Anita Brookner's novels have been preoccupied with women who feel themselves to be profoundly separate. This may be the result of either choice or necessity, or of stoically making a choice of necessity. They are often tempted to alleviate this solitariness by falling in love with a man or attaching themselves to a couple or a family, but this usually ends in recoil and failure. When Miss Brookner is not at her best, the gestures that this despondent view of things demand can seem sentimental, especially when fortitude is subsidised by elegance or at least comfort and by financial independence. In A Friend from England, however, one is left in no doubt that life really is hostile to happiness, even in Wimbledon. It resembles Miss Brookner's Look at me (1981) in that it develops a moral and emotional intensity that precludes any modification of the heroine's terminal loneliness. The finesse with which the new novel is organised makes the prize-winning Hotel du Lac look flimsy, although its materials will be entirely familiar to addicted followers.

LRB 1 October 1987 | PDF Download