Leaving Home Anita Brookner Viking, 168pp, £12.99 ISBN 0670915688

This is Anita Brookner's 23rd assault on despair, and it is a particularly muted, spare and melancholy addition to her canon. The author is in her late seventies, and although her heroine, Emma Roberts, is only 26, she seems to have something of the world-weariness of the very old. Setting, time and Emma's circumstances are all indeterminate: we are told it is the late 1970s, but no period details link the novel to that era; Emma is a student, but seems to be attending no particular institution; she buys a flat in Chelsea by writing a cheque for it, but the sources of her money are unclear. The subject of her study is the 17th-century French formal garden; Nicolas Fouquet and Andre le Notre preside, not Jim Callaghan.

Emma's featureless and withdrawn mother, whose unspoken love is presumably the source of her emotional problems (no father is present), dies soon after the novel gets under way, and her unsympathetic uncle, who blames Emma's absence in Paris for her mother's death, threatens to invade the family flat in Battersea. This sets in motion the domestic flight - or flights - of the title, with the heroine unable to commit herself to either England or France.

An ideal house presents itself, deep in the countryside of Brie, but this is the family chateau of Emma's ebullient friend Francoise Desnoyers, whose tyrannical but strangely helpless mother will make far more exacting demands on her rebellious daughter than Emma's mother ever made of hers. Two male figures, neither much interested in sex, contend for the rest of Emma's confused and fearful emotional life: Michael, half English and half French, who is very inexperienced and boyish; and Philip Hudson, a rumpled, middle-aged doctor, sardonic, wise and disillusioned. Emma's longing can never be satisfied by three such unsatisfactory friends: the question is which, if any, will provide stability of a sort.

Emma moves constantly between England and France - she stays in various hotel rooms and halls of residence in Paris, and in London she moves from Battersea to Chelsea (a small flat in Jubilee Place). The characteristically modern conclusion of the novel is that once the first home has been left, there is no other. Our adult lives consist only of rests on the flight, points of returning. No foreign country can be one's own, and one's own is a foreign country. The French garden is silent and secretive and the Englishwoman can only study it, not possess it. Brookner's long love affair with France seems to be cooling here, as if that country is too formal finally to be satisfying to an ardent heart.

Brookner is sometimes found both repetitive and limited but, in truth, each succeeding novel presents just enough variation to add to the pattern. Her best books are her first five, but there have been many fine later novels: A Closed Eye, Fraud, Altered States, Falling Slowly. This present work takes its place with those, and its magnificent final sentence is among the most moving and judicious of Brooknerian conclusions:

Time, which was once squandered, must now be given over to the actual, the possible, and perhaps to that evanescent hope of a good outcome which never deserts one, and which should never be abandoned.

Brookner's novels sometimes falter at the end, but not this one. Her vision is very dark, and she has sometimes seemed almost obliged to soften things with an upbeat conclusion. But now the note of optimism does not jar. Leaving Home feels like a very late-period work, however much we might hope for more additions to this distinguished canon. Yet if it were to end here, those final words would be fitting and elegiac enough.

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website