Few things in life are as certain as the annual arrival of a new Anita Brookner novel, usually timed to coincide - completely unintentionally, of course - with Wimbledon. Since she was the surprise winner of the 1984 Booker Prize - snatching it from the strong favourite, J.G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun, now an established classic - critics and readers have been divided over her merits. Is she a minaturist? Or is she merely predictable?
Hotel Du Lac, that winning fourth novel, was the best and most characteristic of Brookner's novels. Since then the books have come with unvarying regularity: steady, polished, relentlessly observed. It is a mark of her consistency that Brookner has created an instantly recognisable world, that of the emotionally neutralised West London middle class. Her central characters are invariably single, educated women no longer young but still emotionally responsive. Or perhaps "responsive" is not the correct word. A Brookner heroine yearns, intelligently, at a distance, and with immense self-control. Inevitably her characters accept that breeding and intelligence are no match for sensuality.
Falling Slowly (Viking, £15.99 in UK), her eighteenth novel in as many years, opens in familiar territory. Two middle-aged sisters live together. Beatrice is presented as a romantic; she is a musician, an accompanist, and formerly in possession of an appeal which owed more to her "disposability" than her appearance: "She entered a room with a helpless suppliant air, as if looking for a pair of broad shoulders, of strong arms to which she might entrust her evident womanliness."
Miriam is younger, more watchful and slightly more hard-headed. She translates novels from the French. Having always deplored Beatrice's "unashamed romanticism", Miriam seems to be in control - or is she? She has survived a five-year marriage which ended with her husband's abrupt announcement that he was leaving for Canada with his assistant. However, she is not immune to romance. The very things she deplores in her sister also apply to her. Both are romantics, both admire Jane Eyre, both are seeking their respective Mr Rochester. The two exchange cryptic observations: " `I expect very little,' said Beatrice. `But perhaps I am wrong. No one can say that I am not appreciated. I am surrounded by men, unlike you, sitting there with your dictionaries.' "
One of the difficulties about this novel is that Brookner keeps shifting viewpoints: we watch the sisters through her eyes and then through Miriam's perceptions. At one point Brookner appears to be sneering at Beatrice, later she pities her. Her characters have never been particularly sympathetic, nor heroic. They are not confronted with starvation or physical danger. There is nothing more hazardous than a trip to the local Sainsbury's to assemble the elements for yet another tastefully restrained meal. After a glass of chilled wine, there is usually a bath and cool linen.
Throughout Brookner's novels the prim, lonely though smug central characters have often been pitted against loud, greedy, silly women who get want they want. At the heart of any quest in a Brookner novel is a man or, more importantly, the absence of one.
Despite the narrowness of the world she examines, Brookner is an extraordinarily readable writer. The ability to explore endless variations of the same central thesis takes much skill. The strength of her writing has always been its elegance. Yet the quality of her prose has coarsened perceptively. And she is seldom at ease with dialogue - not surprising, considering her characters exist in a stalemate of strangled emotions.
Dialogue was a serious flaw in Visitors (1997). In the new book, the language lacks Brookner's characteristic poise. It is interesting that by her seventh novel, Latecomers (1987), her epigrammatic style had become almost self-parodying. A noticeable tightening-up followed, while the narrative formula remained relatively unchanged.
It is not so much the twilight aura of failed love which undermines this book as the near-comic fatalism. Miriam, for all her shrewdness, agrees to become the mistress of Simon, a successful married man who keeps his real life well removed from her. Beatrice, now no longer pretending that every hopeless male who enters her sphere is in love with her, quietly gives up on life.
Several of the plot twists are risible. Max, who has abandoned Beatrice, returns in the hope of making an arrangement which will gain him her flat. Appraising Beatrice, he feels that "with such a woman a man would feel little curiosity, knowing that beneath the obedience and the flattery lay something rueful, untouched". Do people really evaluate in such a way? Never before has Brookner, the unobtrusive observer, been so obtrusive.
Elsewhere, Miriam, having long believed her married friends resent her, now feels their resentment "was in fact contempt. You are not one of us, said their eyes; you do not slop around untidily, push your hair back behind your ears, dress in the first thing that comes to hand. You do not shop for cornflakes, fish fingers, baked beans. You will not get fat . . ." Duped by her lover, Miriam is later wooed by an attractive saint she has no interest in until he is abruptly killed off in a sentence.
Falling Slowly is Brookner's most hasty, ill-considered work. Yet the snobbery and smugness are undercut by a palpable rage. Ultimately, the reader is left with the sensation of being privy to an unconvincing tantrum. The book's message is clear, but this time Brookner's technique is uncharacteristically flabby.
