A Friend from England by Anita Brookner

The English writer and art historian Anita Brookner carved out a particular niche for herself during her writing career, producing beautifully crafted novels about loneliness and isolation. Her books often feature unmarried women living small, unfulfilling lives in well-to-do London flats, where they spend their evenings waiting for unobtainable lovers to make fleeting appearances. First published in 1987, three years after her Booker Prize win, A Friend from England is another exquisitely written story of loneliness and self-deception, very much in a similar vein to this Brookner’s other work.

Central to the novel is Rachel, a single, independently-minded woman in her early thirties. The co-owner of a small bookshop in Notting Hill, Rachel lives her life on the fringes of other people’s worlds, avoiding entanglements, amorous relationships, or anything that might lead to a loss of control or demonstration of passion. To her mind, the illusion of romantic love is not for the sensible – only for the naive or the very brave. Despite her role as the novel’s narrator, Rachel remains somewhat enigmatic or difficult to pin down throughout. She drops hints of previous affairs and ‘arrangements’, but little more in terms of detail is ever revealed. Above all, Rachel takes satisfaction from her lack of emotional bonds, a position that ultimately colours her view of others, particularly those who see the world through rose-tinted glasses.

Rachel’s closest friends are Oscar Livingstone – an ageing accountant that Rachel inherited from her deceased father – and his wife, Dorrie. The Livingstones are a kindly couple, treating Rachel almost as if she were part of their family. In short, they see Rachel as an older sister to their twenty-seven-year-old daughter, Heather – someone to guide her in the broader ways and mysteries of the world. On the surface, Heather appears to be a passive person, seemingly content to remain in the company of her parents, sharing their interests and lives until such time as she is ready to marry. While Rachel loves her Saturday afternoon visits to the Livingstones’ for tea, she feels somewhat ambivalent towards Heather and her seemingly circumspect approach to life. Consequently, the two women maintain a friendship, albeit a rather superficial, surface-level one.

While Rachel would be happy for her Saturdays with the Livingstones to continue forever, this arrangement is threatened when Heather suddenly announces her engagement to Michael Sandberg, a strange, childlike man whom Rachel views as somewhat suspicious.

My first impression of Michael Sandberg was that he was blessed with, or consumed by, radiant high spirits. My second impression was that a man of such obvious and exemplary charm must be a liar. (p. 42)

Michael appears to be fairly comfortably off, mostly due to his father’s various business interests in time-share apartments and travels agencies; nevertheless, there is something false or forced about him, a quality that doesn’t quite ring true.

Before long, Heather and Michael are married, settling into an apartment near Hyde Park to begin their married life. As far as Rachel see it, Heather appears to have fast-forwarded to middle age. There is little evidence to suggest that she actually loves Michael; rather their relationship appears to be relatively functional or anodyne in character.  

She seemed to me to have passed into another age group, one in which material certainties are taken for granted, romantic love is a thing of the past, and work has assumed the central position that it usually occupies in truly adult lives. (pp. 71–72)

Meanwhile, Oscar and Dorrie are as welcoming as ever, inviting Rachel to come and see them, just as before – and it is during one of these visits that Oscar reveals his concerns about Michael while driving Rachel home.

A series of revelations follows, ultimately culminating in Heather moving to Venice to marry Marco (the brother of an Italian friend, Chiara) after her first marriage to Michael breaks down. It is at this point that Rachel realises how little influence she has Heather. Rather than sacrifice her happiness by staying in England, Heather has chosen to follow her heart by moving to Venice, where she hopes the marriage to Marco will be a success.

In a showdown between the two women in Venice – a location that Rachel dislikes due to her fear of water – Rachel rails against Heather and what she sees as her selfishness, revealing an envy of those who choose a different path to her own. In some respects, the most startling revelation is the one that Rachel experiences when the reality of her life becomes painfully apparent.

The fact of the matter was that the wonders of this earth suddenly meant nothing to me. Without a face opposite mine the world was empty; without another voice it was silent. I foresaw a future in which I would always eat too early, the first guest in empty restaurants, after which I would go to bed too early and get up too early, anxious to begin another day in order that it might soon be ended. I lacked the patience or the confidence to invent a life for myself, and would always be dependent on the lives of others. (p. 204)

A Friend from England is a very interior novel – claustrophobic, almost, as everything we see and hear is filtered through Rachel’s outlook and perspective. There is real fury and anger from Rachel in what she sees as the foolishness of Heather’s actions. Women like Heather think life is ‘a sort of party, to which invitations are sent out’ without realising there comes a point when ‘the celebrations have to stop’. In short, Heather’s rejection of a circumspect worldview comes as a shock to Rachel, exposing the folly of the self-image she has carefully constructed for herself.

Despite the novel’s somewhat sombre tone, there are occasional flashes of humour – a very Brooknerian strain of humour, mostly stemming from the author’s dissection of the quirks of human nature. In this scene, Dorrie and her sisters are fussing over Michael, eagerly anticipating their roles in orchestrating Heather’s wedding.

They looked on him with indulgence, and I could see that he had a special rapport with these simple women, women who loved weddings and babies and cherished these matters over and above all others, simply filling in the time disdainfully until mobilised by another wedding. The married state claimed their strongest loyalties, their finest efforts; already their minds were furiously working on the arrangements, which would be argued out in long telephone calls. (p. 46)

In summary, this is a quiet, character-driven novel – beautifully-written as ever and very tightly controlled. It’s a novel I admired rather than loved, but brilliantly observed nonetheless.  

My copy of A Friend from England was published by Pantheon Books; personal copy.