The Brooknerian

You can come across the most shocking things in Brookner. A third of the way through  The Rules of Engagement the narrator's heavy but inoffensive husband dies: the experienced Brookner reader probably suspected Digby's time would soon be up. But the manner of his going is appalling. He is brought home by his secretary, having obviously suffered a stroke, though this isn't named. No medical attention has been sought, and none is enlisted by his wife, the narrator, who maintains a vigil over him through the few dark days and nights that follow. It's like something from a Victorian novel. Then he dies. These scenes are set, at a guess, in the 1970s, in an age perhaps less medicalised than today. But would you really not at the very least have called a doctor? The narrator doesn't, and there's no further comment on this. In Brookner we're beguiled into such acceptances. Why? Why? Is there a reason? Or is it just part of the weirdness of the Brookner world, the ...

I have come to believe that there can be no adequate preparation for the sadness that comes at the end, the sheer regret that one's life is finished, that one's failures remain indelible and one's successes illusory. The Rules of Engagement , ch. 5 These lines were quoted on the flyleaf of the UK first edition. They come amid what amounts to a Brooknerian manifesto of belief, taking in such familiar themes as the gods of antiquity; the notion of living a posthumous life; the pointlessness of living a virtuous life; the need to take chances and defy safety. We even get a line about playing Russian roulette with one's life, which echoes a practically identical comment in Brookner's  2002 Independent interview : I think you should play Russian roulette with your life, frankly [...] because there's so little time.

I knew that, in comparison with Edmund, I had few assets of my own. This was one factor that seriously divided us. Sometimes I felt poor when I was with him, and this was a genuine shadow on my happiness. The Rules of Engagement , ch. 4 She wonders, further, whether this aspect of the affair is apparent to him. Brookner, as author, might have similar concerns. It's easy to see all Brookner characters as well-heeled, comfortable, beyond money concerns. But there are subtleties, gradations, and Brookner is careful to trace them, urging the sympathetic reader to view the likes of Edmund as safely bourgeois and the narrator as faintly but certainly déclassée . In more than a few novels Brookner gives her protagonists real financial and property worries. Not that some critics would ever be persuaded her ostensible privilege, and that of her heroines and heroes, didn't disqualify her from their serious consideration.

An elegant sufficiency, content, Retirement, rural quiet, friendship, books... Lines from Thomson's refined poem 'The Seasons' open each chapter of Barbara Pym's 1987 novel Civil to Strangers . Except that it wasn't written in 1987 but in 1936. Rarely do authors enjoy such prolific afterlives as Pym, who died in 1980. Civil to Strangers , her second novel, written in her twenties (her first was Some Tame Gazelle , not published till 1950), has a slightly uncanny timeless quality, not only because of its unusual publication history, but perhaps because of the way Barbara Pym saw the world, or did then. There is no sense of the passing of time, of time being finite. Everything has the potential to be comfortable and contented. Young characters dream of genteel retirement, but it's a state they envision lasting for ever. The novel, published as part of a longer collection, is short and light. It tells the story of Adam and Cassandra Marsh-Gibbon, a young marr...

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...

It's easy at times to sympathise with Brookner's detractors, that small army of reviewers who delighted in reporting she'd written the same book for the umpteenth time with just a few punctuation changes. When we get to late Brookner the echoes of earlier works have become deafening. It could be seen as a service to the fans. We might take pleasure in the evocations of Paris, in the London place names, in a character who bears more than a passing resemblance to someone from an earlier favourite... But the process - Brookner's obsessive retreading and reworking and reimagining - also yields discoveries none of us would be without. Elizabeth in chapter 2 of The Rules of Engagement is 'excluded by some sort of biological misunderstanding'. It's the culmination of a passage that casts back as far as Frances Hinton and Look at Me , and yet manages to be new, and full of new hurt: ...I also knew, or came to know, that I was not the kind of woman who sent out th...

[Completing a series on Middlemarch , Book by Book:] 'It's rather a strong check to one's self-complacency to find how much of one's right doing depends on not being in want of money,' says Mr Farebrother in chapter 63. Middlemarch , masquerading as a provincial Trollope-style novel, is strikingly political. Previously, in chapter 60, Eliot satirises the parochialism of the Middlemarchers, 'who sneered at [Will's] Polish blood, and were themselves of a breed very much in need of crossing'. I can think of nothing so Left-leaning (even in Dickens) elsewhere in Victorian fiction. * I'm interested in how the writing of one book leads to another. My favourite Eliot is Daniel Deronda , which follows Middlemarch . It begins with a memorable scene of gambling in a German resort - and surely the billiards scene in chapter 66 of Middlemarch has some connection with what its author would come to in her next novel. Likewise the Middlemarchers' react...