LIFE is full of wrong turnings and dead ends, all of which are invariably open to Anita Brookner's characters, who collectively make their mistakes and make them knowingly. An oppressive, almost hypnotic sense of the inevitable stalks her work. Alan Sherwood, the narrator of Altered States (Cape, £14.99 in UK), her sixteenth novel in as many years, is another of her shadow people.
Educated, civilised, weak, romantic and doomed to despairing if dignified loneliness, Sherwood is a third generation solicitor and an odd, stiff person, the sort of chap who could and does report taking "Mother to the Berkeley and we had a surprisingly convivial evening. I had not realised how enormously pleased she had been by my invitation."
As financially secure as Brookner's middle class protagonists tend to be, Sherwood is not without humour. His mode of speech is formal, yet this formality is cleverly tempered by his humour and occasional flashes of exasperation. Having enjoyed some years of wild living in Paris, Sherwood had returned to London to pursue the career ordained for him by family tradition. While in Paris he had a comfortable relationship, without commitment. As he admits early in his story, "the first love of my life was my mother..."
Initially appearing the epitome of caution, exact, passive and careful, Sherwood seems a natural observer. But he has had his moments of weakness and it is this which provides him with his story. Brookner has a remarkable ability to consistently produce elegant, intelligent novels exploring shifts between self protection and recklessness centred in small, ordered worlds populated by her own exclusive cast of quietly desperate losers. The same themes prevail heroines in cool linen, elegant if unappealing women in search of men, nice, boring men intent on wanton females who laugh in their faces. Perhaps as a gesture of self irony, Brookner named the central character in A Private View (1994) George Bland. That book was followed last year by Incidents in The Rue Laugier, a measured and bleak virtuoso performance.
Exploring the silent obsessions gnawing away at the hearts of the privileged is a risky business. It is not always easy to direct sympathy at individuals whose agonies have nothing to do with death, children, poverty or serious illness (to Sherwood, a bad dose of flu becomes a life threatening disaster). In the event of failing to win the chosen one, her characters often have the disappointing habit of settling for unhappy compromise. Money problems and displays of greed are left to the minor players. Even so, Brookner manages to write utterly compelling novels. How? Through instinct and craft.
Even her first novels, A Start in Life (1981), Providence (1982), Look At Me (1983) and the surprise Booker winner, Hotel Du Lac (1984), were written with an emphatic restraint in epigrammatic prose. In time, her style became increasingly, dangerously epigrammatic. Clearly she noted this and tightened her language while retaining its elegance. If the late 20th century has a writer approaching Jane Austen's sharpness of observation within an even narrower world than that of Regency England, it must be Brookner, with her shrewd, stylish psychological melodramas.
Of course, it is obvious that Sherwood will be attracted to the selfish, elusive Sarah, less obvious that they will have a brief, disconnected affair "she was unknowable, enjoying our comings together as much as I did, but not appearing to remember them, perhaps judging them as acts which would pass naturally into oblivion. It was one when I had lost her, had lost the possibility of ever seeing her again, that I began to dwell obsessively on her absence."
It is a mark of Brookner's singular gift that she can render a man as emotionally detached as Sherwood sympathetic and not quite ridiculous, although he comes very close to this state when he allows a girl he has no interest in to tend him during his bout of flu "By the time I was on my feet again we seemed to have become engaged."
Sherwood marries the unfortunate Angela, who, having pursued him with an efficient if unladylike vigour, undergoes a character transformation defying reason, never mind the reader's credulity. Dialogue is not Brookner's strong point acidic observation is. However, there are some lively exchanges in this novel and indeed in most of her books exchanges which reflect the essence of a society in which the protagonists watch each other while still managing to miss things, often on purpose. Humphrey, an elderly relative, remarks to Sherwood of Sarah. "Thought you were going to marry her said Humphrey, restored to something like life by the thought of Sarah. Did you marry someone else? Some other girl? Annabel?" It is true that the old man has by now become quite forgetful, but even so, his remark conveys Brookner's portrayal of people wounding and dismissing, innocently or otherwise, but certainly effectively.
Witty, painful, often moving in their bleak truthfulness, Anita Brookner's novels show mastery in a very specific genre. This quiet novel is yet another reminder that she is a novelist whose art and understanding are much wider than the world she chronicles so chillingly.
