FICTION
Matters of the heart
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`Anita Brookner scorns faddishness, and deploys, in its place, a relentless moral scrutiny.'
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ANITA BROOKNER has long been one of my favourite writers. Knowing that she is not a fashionable writer has only made it easier to be loyal to her particular form of truth telling: She scorns faddishness, and deploys, in its place, a relentless moral scrutiny. In her 22nd novel, The Rules of Engagement, Brookner does not deviate much from themes she set out to explore a long while ago: The vanquishing of the innocent at the hands of the rapacious and self serving, the certainty of aloneness, the longing for an illusory sense of warmth to dispel this aloneness.
The protagonist of this novel, married young to a much older man, embarks on an adulterous liaison with one of his friends. The fallout of this particular affair, his entanglement with a childhood friend of hers — another innocent — and its ugly denouement is what constitutes the plot of the novel. Brookner has never favoured the complex plot: In fact, some of her resolutions often strike me as clumsy, particularly in this novel. (The convenient and rather melodramatic death of the husband being a case in point.)
What she is interested in exploring, with a pitiless and unswerving commitment, is states of the mind; the effect, in other words, of the courses of action we commit ourselves to. These revelations lead her to explore territories which the greatest writers have explored. (And I use that word every bit as self consciously as it should be used.)
The protagonist of this novel does not work — almost none of Brookner's female protagonists do (read have to), being comfortably off — and a crude analysis of her work has often hinged around this: Her characters do not inhabit the "real" world and their involvement with their respective states of mind borders the self-indulgent, as a consequence. Whatever the merits of this dubious argument, Brookner's concern continues to lie with the lives of women and their often reluctant preoccupation with their emotional lives.
This novel, for the first time, explores fully Brookner's pervasive discomfort with the gains of the feminist movement: A peculiar mix of admiration and a knowledge that her protagonists were born too late to be able to partake of the fruits of this movement. Witness this passage: "Born in 1948, we were well behaved, incurious, with none of the rebellious features adopted by those who make youthfulness a permanent quest — the sixties took us by surprise: we were unprepared, unready, uncomprehending".
The protagonist of the novel, Elizabeth, takes long walks — and walking through the streets of London has long been Brookner's trope to define individual unease — reads the Victorian novel, and, though her loyalties are tested, remains committed to early loyalties and female friendship. She also rejects the convenience of falling into complacent old age with a single man whom she meets along the way: Thus Brookner favours passion over complaisance, loneliness over pragmatism. It is precisely these choices that make her protagonists difficult to categorise: They might be old-fashioned, but they are always able to see their situations for what they are.
What makes this possible is the exquisite balance of Brookner's prose (no less sharp here). Her writing, while dealing with the elegiac (one of her favourite scenes is meditations on the fading light of day, the early onset of autumn: one never tires of this exquisite and highly stylised melancholy) is anything but sentimental: It is, on the contrary, hard, analytical, polished. Witness, for example, this passage: "One's longings might be, and usually were, unsatisfied, so that if one were lucky they merely receded, but remained subject to conjecture. One returned time and again to memories, or fantasized alternative endings, in which the triumph of the moralist, or the novelist, prevailed. But I had been expelled from that sequence and should now have to live with doubt".
Brookner trained as an art historian and several of her books figure individual works of art at their centres. She is also preoccupied with dreams and their continuous ability to cause us unease. Many of her later books deal with the affliction of growing old and its bitter certainties.
The Rules of Engagement is not Brookner's finest novel. It does not signal a writer at the height of her powers either, to use that dreadful cliché. It stands, instead, as testimony to Brookner's reassuring concern with matters of the heart, as well as reminding us of her extraordinary ability to write the most marvellous prose.
IRA SINGH
The Rules of Engagement, Anita Brookner, Viking, £10.99.
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