FALLING SLOWLY: A REVIEW

To quote the blurb, Beatrice and Miriam are sisters, one a retired accompanist or pianist, the other a translator who spends most of her days in the London library, and although – “neither confides what is in their hearts” – it is basically the same thing, i.e. they’re both hacked off because they aren’t married. They feel cheated and vaguely hard done by. The problem for the reader is that that is so transparently not their real problem. Their real problem is that they’re bored, and the reason that they’re bored is that they never get off their fat arses and do anything.

True, Beatrice and Miriam are fictional characters and fictional characters don’t have moral obligations, but what is so repulsive is that both characters go about their daily lives in the full rosy glow of their creator’s approval. At no point does it occur to either of them that instead of “wondering how to get through the rest of the afternoon” they might get up and do a hand’s turn for somebody else. And what’s worse is that since Falling Slowly is, I think, the eleventh of Anita Brookner’s sixteen novels, one can only conclude that there is a large constituency of rich, metropolitan women out there who think this is acceptable behaviour.

Excessive self-absorption may be forgivable in an adolescent, but in a person of fifty or sixty, it’s just not on. It’s not even as if Miriam and Beatrice have the excuse of a hard life to keep their minds off other people. They live in a flat off Sloane Square – and if you’re reading this from beyond London, believe me, that’s the posh end – for which they don’t appear to pay either rent or mortgage. They take taxis without a thought to the cost and they hardly do a stroke of work. Indeed, Beatrice retires somewhere around page ten. Do they ever, even for a second, realize how privileged and lucky they are? That most women don’t lead lives like that? No, and, clearly neither does Anita Brookner. There are a couple of working class characters – mere walk-on parts. One of them – I think she’s meant to be their cleaner’s daughter – gets a job in a supermarket, for which she is made to express cheery gratitude. The fact that the hours would be long, the pay low and the work dull doesn’t occur to either characters or author. It’s as if finer feelings are for the middle class and the lower orders can’t be expected to share them.

Anita Brookner is very good on the inner life and speech patterns of her own class and gender, but beyond those narrow confines her portraiture is sketchy and clichéd – so a small boy is given a love of dinosaurs. Fair enough, small boys love dinosaurs, but it’s precisely because they love dinosaurs that they don’t make mistakes like saying “Dinosaurs are distinct.” when they mean “extinct.” Real boys (and I’ve got one, so I know) talk about dinosaurs with amazing facility, effortlessly throwing in tongue-twister names without a second thought. If Anita Brookner were any good, she’d know this. And then there is the character of the scientist, in whose reality we are expected to believe on the basis of a few airy references to test tubes. It’s just not enough. It’s too thin, too lazy – like bringing on a Scotsman and proving it by calling him Jock, or giving him a kilt.

Indeed, laziness – or perhaps it’s just weariness – is one of the key features of Falling Slowly. When one of the sisters has what might be a stroke and begins the slide down toward a natural death, Anita Brookner kills her off with an offstage car accident, an awkward deus ex machina that reeks of cop-out. It’s Anita Brookner saying, “Sorry, Folks – can’t be bothered to go through with my own plotline. Will this do?” Well, no it won’t, actually.

She probably imagines – and there are evidently critics prepared to bolster her in her delusion – that she’s mapping out a part of the human condition. That once you get past the menopause, this is what it’s like to be a woman; this is the Female Experience. It’s not. There are dozens of authors who outsell Brookner by the shed-load, but because their subject matter and their reading public are working class women, they are unlikely to get the respectful reviews. Verdict: read and weep.