Ahead of an event, I’ve been working my way through a pile of Anita Brookner novels, many of which Penguin has reissued since her death last March. It’s quite a hefty pile: in her lifetime, Brookner published a book almost every year (her first novel appeared in 1981). If you liked her, of course, this was a treat to which you could look forward; if you didn’t, it was another reason to disdain her. Either way, there was time for some forgetting in between. Devour them one after the other, though, and you do notice what they have in common. I love her novels, but I also think she wrote the same story again and again.
The one I’m reading as I write is The Next Big Thing, whose title couldn’t be more painfully ironic if it tried (the thing in question is death). Julius Herz is a lonely 73-year-old divorcee of émigré origin. A typical Brookner protagonist, he is stuck: he thinks of the days as something to be used up, like stale bread. Brookner’s depiction of him is wholly sympathetic. His thoughts creep along inch by inch, yet only rarely do you long to give him a good shove. You feel for him. When he steps out of his flat, hoping to “make himself into a semblance of gentlemanly old age others might find acceptable”, you know what’s coming: “But there were no spectators, only young people drinking and laughing outside pubs…” We’ve all felt the indifference of the crowd at some point in our lives.
If the young are 10 a penny in novels, old people are harder to find. Off the top of my head, I can think of Kingsley Amis’s Ending Up, Elizabeth Taylor’s Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont and Barbara Pym’s Quartet in Autumn. Those, though, come with a comic sensibility that Brookner’s noticeably lacks. Or does it? Sometimes, it’s hard not to laugh at Herz’s stoicism, a resignation he seems almost to enjoy. Brookner certainly wants us to consider the consequences of old age, but I also think she knew a martyr when she saw one.
Anita Brookner: A Panel Discussion, with Juliet Annan, Tessa Hadley and Carmen Callil, is at Lutyens & Rubinstein, 21 Kensington Park Road, London W11, 21 June, 7pm
