Ladylike, lavender-scented and precious … this writing is everything opposite to that

I had such a mistaken idea about Anita Brookner’s novels, until I picked up The Latecomers in a secondhand shop about 10 years ago, and read the first wonderfully concrete sentence. “Hartmann, a voluptuary, lowered a spoonful of brown sugar crystals into his coffee cup, then placed a square of bitter chocolate on his tongue, and, while it was dissolving, lit his first cigarette.” Somehow – I think because of the title of her Booker winner Hotel du Lac – I’d expected something ladylike, lavender-scented, prissy and precious; I knew as soon as I opened my eyes to her words that this writing was everything opposite to that.

I love the stories, the plots – variations on a few themes, their scope narrowing as time went on. The sensitive and intelligent and weak are preyed upon by the unintelligent and strong; profoundly private women elect, for their own purposes, to build their lives around the absent men who hardly know them. The themes have an exotic flavour these days, they smell of an irretrievable past. But the stories only come into their being through Brookner’s distinctive sentences, ripely substantial, stamped unapologetically with the writer’s personality, commenting and discriminating, digressing and summarising – and darkly funny. Hartmann “considered his life’s work to lie in the perfecting of simple pleasures, mainly of a physical or domestic nature … The idea of God, for example, he rejected as derogating from his own serene existence.”

Latecomers (1988)

My first Brookner-love. The novels of the first decades have stronger stories and more characters, more happens. In Latecomers two Jewish boys, Thomas Hartmann and Thomas Fibich, are sent to London as refugees in the war and become lifelong friends. We follow them into their youth, marriages, fatherhood. In his middle age, Fibich suddenly needs to make the journey back to the railway station in Berlin where he parted from his mother for the last time. This is one of the warmest of her novels, rich with family affection, shadowed by history.

A Start in Life (1981)

This was Brookner’s first published novel – she seems to spring into being as a novelist fully-formed. The rot in Ruth Weiss’s life began when she was small, and her nurse told her that Cinderella shall go to the ball – but the ball never materialised. Instead she’s working on the second volume of her academic study, “Women in Balzac’s Novels”, and taking care of her helpless, selfish, childish parents – who only want to have fun, not to grow old and die. It’s blackly, bleakly, wonderfully funny.

Lewis Percy (1989)

Everyone in Brookner’s novels seems to want to get away to France. France! It’s more elegant, the coffee’s better, they do things differently there. Her characters only ever escape to France temporarily, but it persists in their imagination like a high watermark of civilisation and sophistication, a dream possibility. Lewis Percy, a young English scholar, brings camembert and cherries to a soiree in Paris – but then has to return to his ill mother in London, and marriage to the enigmatically dull Tissy. His mother-in-law is a “Messalina of the suburbs”, smelling of “cigarettes mixed with slightly stale Vol de Nuit”.

Brief Lives (1990)

A bracing novel of lifelong female friendship, or enmity. The narrator doesn’t really like Julia – “She was not a very nice woman, but then neither am I” – yet when she reads Julia’s obituary it prompts the novel’s pouring out of reminiscence, fascination. The women are brought close by the connection between their husbands – but the men feel almost instrumental, it’s what’s between the women that’s truthful and terrible, raw. Brookner notates the ritual of domestic habit like an anthropologist: her friend remembers Julia “placing her underclothes on a chair in her bedroom and covering them with a square of silk reserved for this purpose”.

A Misalliance (1986)

All my favourites seem to come from the first decade of Brookner’s writing life. The later novels can seem to turn round in ever-tighter circles of story, becoming more suffocatingly sad – though the distinctive intelligence and music of her prose never falters. A Misalliance is prophetic of some of the late themes – Blanche Vernon’s husband has left her “for a young woman in computer sciences” and she’s trying to make a life out of what remains, which is next to nothing. There’s shopping, and cooking for one, and the glass of wine carefully held off until the evening – and there are her visits to the Wallace Collection, the National Gallery and the British Museum. It’s a tiny life, and it’s as huge as everything.

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