I like to read a novel and find something out that I didn’t know before that enhances my life or experience in some way. Or I cannot say the book has a useful purpose. In order for this to happen, the characters must behave in a way that makes sense to me, or the author has to introduce a set of rules so that the reader can make sense of the writing. This didn’t happen for me in this novel. At almost every juncture I found myself asking, “why on earth would she do that?”. The “she” being either the protagonist or the author.

Some of it was funny – and not (as we used to say in primary school), funny ha-ha, but funny peculiar.

Anita Brookner chooses Spanish Property Sales as a (second?) career for the Colonel. That was a bit cliched. It was as if Anita had heard such people can be a bit dodgy so thought “Hmmm – how can I imply that the Colonel and his son might be a little shady . . . I know I’ll get them to sell Spanish Property”. When Brookner reaches out into the real world, (as opposed to her own rather strange and limited imaginary world), she gets it wrong.

Other things that struck me as odd (I’m afraid I don’t have the text with me and can’t be bothered to find an online version of it, so this is from memory), why would someone who cannot handle a predatory phone call from someone she knows have the nerve to fly to and then negotiate Venice alone? Why would the same person leave the comfort of her home to walk the streets of London late at night and sit in bars where, in the 1980s a single young woman alone in a bar would definitely attract similar attention. She could have shut any potential unwanted calls from the Colonel out for the evening by taking the phone off the hook.

But I have another idea. Rachel’s unbelievable solution to the phone call problem was so because it was utterly contrived. Why? Because Ms Brookner couldn’t find any other way to place blander than bland Rachel in the same type of drinking establishment where cross dressing blokes might hang out.

Give me Annie Proulx or A.S Byatt any day.

OK. That out of the way, I cannot say whether or not the reviewer actually enjoyed or got much out of the book. I must say that I am a complete Anita Brookner addict, and it seems to me that she could do no wrong. One does wander why Rachel behaves the way she does, why she is so obsessed with the behavior of Heather, and her devotion to the Livingstone family. I’d like to say that Anita’s Brookner’s characters are often deeply flawed, Rachel being no exception. Rachel is as she is because she has no choice, as do all of Brookner’s people, as is the human condition. Rachel has imposed upon herself the mantle of good behavior in exchange for happiness and the avoidance of deep disappointment. She makes the mistake in believing this to be the correct way and does not allow for other ways, unfortunately. Almost all of Anita Brookner’s main characters have chosen the wrong path and come to know it by the end of the books. There is only one book, or perhaps two, that come to mind that have optimistic outcomes, and that is Fraud, most certainly and uncharacteristically, and Lewis Percy.
One needs a great deal of patience to bear with Rachel and to realize her pain and lack of understanding as she assumes that the others in her life are actually lacking in their relationship to reality.
As for England, well, there you have me. I am not English, but American. I know that Anita Brookner paints a picture of life that is not wholly recognizable and seems truly anachronistic. I’d like to believe there are a few thoughtful people left in this world and that Anita Brookner has given them life in her fiction. I know I have rambled. Sorry. Just one more thought as to why Rachel is so insistent on converting Heather. In order to justify her sacrificial life she needed to validate it by convincing another of the rightness of her ways. Failing that, and perhaps witnessing that the opposite to be true is, well, sad. Rachel is afraid that other will see her as Poor Rachel, which unfortunately is what she is.