FICTION: Strangers By Anita BrooknerPenguin, 202pp, £16.99
HOW EMPTY the day feels when work is no longer part of it. How empty a life feels when there is no one to converse with, not even a complaining dependant. How terrifying the time that is left becomes, not only because it is there to fill, but also because that same time is dwindling.
Anita Brookner's 24th novel Strangersyet again explores the world of the marginalised; the solitary men and women who appear to walk briskly about the streets of West London and inhabit those tall apartment buildings and live in fear of either saying too much or too little; their relative material wealth failing to compensate for their emotional poverty.
Paul Sturgis is a typical Brookner character. A retired bank manager, he never married and has no children. His family, such as it was, has been reduced to one relative of sorts, the widow of his cousin. Sturgis now approaching 73, has his routine, he gets his hair cut, he buys a newspaper, reads and makes a point of visiting his cousin’s widow, a cold, detached woman who wants him to think she is busy and popular whereas she is just as lonely as he is.
The idea of reading a novel sustained by fear, dread and regret may not appear overly enticing. Yet internationally respected art historian Anita Brookner, the most intelligent of observers, a Barbra Pym with sinew, brings such refined intellect, candour and irony to her intense tales of small lives that once you read her work and grasp her intent, she becomes a valued constant.
Her novels are precise, at times relentless, they even merge into each other, but her truth compels: "We met, and became friends of a sort" begins the narrator in The Rules of Engagement(2003), "by virtue of the fact that we started school on the same day."
Since her first book, A Start in Life, appeared in 1981, four years before she unexpectedly took the 1984 Booker Prize with Hotel Du Lac from the overwhelming favourite, JG Ballard’s magnificent Empire of the Sun, she has impressed with her elegant bleakness and the shattering moments of comedy. Her gaze is disciplined, yet for all the detached honesty, seldom unkindly.
Her novels, including Latcomers(1988) Incidents in the Rue Langier(1995), The Next Big Thing(2002) appeared each year for 24 years, as prompt as the swallows and then, it stopped, without warning. After a four-year silence, she has returned, at eighty, with another study of a life winding down, the life of an ordinary man who has existed without having ever really lived.
Sturgis is ordinary, desperate for love and very human. Every cruel rejection he has ever suffered remains etched in his mind. Here is a man who has paid for being too nice, too boring. The fact that he appears to have a knack for selecting unpleasant females is never quite stated but Brookner ensures that it is not too difficult to see.
Caught between his long, lonely Sundays and the endurance tests that pass for visits with Helena, the widow, Sturgis in an uncharacteristic flourish decides on a trip to Venice. On the flight he meets Mrs Gardner, an attractive and blatantly ruthless 50-something divorcee who conducts her life with the dizzy abandon of a spoilt teenager. But to Sturgis, she is younger, and therefore young. Such things are relative. Age preoccupies Sturgis who feels he has somehow missed his life as it unobstrusively scurried by. However grim it seems, and it is grim, it is remarkable the way Brookner confronts such realities.
Sturgis pivots between the cold Helena who feels she is doing him a favour when he calls to see her, and the ridiculous Vicky Gardner who clearly feels every new contact must be weighed as potentially useful. With no real feeling of affection for either, Sturgis nevertheless recognises them as human contact.
“He supposed that there were others like himself who slipped uneventfully through their lives to an age at which nothing more was possible, that there were few choices to be made, and at which chastity was no longer a burden but remained a source of regret.”
It looks as if Sturgis in his desperation for companionship will settle for Mrs Gardner but then just as he has reached the haven of the library and is “pondering the merits of Henry James (too like himself in his hesitation and scruples) and Trollope (a diligent worker, also like himself)” Sturgis hears a voice calling him.
At this point, the novel really begins to dig hard and deep into the character of Paul Sturgis. He responds with only one word, Sarah, the name of the person. “It was less a question than a statement.”
With one phrase, Brookner prepares the reader for the history which emerges. Most is left unsaid; Brookner is capable of giving careful details, or none. Her prose style which was previously highly epigrammatic, and with each novel became so stylised as to risk parody, then retreated to an even more intense severity. The prose in this new novel is not quite as elegant as usual, but is, as ever, highly effective. Many of the exchanges are sharper, less eloquent.
Sturgis and Sarah, having once been close, have lived separate lives and are now faced with resuming their old friendship.
Again Brookner watches these people, each struggling with age and the fact they are now different than they had been. There are times when the treatment Sturgis is prepared to accept becomes almost laughable. He even carries out a bizarre task. But then Brookner has made the study of human behaviour her chosen subject.
Strangersis about timing. It is also a novel which attempts to look at the ordinary, the routine, the difficulties of getting through the hours, particularly as the weight of memory becomes heavier.
Brookner the realist is also acknowledging a phenomenon which is affecting more and more people, at a younger age – the unstructured day, a world without work. Her characters rarely have financial problems; they don’t live in war zones. They seldom have children. Increasingly her characters deal with the problems of age and death and dying alone. This is not her finest novel and yet on reading it, it does inspire one to return to her previous books, a fitting testament to exactly how intuitive a writer Anita Brookner is; how skilled she is at balancing irony and pathos.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
