Look At Me

Worth a look

Author
British. Died in March 2016 aged 88. Never married, she was an art historian by training, publishing her first fiction in 1981 when she was 53, abandoning a professorial appointment at Cambridge to do so. Brookner made a good fist of it too, winning the Booker Prize in 1984 for 'Hotel du Lac’ as well as a stream of critical praise ever since. 'Look at Me’ pre-dates 'Hotel du Lac,' but heralds that novel.

Plot
The narrator, Frances Hinton, is a lonely art historian working in a London reference library, absorbed in her research. She owns and lives in a large, extremely valuable inner city apartment that belonged to her deceased parents, her mother most recently, the only other occupant her mother’s reclusive long term maidservant, now elderly herself, and unable to cope outside the environment she knows. Frances gradually becomes infatuated with a young medical researcher who frequents the library and, through him, with his vivacious and highly seductive young wife, eventually moving in with them for a time. In fact, most if not all of Brookner’s novels have characters with more than a passing resemblance to herself. That is, the protagonist is usually an ageing unmarried woman leading a solitary existence. Common themes are heartbreak and frustration.

Writing
The pacing is usually slow, so why bother? The answer is style. Ms B's prose is simply superb, regardless of subject matter. Think female version of E M Forster.

Bottom line
I turned my own hand to fiction around the same age as Ms Brookner, hoping to find an original voice. This book, although not her best, caused me to despair. She does everything so well; I’m not even playing the same game.