The Brooknerian

Brookner, 1982   The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here. Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in. I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly As the night lies on these white walls... Sylvia Plath, 'Tulips'

There's one in Anita Brookner's 2003 novel The Rules of Engagement . I'm 47*, and there weren't any in my peer group at school. Recent news reports suggest it is a rare choice for parents. My copy of Scott's The Fortunes of Nigel (1822) dates from the 1920s. This is very likely one of the last times the novel was in print. And why? Could it be the title? The novel itself is wonderful, a fantasy of the past, in this case set in Jacobean London, and richly literary. No doubt the political associations** of the name 'Nigel', in the UK at least, will continue to keep the novel from our bookstores. *That is my actual age. I haven't been that age 'for some years'. For more on this intriguing topic, see here . **I faintly recall a Farage-themed TV documentary named after Scott's novel, but cannot find the reference.

He had nothing to do, his occupation was gone, and it seemed to him that he should never find it again. Henry James, The American , 1879 edn. He had nothing to do, his occupation was gone, had simply strayed and lost itself in the great desert of life. The American , 1907 edn. The days before him were empty, and the emptiness was as much of a burden as it had always been. Brookner, Strangers , 2009 The curiously downbeat ending to The American takes the reader by surprise. Newman has lost his great love, but surely he'll be reunited with her by the end? This is a nineteenth-century novel! But time passes, and he wanders listlessly around Europe and America, his malaise not so much tragic in a Shakespearean way ('his occupation was gone' echoing a line in Othello ) as proto-Existentialist. Brookner's Sturgis suffers a similar dying fall as he gathers up what remains to him at the end of the author's last novel Strangers . Like Newman, Sturgis wa...

'Not as grand as we. They date from the sixteenth century. It is on my father's side that we go back - back, back, back. The family antiquaries themselves lose breath. At last they stop, panting and fanning themselves, somewhere in the ninth century, under Charlemagne. That's where we begin.' Henry James, The American Whose side is James on? Fineness in a writer is sometimes to be measured in this way. Does James align himself with an ancient French family, a scion of which vocalises the above patrician words? Or is he with 'the American', the new man of the novel's title, Christopher Newman? Such ambiguities are to be found in Anita Brookner too, in those many, many novels of hers exploring the clash between the outsiders and insiders of this world. Such clashes are irreducible, and this is perhaps why she wrote so much. Ever potent because ever unresolved. The passage from The American set me remembering. The Princess Michael of Kent, when sh...

So the English summer ends in a blaze of unwonted heat, and I reflect on my reading. In Switzerland I read Henry James, as followers will have noted. I'm still a little puzzled as to why I didn't get on with Confidence . I'm presently reading The American , which is earlier still, and it is a pure pleasure. Every page, every line, has something to savour. I can't quite decide whether I've read it before. It's the classic 'International Theme' novel in which American manners clash with the ways and mores of old Europe. I would like to have read Confidence in a revised form, but it doesn't exist: James didn't include the novel in his New York Edition. The version of The American one chooses to read is, I think, crucial - it affects one's reading experience and even says a little about one's character. Absolutely I favour the later version. The differences between an early James and its revised form are in evidence practically everywhere...

Continental galleries have an atmosphere distinct from their English counterparts. Walk into the National Gallery, say, or especially Tate Modern and you might be on a station concourse or in a shopping centre. The lack of an entrance fee probably explains the difference as much as any notions of greater European sophistication. In Europe you don't wander in and wander out. Your visit is an event. I was practically the only visitor to the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in the small central German city of Kassel. Misjudging the distance and incline, I toiled up the Wilhelmshöher Allee towards a curving palace on a hill. Coolness descended among rooms of huge canvases: airy generous displays of masterpieces by Rubens, Jordaens, Van Dyck and Rembrandt: whole salons devoted to each, with side-aisles full of smaller pictures by their workshops or contemporaries. Several works stand out: this Jupiter and Callisto by Rubens... ...this Rubens Mary with saints and sinners... ...

Carl Spitzweg, Engl änder in der Campagna , 1845, Berlin Having read and enjoyed Scott's The Talisman , set in the Middle East, I next selected Trollope's  The Bertrams  from my shelves a) because it's also partially set in the Holy Land and b) because it's by now one of the few Trollopes I haven't read. It's a mark of age to have made such headway into so massive an oeuvre. I never thought, when I began, that I'd make it this far. Earliest Trollope ( The Bertrams (1959) is number eight) plus a few oddities from later (e.g.  The Landleaguers  and  The Vicar of Bullhampton ) remain for another year. Will I ever read La Vendée ? You can never tell. One book leads to another. Trollope was the best travelled of the Victorian novelists; he actually visited Jerusalem and its environs, which Scott never did (not that you'd know it from reading The Talisman ). The foreign episode in The Bertrams takes up a lengthy section near the start, and it is ver...