My admiration for Anita Brookner and her incisive writing style is no secret, but there are some aspects of her work that niggle. I am not referring to the most common complaints: that her characters are all similar sorts of people; that they live in similar areas; that their lives are often bland. My issue concerns her implausibility when it comes to everyday practical matters. She sometimes seems to live in a world where nothing works in quite the way it does for the rest of us.
Several of her characters, for example, find themselves looking for flats at some stage. Do they go to estate agents and visit a selection of properties, as mortals do, before making up their minds? Is a mortgage ever required? Do the purchases take months while surveys are completed, leases examined carefully for nasty clauses and completion dates negotiated by all parties in the chain? Hardly.
This example from Leaving Home is fairly typical. Having been left some money after her mother’s death, Emma Roberts decides to buy a flat. Unusually for a Brookner character, it does occur to her to visit an estate agent (they usually don’t seem to know what to do until a place presents itself) but there the real world ends. One of the young women at the agency wants to sell her own flat and Emma arranges to visit. There follows one of the quickest property purchases in history (with the possible exception of The Next Big Thing, where the central character views, buys and moves into a property within three days). This exchange takes place within minutes of Emma's arrival at the flat.
‘I love it. How much do you want for it?’
She named a sum I thought astronomical and which I automatically accepted…. When I saw her begin to waver I reached into my bag for my chequebook and wrote her a cheque for the full amount…. ‘It’s quite all right,’ I told her. ‘It won’t bounce’.
No such thing as exchange of contracts and completion dates in Bookner’s world. And it’s a mystery why anyone would think the seller needed reassurance about the cheque when she is the one still possession of the property and the Land Registry has not yet been notified, but by then the transaction is so implausible that another layer of disbelief can hardly make much difference. Are the technicalities really unknown to Brookner? Is she so set on exquisite writing and exploring the minds of her characters that she really can’t be bothered to make the humdrum things in life sound remotely convincing?
This odd disconnection with reality also shows in her handling of time. In Incidents on the rue Laugier, for instance, time jumps ten years so that the later decades are out of hilter with the characters’ ages (I checked this several times and remain convinced it isn’t possible). And while Christmas may start earlier than it used to, it still seems highly unlikely that a hotel would have Christmas decorations up in the middle of October as is the case in Look at Me. That is not the only timing problem in Look at Me. Frances Hinton begins her friendship with James Anstey in October and it comes to its cruel end just before Christmas. Yet the development of the relationships between this shy couple seems to take much longer than that, indeed there is a period when they don’t meet for a couple of weeks and several other events, weeks apart, also take place in that narrow time frame.
As with time, so with distance. James regularly walks Frances home after their restaurant meals with the others in the group, after which he walks back alone (he explicitly says he walks). Yet Fran lives in Maida Vale, while James and the restaurant appear to be west of centre. This would involve a walk of at least five miles, ten for James. This hardy couple regularly do all this after a day’s work and a night out. And how much time for sleep can poor James manage?
Such oddities are not unique to Anita Brookner. I suspect that these unconvincing moments may have something to do with the loneliness (or at least the aloneness) of being a novelist. There can be inconsistencies and even impossibilities we don't notice ourselves, and we all sometimes need someone else to point out the parts that somehow don’t seem right. I suspect well-established writers are sometimes intimidating to editors, who then stick to looking for typos and grammatical points. That really seems to be the only explanation for some of the jarring bits that slip through, though we don’t know what discussions and possible arguments that may have taken place behind the scenes.
It makes me grateful for our little writers’ group in my town, where each other’s work is read and pitfalls pointed out. The advice can be taken or not, but it is useful to have other opinions. There is always the temptation to be defensive and we all feel we must know our own intentions best, but I have found that, after due reflection if not at the time, there is some merit in most (well, some) of the advice given and the points made.
None of this detracts from the joy of Brookner’s prose, but there are moments when I think some of her characters might have been a little more convincing if their world worked more like the real one.
Several of her characters, for example, find themselves looking for flats at some stage. Do they go to estate agents and visit a selection of properties, as mortals do, before making up their minds? Is a mortgage ever required? Do the purchases take months while surveys are completed, leases examined carefully for nasty clauses and completion dates negotiated by all parties in the chain? Hardly.
This example from Leaving Home is fairly typical. Having been left some money after her mother’s death, Emma Roberts decides to buy a flat. Unusually for a Brookner character, it does occur to her to visit an estate agent (they usually don’t seem to know what to do until a place presents itself) but there the real world ends. One of the young women at the agency wants to sell her own flat and Emma arranges to visit. There follows one of the quickest property purchases in history (with the possible exception of The Next Big Thing, where the central character views, buys and moves into a property within three days). This exchange takes place within minutes of Emma's arrival at the flat.
‘I love it. How much do you want for it?’
She named a sum I thought astronomical and which I automatically accepted…. When I saw her begin to waver I reached into my bag for my chequebook and wrote her a cheque for the full amount…. ‘It’s quite all right,’ I told her. ‘It won’t bounce’.
No such thing as exchange of contracts and completion dates in Bookner’s world. And it’s a mystery why anyone would think the seller needed reassurance about the cheque when she is the one still possession of the property and the Land Registry has not yet been notified, but by then the transaction is so implausible that another layer of disbelief can hardly make much difference. Are the technicalities really unknown to Brookner? Is she so set on exquisite writing and exploring the minds of her characters that she really can’t be bothered to make the humdrum things in life sound remotely convincing?
This odd disconnection with reality also shows in her handling of time. In Incidents on the rue Laugier, for instance, time jumps ten years so that the later decades are out of hilter with the characters’ ages (I checked this several times and remain convinced it isn’t possible). And while Christmas may start earlier than it used to, it still seems highly unlikely that a hotel would have Christmas decorations up in the middle of October as is the case in Look at Me. That is not the only timing problem in Look at Me. Frances Hinton begins her friendship with James Anstey in October and it comes to its cruel end just before Christmas. Yet the development of the relationships between this shy couple seems to take much longer than that, indeed there is a period when they don’t meet for a couple of weeks and several other events, weeks apart, also take place in that narrow time frame.
As with time, so with distance. James regularly walks Frances home after their restaurant meals with the others in the group, after which he walks back alone (he explicitly says he walks). Yet Fran lives in Maida Vale, while James and the restaurant appear to be west of centre. This would involve a walk of at least five miles, ten for James. This hardy couple regularly do all this after a day’s work and a night out. And how much time for sleep can poor James manage?
Such oddities are not unique to Anita Brookner. I suspect that these unconvincing moments may have something to do with the loneliness (or at least the aloneness) of being a novelist. There can be inconsistencies and even impossibilities we don't notice ourselves, and we all sometimes need someone else to point out the parts that somehow don’t seem right. I suspect well-established writers are sometimes intimidating to editors, who then stick to looking for typos and grammatical points. That really seems to be the only explanation for some of the jarring bits that slip through, though we don’t know what discussions and possible arguments that may have taken place behind the scenes.
It makes me grateful for our little writers’ group in my town, where each other’s work is read and pitfalls pointed out. The advice can be taken or not, but it is useful to have other opinions. There is always the temptation to be defensive and we all feel we must know our own intentions best, but I have found that, after due reflection if not at the time, there is some merit in most (well, some) of the advice given and the points made.
None of this detracts from the joy of Brookner’s prose, but there are moments when I think some of her characters might have been a little more convincing if their world worked more like the real one.
This is so not Brookner