Falling Slowly
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
'She hoped one day to find the image she unconsciously sought, without knowing why she sought it, something to lift the spirits, to transport her on an imaginary journey, to give a hint of the transcendence which was so blatantly lacking in her everyday life of words and paper.'
Beatrice and Miriam are sisters, sharing little except a traditional childhood that has left them burdened with unhappy memories.
Beatrice is a pianist, a romantic, who believes in love, while Miriam, who married the rather colourless Jonathan Eldon for pragmatic reasons, companionship, status, is not beyond disillusionment. Following her divorce, she returns to Beatrice, who is beginning to appear fragile. While they share a home and a few acquaintances, neither confides to the other what is in their hearts.
For the beautiful Beatrice, now prepared to settle for friendship and closeness rather than passion, there is Max and the hope of the carving a contented future with him. For Miriam there is love and esteem - and, finally, certainty.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Women whose empty emotional lives are conducted behind a facade of stoic acceptance are Brookner's stock-in-trade. Here, she evokes an almost palpable atmosphere of resigned regret as she chronicles a turning point in the fortunes of two middle-aged sisters in London. Beatrice and Miriam Sharpe have spent their entire lives falling slowly through space: unattached, isolated from society, essentially passive. Miriam, the younger, sharp-tongued, divorced sister, who earns a comfortable living as a translator, is now dryly disillusioned and skeptical about the future. Beatrice, whose contract as a piano accompanist has not been renewed, is a fluttery, incurable romantic who has always expected to meet her Prince Charming. Both have lived cautiously, waiting for high points that have never arrived. Now they both realize that they are on the downhill side of life. During the course of several months, Miriam falls in love with a faithless man and is betrayed, and loses both Beatrice and another man whose love could have redeemed her hermetic existence. Brookner is acutely sensitive to her characters' emotions, minutely dissecting the particular state of suspended loneliness in which they dwell. As usual, the reader is surprised when the cool, understated narrative elicits sudden heartache. But there's an unwelcome surprise, too: uncharacteristically, Brookner employs a cliched plot device to signal the end of Miriam's hopes. Survival with dignity is Miriam's small triumph, after she realizes that "I'm better off alone.... There were no happy endings." Brookner's (Visitors) impeccable craftsmanship and worldly irony make each of her novels memorable, but here her heroines' passivity becomes exasperating.
