It's become a cliche to call Anita Brookner the modern Henry James, but with her latest novel, she's outdone the fusty old master. Some future genius will have to be called the modern Anita Brookner."The Bay of Angels," her 20th elegant novel, perfects an examination of loneliness that threatened to grow monotone in her last few books. Yet here, remarkably, she makes another quantum leap into psychological depth, splitting the atoms of human nature and tracing the particles that veer off.Her narrator is a compulsively analytical young woman named Zoe Cunningham. She lives in quaint isolation on the margins of life and London with her widowed mother, "a woman in embryo."Despite their static circumstances, Zoe is sustained by the lessons of those earliest books, the fairy tales of Hans Christian Anderson and the Brothers Grimm, and later by the stories of travail and triumph by Charles Dickens."I was willing to believe in the redeeming feature," she notes wistfully, "the redeeming presence that would justify all of one's vain striving, would dispel one's disappointments, would in some mysterious way present one with a solution in which one would have no part, so that all one had to do was to wait, in a condition of sinless passivity, for the transformation that would surely take place."When a wealthy, older man falls in love with her mother, the fairy godmother seems to have come through after all.Simon is loving, generous, and paternal, just the sort of gentleman to whom Zoe can relinquish her gentle mother and go off to live a modern, liberated life. "It was providential," she writes. "All seemed to agree on that point."Simon moves Mrs. Cunningham to his modern villa in Nice, France, sets Zoe up with her own flat, and all live happily ever after."Though it satisfied the requirements of legend," Zoe concedes darkly, "it made me aware of what all the stories left out, namely the facts of what happened next. The stories had ended on the highest possible note, whereas what they should have indicated was the life that followed."Indeed, what follows in this novel is rather sad. Simon suddenly dies and his affluence evaporates. Zoe and her mother find themselves without money or a place to live. More ominous, though, her mother's energy begins seeping away.Visiting her in a sanatorium, Zoe finds herself riding conflicting currents of love and dread. She's wholly devoted, but she resents the loss of freedom, the burdensome need to parent the parent. As Zoe travels back and forth between London and Nice, the circumference of her own life begins to shrink toward the center of her mother's health.Her emotional turmoil is compounded by the Kafkaesque treatment she receives from the doctors and nurses and the thicket of old-fashioned attitudes held by other women at the nursing home.This may sound dreary in summary, but Brookner's wit glows like a kind of background radiation that charges everything here - even the tragedy. She has never been more clear-sighted, more compellingly brilliant.When Zoe begins seeing her mother's doctor, a man who "gave the impression of having worn a double-breasted suit from a tender age," the fairy tale threatens to rise up again, but Zoe won't fall for that. Somehow, she must negotiate the old desire for male salvation and the modern insistence on barren autonomy.It's a conundrum worthy of Brookner's relentless analysis, and it eventually yields, if not an answer, at least profound insight.http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/0419/p2...
Carefully wrought prose, like setting ornaments on a shelf in a just so manner. It is the story of a young woman's entrance into adulthood told in the first person. Her passivity and determined naivete are irritating, especially in the context of her constant assertions that she is an independent and emancipated woman. She is completely dependent on, and constantly seeks, paternalistic oversight of some sort, and yet rarely or only obliquely acknowledges that reliance. Some of the scenes were too contrived and jarringly unbelievable, such as the mother's hospitalisation, and the daughter's drifting helplessness. But the scenes in the Residence Saint Therese, especially the first scene, were wonderful. They were precise acute observations of the players and their roles in a nursing home. Since this was my first novel by Brookner, I'm not sure if this claustrophobically precise style of writing is her own, or if it was the voice of the narrator. I'm looking forward to comparing it with another one of her novels.
What do You think about The Bay Of Angels (2001)?
The Optimist's Daughter meets The Wings of the Dove, set against the glaring light of the Med, The Bay of Angels made me feel horribly sad. (view spoiler)[One of the main characters spends half the book dying, too young, I might add. (hide spoiler)]
—Kate
I thoroughly enjoyed The Bay of Angels by Anita Brookner. I particularly admire the way she susses out the intricacies of emotions attached to human interaction -- it is such an organized approach to description, her method of describing what's going on inside people's heads as they observe life. I am quite astounded by it. It has changed the way I will regard my own life.Brookner's vocabulary is also thought-provoking, stimulating, and inspiring. I had to look up words I had never seen before. Nothing is said in a common manner and yet it is completely without affectation.This book is a marvel.
—Dolores Abbott
I kept thinking something 'exciting' is surely going to happen to Zoe or her mother....but they just kept plodding along in such a boring routine. Felt I was reading the same sentences over and over only in a different paragraph. Wondered how Zoe could fill a whole day after checking at the hospice early in the morning....she wasn't allowed to see her mother; just check in with the nurses and then she seemed to do little but wander the streets of Nice until time to head back to her barely furnished room. Why didn't she meet any friends? Why didn't she visit galleries, museums, parks? Why didn't she get a part-time job?
—Deane
