literature, still less a witness statement: this is dislocation of a kind most of us are privileged not to know. Spectator, review of Sebald's Austerlitz, 2001 Cold and sick ... displacement ... dislocation . High praise indeed, from Brookner. Time and again in her reviews, especially in the later ones, she commends novels for the unease they induce in the reader. Followers of this blog will know I'm of the opinion that in her writings on other writers Brookner is really writing about herself. I'm a few chapters into a re-read of The Bay of Angels at the moment, and already my heart is in my mouth. In no way is it a cosy or comforting read. The critic John Bayley was of the opinion that even the gloomiest art could be comforting, 'by the paradox implicit i...

...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 ...

In my freshman prize copy of A Dictionary of Stylistics (Longman, 1991), by one of my old teachers, Katie Wales, I find the historic present defined as the 'special use of the present tense in oral or written, anecdotal or literary narrative, where the past tense might be expected, the shift creating a more dramatic or immediate effect'. Professor Wales cites the use of the form in jokes, in newspaper headlines, in Pope's Iliad,  and in Anita Brookner's Family and Friends . The form has continued its popularity with literary novelists. Consider Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell novels. There was a  minor media spat  a few years back, regarding the use of the historic present in BBC history programmes: 'It gives a bogus, an entirely bogus, sense of immediacy,' said John Humphrys. Brookner's deployment of the historic present in Family and Friends evolves out of the authorial voice's examination of a set of old photographs. In Brookner's han...

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...

George Eliot is disturbed and embarrassed by 'The Lifted Veil'. In a letter to John Blackwood, she describes it as 'a slight story of an outr é kind - not a jeu d'esprit but a jeu de mélancolie '. And Eliot's struggle for control over the material of 'The Lifted Veil' manifests itself both within the tale in the narrator's repeated apologies for going on at such length, and externally when Eliot returns, fourteen years later, to preface the tale with a new epigraph which resolves some of its more disturbing ambiguities. Yet the experience proves cathartic, allowing Eliot to move on to the masterpiece of Middlemarch . John Lyon, Introduction to the Penguin edition of The Sacred Fount by Henry James  Shusha Guppy: Do you ever rewrite what you have written? Brookner: Never. It is always the first draft. I may alter the last chapter; I may lengthen it. Only because I get very tired at the end of a book and tend to rush and go too quickly, so ...