The Brooknerian

[Part of an occasional series on  Middlemarch  - Book by Book:] In chapter 14 Mary Garth teases Fred Vincy with a list of literary lovers. The modern reader is on familiar ground with Ophelia and with Juliet, but things soon become dicey. Mme de Staël's Corinne gets a name-check, along with characters from Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield . Then it's the turn of Scott. Most people have heard of Waverley and Flora MacIvor. But Brenda and Minna Troil, Mordaunt Merton and Clement Cleveland?! My edition of Middlemarch informs me they're to be found in Scott's 1822 novel The Pirate , which surely hasn't been in print for at least the last half-century. Did it have a better reputation in Eliot's time? Very likely. You can sense Scott's influence throughout - not just in the fact Middlemarch is to all intents and purposes an historical novel, but also in details such as the gnomic Scott-style epigraphs, not a few of which Eliot composed herself, ju...

From the back: an ex-library copy of Lewis Percy , a paperback edition of A Friend from England , and the hardback of Brookner's  essay collection Soundings It's fun to speculate about the previous owners of one's secondhand books. Who were Stu and Jo? It's nice to think of Soundings acting as currency in the transactions between a courting couple. But there's something slightly try-hard about the inscription, and the joke about the year also sounds a little desperate. I wonder whether Jo loved French art too. And why didn't Stu keep her gift? And Rebecca Ime - who was she? An unusual name. And why did she get rid of A Friend from England ? Didn't she like it? Were its messages too close to home? The Lewis Percy was withdrawn from one of the libraries I used to work in. I might even have stamped one or two of those dates.

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've long enjoyed the novels and also the literary criticism of David Lodge. Late in his career, with perhaps no more novels to come, Lodge, like his hero Henry James, has turned to autobiography, and  Writer's Luck: a memoir 1976-1991 (above) is the second volume. It reads a little like Lodge's great campus novels of that era, but with one major exception. Lodge declares himself a kind of war reporter in the sexual revolution that coincided with his adulthood, rather than a participant - whereas his characters were always enthusiastically and energetically involved. This makes the memoir a little pedestrian at times, even a little disappointing. But lives are often like that. Lodge's 'global campus' novel Small World was shortlisted for the 1984 Booker Prize, along with works by J. G. Ballard, Julian Barnes, Anita Desai, Penelope Lively and Anita Brookner. Lodge was of the popular opinion that Ballard's Empire of the Sun was the runaway favourite....

Her fiction is noted for its subtlety and technical skill but this can be deceptive, and has indeed deceived an odd ghetto of English critics who greet her novels with delighted misunderstanding. Elsewhere it is recognised that in ambush behind her classically beautiful prose, rooted in the territory of small lives, is a devilry that works on her stories like lemon zest. Family and Friends , in Alfred's final revenge,* provides a finale so delicate and precise that you can almost see the keen eye of the author slowly blinking at you. Callil and Toibin, The Modern Library ['the 200 best novels since 1950'] (1999) *I'm not sure I really noted this ending on earlier readings. It concerns Alfred and Nettie and occurs in the last few lines. Brookner does love her last-minute reversals, reveals and surprises. * The Brooknerian will now be taking a break of a few weeks. Back soon. Thanks for reading!

Brookner spoke at length about Family and Friends to Olga Kenyon in Women Writers Talk (1989). 'It's my family,' she said. 'Of course they're rendered into fiction because I didn't know them till I was about seventeen - when I began to see them as separate people.' It was indeed a family photo that sparked the novel: a cousin showed her a wedding picture with her grandmother dominating the group. 'I gave the photograph back, but the following day I began to write Family and Friends . I had always avoided writing about my family. They had given me a good deal of trouble in real life.' Although, largely from lack of knowledge, she fictionalised the early lives of the uncles and aunts in the novel, 'somewhere in the course of this invention, I discovered I was writing what amounted to a true chronicle. Whether this was an obscure form of unconscious memory, whether it was intuition, or whether it was the exhilaration of disposing of these ch...

'I never thought he would marry, like the others,' thinks Sofka of her son Alfred in chapter 9 of  Family and Friends . 'I thought he had passed the age of danger.' It's a markedly literary novel, in the sense of its allusiveness to other works. The set-piece scene in Wren House with Dolly (a soon-to-be self-allusive choice of name for Anita Brookner) and the scrambled eggs suggests several such rural house-parties in English literature. Howards End , perhaps? L. P. Hartley? There is, additionally, specifically a reference to Dickens. Brookner disdained comparisons with Jane Austen. But doesn't the quote above recall a line from the opening of Persuasion -  Elizabeth Elliot hoping to be propositioned by a baronet within a twelvemonth, recognising as she does her approach to 'the years of danger'?