The Good of the Novel

by Liam McIlvanney

  Brookner’s protagonists are at once uniquely her own – that is, a mirror of her own particular consciousness – and also a mirror of today’s Odd Women, an unglamorous yet increasingly numerous breed, to judge by the continued interest in her books, which are read chiefly by women, and by the ongoing erosion of social mores. One reads Brookner as one reads a murder mystery (as opposed to a romance novel), obscurely titillated by the terrifying fate that befalls her characters – relegated to the margins for their failures, which are always born of their innocence as opposed to their guilt (for which they inevitably feel guilty all the same), of their ‘blamenessness,’ a favorite Brookner word – and anxious, too, for clues as to ways to avoid this fate oneself. Sometimes the dreaded conclusion already has befallen us as well, sometimes we are swimming to keep our own heads above water, and mistakenly look to Brookner for solace or solutions, which are never forthcoming; in this regard, she must always disappoint. (It comes as something of a surprise to discover that Brookner can be quite scornful on the page – she writes to console no one except herself, and womanly worth, refreshingly, is far from an absolute.) Some of her readers give up on her after the third or fourth novel, unable to take any more. (One beautiful, well-educated, solitary Egyptian woman who lives in New York told me recently, shuddering, that her own mother had made it to nine.) But Brookner’s message is calm and matter-of-fact: her characters are destined to become what they become, even though they do not necessarily glean this until the action is complete, when the tables have already been turned, when it’s too late to fight; this fact must be accepted with dignity and stoicism and moral valor. Obsessed with time and with time running out, her protagonist becomes highly attuned, finally, to the price of every sexual foray and every social alliance, able to tabulate the results of the minutest demographic disparities, in class and age and ethnicity. At the same time, she is frequently baffled as to how to use up her days, especially when long-awaited freedom from responsibility, usually filial, finally arrives. Often we find her walking the streets for hours, without a destination. This is the Brookner conundrum. The constant awareness of time, devotion to the hours, accompanied by limitless and often baffled waiting, is one of the most resonant elements in her books. It serves to confront the reader with the realisation that her time, too, is fast running out. How to live out one’s days, especially all alone? This, finally, is Brookner’s great question, touching, uncomfortably, on the essential eternal concern of one’s own mortality, however impossible that may seem. (‘I have never understood how men can so lightly cast it out of their minds,’ Constant’s Adolphe remarks, recalling the death of an older woman with whom he once discussed the subject endlessly, a woman whose ‘remarkable and highly original mind’ had had a great influence on him. ‘But she did not understand the ways of the world and, again like so many others, through failing to adapt herself to an artificial but necessary code of behaviour, she had lived to see her hopes disappointed and her youth pass joylessly away, until at last old age had overtaken but not subdued her.’) But not subdued her. What gets the Brookner heroine up and out of bed each morning is what gets every prisoner up. Aside from the duty to live, an emotion perhaps more irrational, more absurd, even than love: hope; or, rather, hope against hope. And therein lies remarkable valiance.

  Edith Hope, the narrator of Brookner’s best-known novel, her fourth, Hotel du Lac, published in 1984, is a writer of romance novels, of the satisfyingly resolved Harlequin or Barbara Cartland or even Brontë sort (Brookner herself is a writer of anti-romance novels of the fraught, doomed sort). At one point in the novel, Edith recalls a luncheon with her publisher in London, just before her arrival at the exclusive Swiss hotel on Lake Geneva to which she has recently been banished for significant social misconduct (which is to say, something so bad that mental instability is suspected). The publisher gently tries to suggest that she consider a new tack, today’s readers being more interested in sex than in romance. Edith demurs. As for her readers, ‘they want to believe that they are going to be discovered, looking their best, behind closed doors, just when they thought that all was lost, by a man who has battled across continents … to reclaim them. Ah! If only it were true.’ (A century before, Rhoda Nunn, in George Gissing’s The Odd Women, blames the spell of such mythologies for a young girl’s recent elopement: ‘All her spare time was given to novel-reading … Love – love – love; a sickening sameness of vulgarity. What is more vulgar than the ideal of novelists. They won’t represent the actual world; it would be too dull for their readers. In real life, how many men and women fall in love? Not one in every ten thousand, I am convinced … There is the sexual instinct, of course, but that is quite a different thing; the novelists daren’t talk about that.’) Edith herself is well aware of being a proponent of the vulgar ideal, and even dimly, shamefully aware, in spite of herself, of being in its grip. For Edith, the most potent myth of all for her readers is Aesop’s fable of the tortoise and the hare, a myth she consciously exploits herself. In her books, she explains, ‘It is the mouse-like unassuming girl who gets the hero, while the scornful temptress with whom he has had a stormy affair retreats baffled from the fray, never to return. The tortoise wins every time. This is a lie, of course,’ she goes on, ‘In real life … it is the hare who wins … The propaganda goes all the other way, but only because it is the tortoise who is in need of consolation. Like the meek who are going to inherit the earth.’ This is the suspense, such as it is, at the center of nearly every Brookner novel: Will the tortoise finally win? Will the tortoise even make headway? Will the tortoise perhaps demonstrate that her own nuanced qualities, not shared by the hare, are redeeming in their own right? Finally, will the tortoise ever be seen as an object of desire? (In The Rules of Engagement, Brookner’s 2003 novel, one of two competing tortoises does ‘win’, but only briefly, and only in secret ephemeral intimacy. Passion actually counts for very little in the world, we are not altogether surprised to learn, even though it is the most real thing we know. Naturally, things end badly, as they must.) What actually and consistently does win is power or money or strength or beauty or tallness or boldness or ascendant class – or, preferably, a heady cocktail of all these things. Love plus love equals zed, let’s face it. And yet: it is what we crave, all of us. (Aesop features in Brookner’s meditations, but where is Darwin?)

