A Family Romance

It’s been a while since I last read Brookner but this book was just what I was looking for. A very cool and quiet story to read in a heatwave.

The last book I read was about a character named Dolly, and so is this one, in fact it looks like that is an alternate title used outside the UK. The Dolly here is the narrator’s aunt by marriage and the book slowly reveals the details of her life. In the book the eventful but dependent existence of Dolly is compared to the sparer life of the narrator Jane. I’ve commented before that I find Brookner rather anachronistic and this book definitely felt like that to me. It was published in 1993 and the narration mostly takes place in the 1980s and I realised that Jane was only a few years older than me and that in the end what I was actually comparing was Jane’s life and mine. And we come from different worlds but that was only revealed slowly through the book.

When Jane’s father marries her mother he occupies “a large bachelor flat. With a little adjustment he thought it would do very well for the two of them”. Her father, as far as I can remember, is only ever referred to as working at a bank. The flat is in out of the way, unfashionable Battersea, though it overlooks the park. Generally it sounded quite nice but I had the idea that the family, once Jane was born, were quite squeezed in. They were obviously fairly well off and they’d be doing well out of rocketing London property prices as well. It’s only late in the book that the flat is revealed to be seven rooms and two bathrooms: yes, I’d imagine the flat would do for two of them! There’s a vast quantity of street name dropping in the book so you can go to RightMove and look up apartments on Prince of Wales Drive SW11 for yourself. The closest match I could find was going for £1.75 million today.

The story was however really about Jane slowly realising how privileged she was and that Dolly did things differently and had different advice for her because she came from a much less secure background. At least that’s what I thought it was about. The author’s summing up of the situation in the last chapter left me a little puzzled as to whether Jane actually understood that. Jane came to different conclusions - finding that their attitudes to relationships were the defining difference - but I didn’t really agree with her. For most of the book I’d liked her as a child and the last chapter made me think I’d like her less as an adult. Perhaps that’s the point, as children we overlook differences between people, as adults other things become important. I enjoy reading Brookner’s prose and will continue to do so whilst probably continuing to disagree with her character’s opinions quite a lot of the time!