Perceptions exist about Anita Brookner's fiction. For many she has become the chronicler of lonely, middle-aged, childless women, and sometimes men, who are middle class, usually materially comfortable and invariably unhappy, if dignified in their misery. To an extent this is a true reflection of her eloquently despairing, intelligent and civilised central characters, who tend to wander through their days of ordered existence wondering why their lives are dull ordeals. Most Brookner characters spend a great deal of time briskly walking through damp London streets. It can not be disputed that variations on loneliness and longing dominate her novels.
Interestingly, though, for a writer with such a clearly defined literary territory and measured prose style, she has in mid- to late career made subtle modifications not only to her style, which is far less epigrammatic than it was, but also to her approach to story. Her narratives, as evident from novels such as Falling Slowly (1999) and Undue Influence (2000) have become tougher, less theoretical; as have her characters. The Bay of Angels is her 20th novel in as many years and it suggests that Brookner, always aware of the agonies of hopelessness reserved for a particular kind of woman, is now determined to balance the romantic with practicality.
Zoe Cunningham, the narrator, begins her story by admitting to being an avid reader of fairy tales. As she goes on to reveal in a second sentence of uncharacteristically laboured formality, reading such stories is not ideal "groundwork for success in worldly terms". She is reflective, a thinker and, true to Brookner's clever rueful heroines, wise in hindsight thanks to an intense experience. Despite the fact that she ponders her situation with near-forensic attention to detail, we actually know little about her; or at least only the information Brookner feels to be relevant.
She lives with her mother, a quiet widow whose life has become a passive vigil spent in enduring the days by reading, lying down or staring out the window. Into this world of silence, at regular intervals, enter the bored, pampered wives of two wealthy brothers. The women believe their mission is to stimulate Anne (the widow) to a social response before it is too late. Zoe reports her mother's habit of politely declining such invitations. One evening she does not refuse - and by chance meets up with an elderly man. He quickly makes his intentions clear. Brookner is quite brilliant on the strange dependence and importance women, all kinds of women, place on men - whether at a party or in a rest home for elderly women.
While Zoe is as self-possessed, observant and as essentially unhappy as any Brookner narrator, her mother proves an unexpectedly tragic character. Caught in a twilight zone until her surprise second marriage takes her away to France, Anne is uncomplaining, almost saintly and oddly convincing. Her exotic new life includes her daughter - whenever it suits Zoe. This arrangement is abruptly altered when Zoe decides to introduce an unreliable boyfriend into her mother's new life. Tension gives way to grief when tragedy occurs and everything changes. The women are brutally reminded that they are on their own in a ruthless world dominated by couples. With her mother's new dependence is born Zoe's determination to have her own life, and she takes charge with a believable mixture of resourcefulness and terror. Rootless, needy, Zoe emerges as a study in restlessness, an individual caught between notions of dream and reality, liberation and duty. Her dilemma - which swings between imprisonment and "terrible freedom" - becomes more compelling than she is, but this doesn't matter. Anne slides further and further into a stoic apathy that is skilfully handled by Brookner, who here shows herself to be as insightful of ordinary human pain as she is of emotional stalemate. There is a wonderful moment in which Zoe contemplates the destiny facing her and her mother "which was to live out our lives in the best possible taste". The daughter's recognition of her mother's "habitual and disastrous innocence" is shocking in its candour, just as her thoughts on looking at her dying mother's face ("she looked neither sad nor frightening, merely preoccupied ") are unnervingly exact.
Brookner is a writer apart. She invariably confers tragedy on melodrama. She is also a novelist who either alienates readers or wins them forever. She can be ponderous; at times the elegance and correct decorum of her work is too stiffly mannered. There is always a whiff of class as well as her obvious dislike of most of her characters. The Bay of Angels, suspended between two cultures, that of England and France, is a strange, oppressive novel generously populated by an assortment of odd loners beyond even Brookner's usual quota of outsiders. Still the intelligence, clarity of thought, blunt honesty and understanding of compromise as a method of survival win out. Brookner is simply a consistently good and disciplined reader of human nature. Having read 20 of her terse sagas, I have to admit I'm more than ready for the next.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
