Fiction: A lonely, intelligent woman presents an account of her life. As always, in the fiction of Anita Brookner, it is the story of emotional rather than financial hardship. A pragmatic despair undercut by irony as well as traces of deceptively robust humour shapes the narrative. This is Brookner's 22nd novel in as many years, and sustained by sadness and harsh truth, it is among her finest - no faint praise, says Eileen Battersby.
It is also her most heartfelt. For sheer unrelenting moral courage and bleak honesty, she writes at a higher remove than virtually all of her fellow contemporary British novelists. But then Brookner, surprise winner of the 1984 Booker Prize with her fourth novel, Hotel Du Lac, is a polished, stylistically formal European writer of significance who has specialised in states of feeling and discreetly middle-class inner turmoil.
Elizabeth Wetherall is the latest Brookner narrator, blessed - or rather cursed - with self-knowledge, analytical intelligence and a refined sense of deep regret for all that has happened and, more painfully, for all that did not.
The child of unhappy parents, she always seemed more fortunate than her friend, another Elizabeth: "We met, and became friends of a sort, by virtue of the fact that we started school on the same day."
The other child elected to be known as Betsy. Her domestic situation was marginally worse: a widowed father, eventually disgraced for suspected medical negligence. An aunt had run the household.
Both Elizabeths were born in 1948. It is unusual for Brookner to provided such a detail, but it becomes important as these women are fated to miss out narrowly on the new freedoms. As have previous Brookner female narrators, Elizabeth, following some time in Paris, returns to London and settles for the safety of passionless marriage to a civilised older man.
Digby offers security and polite companionship, a life similar to that plotted by her mother, "marriage to a professional man, a comfortable establishment, licensed idleness, licensed amusements". There are no children. Elizabeth can recall of Digby: "He loved me. That was what had always impressed me. He loved me rather too much, in ways I could hardly accommodate."
Daily existence for the married Elizabeth confers "a benign numbness". It is an empty ritual based upon waiting for her husband's return home from the office for their evening meal together. Sustained by reading 19th-century novels and hours of introspective thought, Elizabeth has neither responsibility nor employment. Her physical presence is sufficient to fulfil her marital obligation. Hardly surprisingly, she attracts the attention of Edmund, a married man with a liking for emotionally undemanding affairs and an unloved, all-powerful wife.
In Elizabeth he finds the ideal comfort, for a while. She arranges her days around the chance of his visits. She makes no demands and is grateful for his attention, glad to fit into whatever slot he grants her. Their affair operates as a form of trade - sexual excitement and the anxiety of waiting in exchange for her acceptance of ritual humiliation. She has become a fixture of convenience, no more, no less, nervously waiting for the next telephone call. Meanwhile, old Digby believes her to be attending night classes.
Life has also been continuing for Betsy who, having gone to university, had been left her aunt's money and had gone to Paris, where she acquired polish and a flamboyant if doomed lover. His abrupt death brings her back to London, where she rediscovers Elizabeth. Brookner, always shrewd and adroit in the handling of female friendships, has never been better than she is here with her portrayal of the eager-to-please Betsy and the wary, if quasi-generous Elizabeth. Loneliness, fear and a shared early history sustains their friendship, as does their mutual childlessness.
Death takes the passive Digby. There is no surprise; Brookner rather briskly introduces this and quickly deals with it. Its relevance is less to do with Elizabeth's marriage than with her relationship with Edmund. As expected, a single Elizabeth is far less appealing to him than a married one. As have many previous Brookner characters, she takes to walking the familiar streets of south and south-west London.
Shifting light and the changing seasons contribute to the sense of internal claustrophobia and outer freedom that Brookner invariably creates. Elizabeth is in flight from herself and also a remorse ignited by the combined loss of Digby and Edmund: "One huge loss that encompassed them both, seemed to be my lot, and I could see that unless I were very careful I might end up mourning for myself."
If it all sounds very familiar in the context of her novels, it is also new. Brookner's genius, for genius it is, lies in her ability to achieve subtle variations on a theme. Her canvas is narrow and intense, yet it is this very narrowness and intensity that makes it so compelling. Elizabeth is as spoilt and as protected as any or all of many Brookner central characters. She rejects her final hope of loyal, if dull, companionship.
But she is also as heroic as is anyone who arrives at a full realisation and acceptance of what has happened to her life, a life that never really developed into anything. Nor is she without wit. When chance leads her to Nigel, a lost soul determined to serve, she listens to his story. He concludes his tale of romance killed by circumstances with the comment: "That's what Freud would say, anyway."
Elizabeth's response is true to the controlled exasperation ever-festering beneath the surface of Brookner's work: "You seem quite normal to me. One imagines Freud dealing with something more dramatic."
Betsy's fate is far more unfair. She takes up the thankless role of being Edmund's mistress, and assistant to his Constance, a charity organiser. For Betsy, he is not so much a lover as the provider of a family, something she craves. She comes to view his children as surrogate offspring of her own. Again Brookner is quite brilliant here by never allowing the reader a glimpse of how these children see Betsy. Instead, she offers a staggering insight into the cynical complicity of Constance and her attitude to Betsy.
Constance, although only a minor character, is another of Brookner's calculating bitches. On meeting the two friends, Constance addresses the narrator with the following:
" 'Sorry to hear about your husband.' There was a pause. 'Happy New Year,' she added."
But the insult to Elizabeth is slight compared with the dismissal offered to kindly, desperate Betsy, "her assistant" and husband's current mistress:
"It was kind of you to entertain my husband," said Constance. Betsy's tell-tale colour flared in her cheeks. "And I insist on seeing that you're not out of pocket."
"There's no need . . . ." said Betsy. "Oh, I think I'd feel better if I knew you were paid something."
The further collapse of Betsy's already subservient personality is reported by the narrator, who is compromised by watching her friend destroyed by Edmund, who then seeks Elizabeth's help. For all its politeness, civility and verbal elegance, The Rules of Engagement is a savagely clear-eyed performance from the shrewdest of truth-tellers. Complications, contradictions and those doubts born of a terrifying solitude fascinate Brookner. It is a novel about expectations, choices, lost opportunities and, most profoundly, about discovering that apathetic survival is often worse than valiant failure.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
The Rules of Engagement. By Anita Brookner, Viking, 246pp, £16.99