The Brooknerian

My school librarian (I spent most lunchtimes in the school library), a Mrs Davies, very Welsh, was a literary woman. Gradually down the years one pieces together one's prehistory. She was over the moon when Graham Greene wrote what was to be his final novel, The Captain and the Enemy ; she even had a publisher's promotional poster, which she displayed in the library. This was in, I now learn, 1988. I saw The Captain and the Enemy in a charity shop, and was at once transported. I had to have it. Such discoveries are like reclaiming the lost past. The Captain and the Enemy concerns a conman. Who else does these plausible figures with such aplomb? Le Carré of course; Brookner has several too: an Ainsworth in Fraud , a Colonel in A Friend from England . An ersatz military moniker is often de rigueur . Greene's Captain arrives at the narrator's boarding school, claiming to have won him from his father in a game of backgammon. The boy follows the Captain to a fadin...

A curious anecdote, this, from the Chelsea Society (see here ) - reminding us, as ever, that so reclusive a figure as Brookner was in some sense doomed to be constructed by such stories (as she surely knew): A resident who was on greeting terms with the novelist, the late Anita Brookner recounts this very early morning exchange on a near-deserted summer King’s Road. Resident: ‘Good morning, Miss Brookner, and what an exceptionally bright and sunny morning it is.’ Anita Brookner: ‘Quite so. And passing Markham Square I heard a fox cough.’

I was writing this book during the last year or so before Britain's deluded, masochistic departure from the European Union. Julian Barnes, 'Author's Note', The Man in the Red Coat (2019) Not a few critics of The Man in the Red Coat have made good use of Barnes's afterword, in which he makes tentative links between the Parisian  fin de siècle world that is the book's topic and the troubled politics and discourses of today. Altogether, The Man in the Red Coat is something of a disappointment. Its art and literary criticism are second to none, and it is richly illustrated, but it is confusing book, with meanderings that mimic W. G. Sebald but without his unpredictability. I found it smelt a little too much of the lamp. I fear the red-coated Pozzi, whose Sargent portrait Dr Pozzi at Home , inspired Barnes's book, may simply not be very fascinating as a subject. Ah, but when was Julian Barnes writing? That's what perversely interests me. Was...

The novel of sensation, that mid-Victorian phenomenon typified in the novels of Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Mrs Henry Wood and, to an extent, Dickens ( Great Expectations ) and Trollope ( The Eustace Diamonds ), grew out of the earlier success of the Gothic novel, though now the terror and disruption are domesticated, rooted in the modern world of the 1860s: railways, the telegraph, suburbs, the anxious middle classes and the rising lower orders. East Lynne , Wood's breathless blockbuster of 1860, tells a story of murder, jealousy and unwise alliances. There are aristocrats, but they're on the way out. Like Collins, Ellen Wood knows better the grimy world of the middle classes, of anonymous uncertain suburbia. The novel is fast, slangy, sloppy, trashy - quintessentially 'sensational'. Anita Brookner, a regular reviewer in the highbrow journals, once in a way was given a little something to tickle her fancy. Can we believe she was asked to write about ...

One looks forward to Julian Barnes's forthcoming  The Man in the Red Coat . The painting that inspires the book, Dr Pozzi at Home by John Singer Sargent, and Sargent himself, crop up interestingly in the Brookner literature. For more, see here  and here .

Accounts of meetings with Anita Brookner are often treasurable. Julian Barnes (follow the 'Julian Barnes' label at the foot of this post) was a friend; Roy Strong enjoyed several chance encounters (ditto 'Roy Strong'); James Lees-Milne commented acidly on her hair ( here ); and even I once met her, not quite by chance, in a London street ( here ). The artist Zsuzsi Roboz sketched a portrait of her, the experience of which Roboz wrote about in 2011: In the case of my meeting with Anita Brookner, I felt this was an occasion for mutual observation; she didn't miss a thing and seemed to be storing up every detail of my character and appearance as much as I was hers. The 'face to face' project was, in a sense, a series of duels between myself and the sitter, and also an occasion to witness the observer observed. The resulting picture, with its clairvoyant stare, complements the many memorable photographs of the author, and can be seen here .

The political agitation which for a year and a half had shaken England to its centre... So begins an early chapter of Coningsby - not a novel about the battles of today but about a past constitutional upheaval and its consequences, the passing of the Reform Act of 1832. Coningsby (1844) is, in parts, an addictive read if, like me, you're something of a political geek. But as a novel  it fails.* Its characters are shallow, artificial, irritating, either uttering blandly witty aphorisms or acting as mere mouthpieces for policy positions. It is unpersuasive to argue that the fate of a nation may be as compelling as that of an individual - or I, at least, find it unpersuasive. And I confess I bailed out. Oddly I found myself looking forward to Disraeli's long chapters on the politics of the 1830s, and rather dreading those following the lives of Coningsby and his Etonian pals, their arch conversations, their boring cynicism, their moments of sickly romanticism. Perhaps ...