Anita Brookner: The Rules of Engagement

Reviewed by MICHELE HEWITSON

Two girls, both called Elizabeth, living in London in that "in-between period for girls of our generation, too old for the Fifties, too young for the Sixties", become friends more by proximity and their shared name than out of any real desire for the other's company.

One girl decides to be known as Betsy, to distinguish herself. Their lives - little lives, half-lived, because this is Anita Brookner - go on, they meet from time to time, lose contact, then, properly grown up now, their paths cross and they become, again, friends of a sort.

Elizabeth is married to an older man, solid, dull; Betsy is involved with a nasty, mad French radical. Elizabeth has embarked on a joyless affair. When the husband dies, and Betsy becomes obsessed with Elizabeth's former lover, Elizabeth dreams of leaving to live in Paris.

This is as much as she will allow herself to desire: "My days would be entirely empty, entirely insignificant, giving me time to evaluate my life, and also to remove myself from the life I had already lived. My aim would be to detach the present completely from the past."

This is what passes for hope in a Brookner novel: detachment, insignificance, emptiness. And yet, in her little lives, never fully realised, she writes perfectly pitched little stories with fully realised characters.

Here is Elizabeth, looking out a window and reflecting on her life: "We were in July, late July, and already there was an almost imperceptible alteration in the light, a dulling of the atmosphere, a quietness, a sense of endings."

That is what Brookner achieves with such quiet brilliance: a fullness of story-telling out of that emptiness, an almost imperceptible alteration in the light as you read.

Penguin $27