Sense and sensibility
Anne Chisholm
THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT by Anita Brookner Viking, £16.99, pp. 246, ISBN 0670914363 Literature, in Anita Brookner's
novels, is never a source of comfort. Often, it is positively dangerous: her characters, especially the women, have frequently been misled by books into expecting too much of life and love. This autumnal, profoundly melancholy new novel, which revolves around female friendship and rivalry, conveys the same bleak message. No constant Brookner reader is allowed to keep any romantic illusions.
There is, as always, something splendid about Brookner's unflinching examination of the manouevres of the heart. In graceful, limpid prose she tells the story of two women, born in 1948 (the date is precise and significant) whose childhood affection waxes and wanes over the years as their lives connect in the most basic and painful ways. Elizabeth, the narrator, appears at first to be the more conventional one. She decides to escape her unsatisfactory, unhappy parents by marrying a kind, decent man much older than herself. She likes reading the great Victorian novelists, where men are resolute, women are brave and everyone reaps their just deserts in the end.
She shares her christian name with her friend, always known as Betsy, As soon as we learn that Betsy has a passion for Racine we know she is in trouble; unlike the cooler, warier Elizabeth her heart clearly rules her head. She too has a difficult family background, losing both parents young; she is emotionally over
demanding, and vulnerable. Both girls are pretty and also clever but, as Brookner sees it, have been born just too soon to catch the wave of feminism and assert their right to pursue their education and a career. She also insists that they have missed the easy hedonism of the swinging Sixties, so that they are encumbered by old-fashioned conventions and standards of behaviour.
Both girls spend time in Paris, but whereas Elizabeth retreats back to London and her safe marriage, Betsy falls into a grand passion for a handsome, damaged and exploitative student revolutionary. Nevertheless, Elizabeth rather envies Betsy her aura of satisfied desire. She herself is unsatisfied, bored by her domestic routine and her nice dull husband, Digby. She starts an affair with Edmund, one of his married friends, and discovers the erotic charge of illicit sex in a rented flat on summer afternoons, But guilt and retribution follow: Digby dies suddenly, and at his funeral wake she observes Edmund fastening on to Betsy, back from Paris after her own lover's death.
Brookner writes mesmerisingly well about Elizabeth's plight, as she struggles to find her feet again as a woman alone. She finds solace in long walks around London streets and parks, and in maintaining a dignified silence while Betsy's romantic, hopeful nature and avid need for love lead her into humiliating dependence not just on Edmund but on his conniving wife and their adored children. When Betsy develops cancer, it is Elizabeth who takes over, visiting her in hospital, where until the end she pines for her lover and murmurs lines from Racine. Meanwhile, the tentative admirer Elizabeth has acquired beats a retreat, unnerved by Betsy's hold over her friend, In any case, Elizabeth by this time has decided she would rather live alone. As she reflects, 'Handing over one's life to another person is not really to be wise.'
It is, perhaps, a measure of Brookner's great gifts as a writer and her achievement in establishing, over 22 novels in 30 years, such a powerful message about the plight of women today that occasionally even her admirers want to fight back, to argue with the notion that affluent, intelligent women in their fifties, like Elizabeth and Betsy, can really be so passive, such victims. All one can say, perhaps, is that some are and that Anita Brookner knows and understands them. Although it is, as always, crude and reductive to identify the writer with her characters, in this novel especially it is impossible not to hear the authorial voice in Elizabeth's, as she stoically accepts her limitations, does her duty by her friend, bears the punishment she feels she deserves for her had behaviour and bad faith, and faces up to the advance of old age and the inevitability of death. There is beauty as well as courage in Brookner's new book. Just don't take it to read on the beach.
Previous page
