Anita Brookner
Brookner returns to a theme that has engaged her attention again and again throughout her career as a novelist. How does a young woman escape the smothering atmosphere of a sheltered home-life and the fate of a life-negating mother? The young woman in question is usually a thoughtful, loner type by nature who has grown up in a world of books and destined already for a relatively sheltered life of scholarship. Such a woman in such a predicament is Zoe Cunningham, the first-person narrator of Brookner's The Bay of Angels.
This time, however, a way out seems at hand. Zoe's long-widowed mother, against all odds, meets and marries a generous, well-meaning older man who offers mother and daughter a new life rich with opportunities beyond their modest expectations. But their unexpected good fortune is short-lived. Zoe, having briefly tasted freedom, sees the door closing, the clouds of fate gathering, and the road ahead foreshortened. She may end up like her mother, after all.
Brookner imparts to this scenario a gothic sense of doom. One can't help feeling Zoe's claustrophobic horror as she sees events conspire, one by one, like bricks being laid, walling her up still alive in a tomb. You can't help but root for Zoe, to hope for her escape, and she does effect an escape, of sorts, but it isn't the one that she, or the reader, foresees.
Brookner is a realist in the end. And Zoe describes the painful path from romantic to realist that so many of Brookner's heroines must inevitably travel. Such a path does not lead to the happy ending we were promised in books and fairy tales, religion and art, but it does lead to the hard-earned wisdom that enables us to make the necessary compromises that enable us to survive with dignity and a measure of contentment.
Such a "reward" may not be everything we hoped for in life; but it is often enough to make the struggle of living it worthwhile.
***Memorable Lines***
"The sun is God. Of the rest it is wiser not to know, or not yet to know. The plot will unfold, with or without my help..."
"Our story will run it's course, and I realize, with a lifting of the heart, that it is not yet time to close the book."
"How had it felt to die? This was
the news that no one was available to tell. Hence the entire business remains
unknown, and must remain so until it is one's own turn to confront it. Then
perhaps one would conclude that it is indeed a mystery, and one that no living
person, the person so helplessly in attendance, can imagine. One would be more
alone in death than one had ever been in life, and that would be the worst
outcome of all."
"I was too sensible, even as a
child, to believe in a fairy godmother [yet] I accepted as part of nature's
plan that after a lifetime of sweeping the kitchen floor I would go to the
ball, that the slipper would fit, that I would marry the prince...I was willing
to believe in the redeeming feature, 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."
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