Anita Brookner (1928–2016)

Romance novelist Edith Hope has escaped from her life at a quiet Swiss hotel at the end of its season. Her life in London consists chiefly of making others happy – her publisher by writing not-quite-bestseller romances, and her friends by making up numbers at dinner parties and saying what’s expected of her. She is more isolated than ever in her retreat, and to occupy her mind she analyzes her fellow guests almost as if they are characters in one of her books. The only eligible male show more guest attaches himself to her and he seems to offer a permanent escape from the difficulties she left behind.

This novel appears to be a response to Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women. Brookner uses this phrase twice in the novel, and this seems deliberate. Pym’s Mildred Lathbury ends her loneliness through marriage to an anthropologist, to whom she can be useful. Brookner’s Edith Hope makes a different choice, rejecting marriage to a man she doesn’t love and who doesn’t love her to continue as mistress to a man she loves who will never leave his wife for her. She has realized just in time that marriage to such a man will not end her loneliness. It would be interesting to pair these novels in a reading group and see where the discussion goes. show less

Reading this novel was my introduction to the world of Anita Brookner. Having started with Hotel du Lac, her Booker prize-winning novel, I moved on to others including Providence and Incidents in the Rue Laugier and Look at Me. But it was experiencing her distinctive prose style and characters with complicated emotional lives that drew me in. Hotel is written mostly in the form of musings of the protagonist and has very little overt activity. But her life is changing, partly at the show more suggestion of her friends and partly through her own meditations on her situation. The developments of these small changes, of her reactions to loneliness and the stigma of being unattached, are the stuff that moves a reader to think about her condition as a woman and a human being. Her choices lead to a reinvigorated self-reliance that may be difficult, but it is being true to herself. Anita Brookner's novels are short but they pack a powerful punch. show less

Good grief, I have a real knack for choosing stories that don't help my current spirits. In this evocative but unremittingly sad story, we meet eighty-year-old Beth, who lives in defiant independent in a basement flat near Victoria. Her solitary state is partly a matter of choice: she asserts, with a prickle, 'I am not lonely except in company.' And yet there's a smack of wishful thinking behind those words. With a broken marriage behind her, without children and with no close friends or show more neighbours, Beth passes her days with a strict schedule of books and visits to the local hairdresser's, where she finds a measure of company and liveliness. But one morning she wakes having had a dream of her two girlhood friends, which causes her to revisit her past and her present situation.

When Beth is caught in the rain at the hairdresser's, one of the girls introduces her to Chris, who runs a car service for elderly ladies. His brightness, youth and enthusiasm bewitch Beth, who discovers that her heart hasn't yet entirely withered away. This cheerful young man becomes an answer to the yawning void in her life. But do we run the risk of building castles in the air around charming people who appear suddenly in our lives? Can such idealism be sustained? For all her assertions of satisfaction, Beth's loneliness is so vividly present that it's almost another character, darkly clawing at the corners of the page, and when events cast a new light on her new friend Chris, she is finally nudged into wondering whether it's time to make a stand and change her life. Deeply moving as a picture of isolated old age, tragic, and enough to make one start casting worried glances in the mirror. And yet, the story is so affecting precisely because Brookner is so clever, insightful and articulate. show less

'Hotel du Lac' won the Booker Prize in 1984 and is set in an out of season luxury hotel situated on Lake Geneva. Edith Hope, the autobiographical heroine, writes commercially successful, formulaic romances. Edith’s fictional heroines always get their men, but their success does not reflect her own life.

Edith is well-educated and amusing, but rather plain, “a mild-looking, slightly bony woman in a long cardigan, distant, inoffensive, quite nice eyes, rather large hands and feet, meek show more neck.” She’s had lovers but remains independent, has her own flat and earns her own money. She writes the same kind of predictable novels and refuses to change them to suit contemporary taste.

Edith’s friends think she has a pitiful existence, they can’t imagine she has a secret lover and so try to improve her life. She’s quite content with her quiet independence but nevertheless, accepts a proposal of marriage from the kind if dull Geoffrey Long, who is still grieving for his recently deceased mother. However, en route to the Registry Office she suddenly changes her mind and cruelly jilts Long. She voluntarily travels to Switzerland, not as a punishment but as a place for reflection.

Once in Switzerland the story centres around six hotel guests, five English and one French, five women and one man. Staying alongside Edith there is the old, widowed and lonely Countess Bonneuil who has been exiled to the hotel because her son's wife won't have her in their villa across the lake. Self-indulgent Iris Pusey ostentatiously displays the wealth she inherited from her late husband. She overwhelms her adult daughter Jennifer with affection, keeping her fixed in a childlike dependence. Beautiful, elegant, upper-class Monica is a terrible snob who despises everyone who’s “in trade.” Monica suffers from bulimia and if she can’t produce a male heir after this stay at the hotel, her husband will divorce her. She is desperate for a child if only to avoid the ignominy of being a divorcee.

Philip Neville, the prosperous owner of a successful electronics company, " is worldly and attractive but is divorced from his ex-wife, who ran off with her younger lover. Neville proposes to Edith but what he wants he frankly admits is someone to entertain for him and who will not embarrass him, a loveless yet comfortable marriage in which they would both be free to take lovers as long as they did it discreetly. Edith soon realises that she is faced with a choice, between love with the often absent and unattainable married man back in London or a wealthy but loveless life with Neville. But which will she chose?

Brookner doesn't reveal why Edith has been banished to Switzerland until roughly two thirds through the book and when she does its quite amusing but this is about the only touch of humour throughout. This is a thoughtful, introspective and character driven piece of writing, where nothing really happens and all the characters are damaged in some way or other. The book looks at what it means to be a woman in what is still a male dominated world particularly in publishing and there are numerous similarities between Edith and and Virginia Wolff. This book is a long way from my usual choice of reading material but I picked it up solely because of its Booker win, and although well written it was a little slow for my tastes. show less