  This is the Brookner lament: her heroines subscribe to the myths – not just those of Aesop but of the King James Bible, the Western canon, all of it – they honor their parents, consider their neighbors, are faultless in their worldly dealings, make the most of their personal attractiveness, and yet they still go unrewarded. They’ve been lied to, Brookner would have us know, robbed in the church, and she is at first bewildered, then furious about it. (As are many of her readers.) The cunning and successful – the ‘plausible,’ or the ‘bold,’ Brookner calls them – never abided by such rules in the first place. (And when, we may ask, have they ever, in the history of mankind?) But the worst of it, the final humiliation, is that the honorable are now held in contempt. Further, there appears to be scant refuge: Religion? Please! For Brookner, the only God is the sun. One is still obliged to make one’s way through the world as a kind of orphan saint, bereft of the comforts of a father, and in accordance with one’s own moral imperatives. (‘Only that possesses value which you have thought in the first instance for your own instruction,’ Schopenhauer reminds us. There is no other way.) Though there is almost unbearable sorrow in this dim view, there is also great relief, just as there is in, finally, giving oneself over to the sun, a God with no face. For as Brookner magically demonstrates, there is in fact enormous solace to be found in the divinity of simple light. The great painters understood this, too. The sun rising and setting in the sky every day, its subtle casts of gold and silver that mark our days, the glittering chartreuse of new trees that we remember from spring to spring. There is the anxiousness to be done with it all, certainly, and then again no. It is the light that gives one
pause. The beautiful Brookner clothes are a strangely fitting counterpart to the porcelain-blue skies, devoid of duplicity, with their promise of heaven. Perhaps dress is also a way to honor the beauty of the world. And so – what? A return to paganism of sorts; a pagan book of hours. This must suffice.

  To the relaxed and amoral, the new (or neo-new) order of greed and implacable striving comes easily; there is no thought of any need to oppose it. To the chaste and circumspect and punctilious, this is a dismaying thing, for we are speaking of the rare flowers, which bloom for only days at a time in February. In truth, the chaste and the circumspect have always been on the wrong side of things, as Brookner sees it, or half sees it (she is, after all, one of the rare February blossoms). Their blame lies in their refusal (or inability) to see things as they are, to acknowledge wickedness, vainglory, Versace. Ignorance of the real is no excuse, nor is innocence. The world has changed – once again – for the worse. Yet another noir is born.

  Edith herself, behaving in accordance with the tenets of Harlequinism, has recently left a seemingly kind and unobjectionable prospective husband (a man who, like herself, has been faithful to the rules) at the altar simply because she doesn’t love him, finding herself unable at the last minute to renounce an unpromising but presumably sexually fulfilling relationship with a married man (Brookner is austerely unspecific as to this critical point, perhaps by reason of Edith’s innate delicacy, though the author herself becomes more expansive in successive novels). A horrified friend has sent her off to the mysterious hotel on the lake, to regain her senses (implied penance being a part of the process). On arriving, ensconced in her hotel room, whose most notable feature, despite its bright immaculateness, is ‘its air of deadly calm’, with its ‘veal-colored’ carpet and curtains and counterpane (even though you may never have been in such a room, you know its austere and faintly disturbing elegance instantly), Edith contemplates the view:

