Anita Brookner: Leaving home

An Anita Brookner plot, set down in writing other than her own, appears achingly dull. There will be a young woman, in this case Emma Roberts, who has had a quiet but intensely loving relationship, usually with her mother. In this case, Emma notes about her mother that, "we loved each other greatly, yet so exclusive was that love that it was experienced more like anguish. That feeling has remained with me and will no doubt extinguish all the rest."

The mother dies, of course: "It was therefore somehow appropriate that she should do so, and leave me bereft." Appropriate would be a very odd word to use, were this not a Brookner novel. The mother's death is appropriate because that death is the proper action for a woman "so inactive, her days reserved for reading and thinking." She was, "somehow not viable".

Which makes her a strange character to inspire such exclusive love from a daughter but this is the normal state of affairs for a Brookner woman. Men in her novels are peripheral: distant, usually disappointing or disappointed, faint characters drawn on the margins. They do not inspire love, or much loyalty, although they may represent, fleetingly, hope. This will not survive sustained acquaintance.

Emma, because she is a Brookner woman, will leave home and go to France: she is to study 17th-century garden design for a thesis. She has a fascination, although what a low-key fascination it seems, with "the classical code — reticence, sobriety, order — that attracted me ... Truth to tell it was the theory that shaped these gardens rather than the gardens themselves that was of interest: the creation of pure articulation. Details of vegetation were irrelevant, as was the desire to impress."

A lesser writer might give in to the desire to impress. Brookner simply moves Emma, sedately, with reticence, sobriety and order, into a less-ordered world and has her witness a messiness in another mother/daughter relationship. Emma goes to the beautiful old French home of her new friend, Francoise, and is seduced by both the home and the mother. She is lonely, and she admires beauty. There is a small scene, which represents a falling apart, a betrayal, and results in a retreat. This is typical. She almost gives way to desire: she yearns to touch the sleeping younger son of the older man she is, in desultory fashion, seeing.

"I thought with horror of my instinctive, almost automatic desire to touch ... Now, once again, I saw the virtue in those classical principles. In the end only restraint stood up to scrutiny."

And, once more, Brookner's incredible restraint, her inimitable examination of lives painted as meticulously as a still life, stands up beautifully.

* Michele Hewitson is a Herald feature writer.
* Penguin/Viking, $55