Lord Jim at Home
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“A brilliant, chilling picture of the English middle class at home.” —Illustrated London News
When Dinah Brooke’s second novel, Lord Jim at Home, was first published in 1973, it was described as “squalid and startling,” “nastily horrific,” and a “monstrous parody” of upper-middle class English life. It is the story of Giles Trenchard, who grows up isolated in an atmosphere of privilege and hidden violence; who goes to war, and returns; and then, one day—like the hero of Joseph Conrad's classic Lord Jim—commits an act that calls his past, his character, his whole world into question.
Out of print for nearly half a century (and never published in the United States), Lord Jim at Home reveals a daring writer long overdue for reappraisal, whose work has retained all its originality and power. As Ottessa Moshfegh writes in her foreword to this new edition, Brooke evokes childhood vulnerability and adult cruelty “in a way that nice people are too polite to admit they understand.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brooke's 1973 novel, first published in the U.K., presents a stinging portrait of an upper middle class British family. In an enthusiastic foreword, Ottessa Moshfegh describes feeling like she aged 20 years while reading Brooke's bracing account of sociopath Giles Trenchard, only to be restored with "new nerves" by the end. Born to tradition-bound and emotionally remote parents in the interwar period, Giles endures physical abuse from his nurses at home and cruel humiliations from his teachers at boarding school. As a seaman in WWII, he routinely witnesses shipmates getting blown up beside him, and deals with these moments the same way he faces the general privations of a sailor's life: with stiff-upper-lip stoicism. After the war Giles drifts into an aimless life of cricket, carousing, and excessive drinking, straining his relationship with his increasingly exasperated parents. Though foreordained by the title's reference to a Joseph Conrad character who falls from grace through a lapse of judgment, Giles's final desperate act against his family is as shocking as it is unexpected. Brooke structures her novel like a bildungsroman, but aims for a much broader critique of the British class system, notably in the festering moral rot of Giles's grandfather. Her wide-eyed view of the dark side of the privileged class is as startling today as it was a half-century ago.