  From the window all that could be seen was a receding area of grey. It was to be supposed that beyond the grey garden, which seemed to sprout nothing but the stiffish leaves of some unfamiliar plant, lay the vast grey lake, spreading like an anaesthetic towards the invisible further shore, and beyond that, in imagination only, yet verified by the brochure, the peak of the Dent d’Oche, on which snow might already be slightly and silently falling. For it was late September, out of season; the tourists had gone, the rates were reduced, and there were few inducements for visitors in this small town at the water’s edge, whose inhabitants, uncommunicative to begin with, were frequently rendered taciturn by the dense cloud that descended for days at a time and then vanished without warning to reveal a new landscape, full of colour and incident: boats skimming the lake, passengers at the landing stage, an open air market, the outline of the gaunt remains of a thirteenth-century castle, seams of white on the far mountains, and on the cheerful uplands to the south a rising backdrop of apple trees, the fruit sparkling with emblematic significance. For this was a land of prudently harvested plenty, a land which had conquered human accidents, leaving only the weather distressingly beyond control.

  This is the true magic of Brookner – her ability, through cadenced classical sentences, to conjure up an atmosphere that is not quite of this world, one that is balanced between a slightly hyperreal landscape – also the terrain of great painters – and dreamscape, which together summon up a rich emotional backdrop for her drama (or anti-drama; you choose). The paragraph might describe a painting of Caspar David Friedrich’s; indeed, Edith herself might be the Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog, which might in turn be a title from one of her books, Beneath the Visiting Moon and The Sun at Midnight being two of them. The book’s first paragraph’s metaphorical voyage from dreary, unsettling wintery opacity to bright, sunlit paradise also charts the pilgrim’s progress of the novel of romance. Brookner must inevitably suffuse this perfect scene of order with the disorder of conscious or unconscious human volition.

  Brookner, an art historian by training, has a practiced eye and an exquisite sensitivity to the nuances and associations of color and light, and also a rich allegorical vocabulary. Nearly everything in her book has emblematic significance. The lake, the garden, the peak, the reduced rates, Switzerland itself, are all the material of vivid dreams, to which Edith succumbs each night, clad in her virginal ‘long white nightgown’. In the evening after dinner that first day, walking along the lake’s shore, Edith is reminded of ‘nothing so much as those silent walks one takes in dreams, and in which unreason and inevitability go hand in hand. As in dreams she felt both despair and a sort of doomed curiosity …’ And the vast lake is of course the great symbolic repository of the unconscious, both alluring and terrifying in its associations of sex and death by drowning and voyages to uncertain, distant shores. In Brookner’s most recent novel, Leaving Home, the narrator Emma Roberts observes, ‘It was not wakefulness that disturbed me; it was sleep itself, that descent into the unfathomable, the unknown, the element that threatens us all.’

  The hotel itself is a kind of emblem, in off season resembling more a sanatorium, with its handful of guests, nearly all of them wealthy women in various states of exile. (A ‘gyneceum,’ as Edith refers to it, with dry distaste, it is also something of an orphanage, a nunnery, or even a women’s correctional facility, all homes to the marginal.) There is a taciturn elderly deaf countess who dresses in black and wears anachronistic veils with tiny velvet bows; the hotel is where she lives half the year, banished from her ancestral home by her son’s venal, flamboyant second wife, who has no use for the old woman, whose life in turn has been reduced to stoical waiting for her son’s monthly Sunday visits. There is a cynical, fierce, and beautiful young woman with an eating disorder and a small noisy dog; her despised husband is in need of an heir, and has sent her off to the hotel in order that she may optimise her health. And there is a fabulously rich mother and daughter whose devotional bond is cemented seemingly by nothing more than extravagant shopping sprees (the mother’s quirky, vividly described nightly dinner costumes seem straight out of the pages of Élegance, though we are now situated in the early stages of brand psychosis, and so maybe not). The only male on hand is an attractive middleaged Englishman who dresses in grey and wears a deerstalker hat and whose wife has left him a few years earlier for a much younger man. A collector of antique famille rose dishes, he fancies himself a connoisseur of women as well and is prospecting among the hotel’s exiles, this mostly purposeless set rendered poignant by their collective abandonment – they are like lost change on the beach.

  Edith little by little comes to know the hotel’s guests and something of their histories. She writes dull, rambling, self-abasing letters (mercifully unsent) to her lover, David, back home, in a painful attempt to amuse him – her writerly dog’s trick – and finds herself distressed upon rereading them to note that her narrative has somehow ‘accumulated elements of introspection, of criticism, even of bitterness’. (The reader suspects the truth about this man at once: at a Sunday noon drinks party, moments before Edith actually makes his acquaintance, examining his back she detects from his impatient movements ‘a burning desire to get away’. Later, on the day she’s failed to show up at her own wedding, she calls for him at the auction house where he works. His assistant says, ‘doing a sale outside Worcester. Anyone could have done it. I don’t know why he went.’ Such are the moments when the mind’s reason crosses swords with passion’s paranoia; we all know which one wins out. This ghostly, treacherous, yet divine man makes countless appearances, in various guises, in Brookner’s books.) When the beautiful worldly woman with the dog takes Edith into her confidence and gives her the lowdown about the guests, Edith sheepishly realises that while she is capable of making up characters, she’s unable to read those of real life. ‘For the conduct of life she required an interpreter.’ Edith is the odd woman out in this crowd, of course. All of the women present know the rules of the game, which are duly explained to her by the mysterious gentleman in grey, Mr Neville. To h
im, she reveals, flushing, that there are two kinds of writers: ‘Those who are preternaturally wise, and those who are preternaturally naïve, as if they had no experience to go on. I belong in the latter category.’ This is a great confession for a writer, any writer, to make.

  ‘Edith, you are a romantic,’ he declares one brilliant, mellow day over lunch at a trellised restaurant at a nearby village, delivering the deadly blow. The devil’s advocate – there is very often one in Brookner – he argues for a personal selfishness that rather uncomfortably recalls the tenets of Ayn Rand: ‘You have no idea how promising the world begins to look once you have decided to have it all for yourself. And how much healthier your decisions are once they become entirely selfish … To assume your own centrality may mean an entirely new life.’ Thoughtful, Mephistophelian Mr Neville would like to persuade Edith of the puerility of love, which she is naturally loath to accept. ‘I cannot live without it,’ she declares. ‘I cannot think or act or speak or write or even dream with any kind of energy in the absence of love. I feel excluded from the living world.’ To which he counters, ‘You do not need more love. You need less. Love has not done you much good, Edith. Love has made you secretive, self-effacing, perhaps dishonest?’ To which she can only nod in tacit agreement. The idea of putting herself first, for once, is an appealing one, which she seriously considers. Mr Neville proposes that what Edith needs instead is the social protection of marriage, but one without the bourgeois restrictions of faithfulness, and this he offers himself, aboard a boat, as it crosses the lake.

  Inevitably, given Edith’s companions at the gyneceum, her musings turn to mothers and their children, particularly to mothers and their daughters, to Mrs Pusey and her apparently devoted daughter, Jennifer, and to Edith and her own mother. She is drawn into stinging remembrance of an experience with her mother that pales in the face of the Puseys’ apparently easy relationship (easy, too, to make a typo here). What is the greatest shame of a child? Not having felt – or, indeed, been – properly loved, with abandon: as a child, for simply being a child, a discrete individual, the joyful product of her parents’ joyful union. Another shame: perhaps, too, a feeling that one’s parents are not quite like those of the others around one – financially insecure, withdrawn, excessively reliant on their own child for protection, rather than the other way around. Nearly every one of Brookner’s heroines suffers from some sort of variation of this crippling handicap, having made itself felt in earliest childhood. When Mrs Pusey celebrates her seventy-ninth birthday with a gigantic perfect Swiss cake, Edith is reminded of her own paltry birthdays, on which it fell to her to make her own cake and serve it. These sorts of memories make Brookner’s characters withdrawn, nervous, unduly watchful as to their own conduct, searching for errors that might explain their fall from grace. Edith, because she is doomed to conscientiousness, is forced into a meditation on her own mother’s bitter disappointment with life, which summons up the inevitable pity. Her failure to realise her own ideal being foremost in her mother’s mind, she largely ignored Edith. No one’s fault, you could say, but the effect has been grievous. Edith, being intelligent and hypersensitive and eager to compensate for any inadequacy of her own, has always strived for something her father taught her in times of distress: strength through character. ‘This is when character shows,’ he explains, whenever poor Edith is reduced to tears. (‘Good women always think it is their fault when someone else is being offensive. Bad women never take the blame for anything,’ Mr Neville shrewdly observes on his outing with Edith; the prospective value to himself of Edith’s tragic empathy and conscience is not lost on him.) Still, at the hotel Edith finds herself mulling over not her own vulnerability but her mother’s: