He collected a grand total of something like 550 commissions, refusing nothing and ultimately undertaking the colossal task of creating Viceroy's House in New Delhi, which took him 20 years.Brown's purpose in this book is neither biographical nor architectural. Rather, she discusses the power and influence of those who did the commissioning. She is completely at home amongst the Lyttons, and Lytteltons, the Sackvilles, Barings and Asquiths who built, recommended and built again. In her introduction, she sighs that she has amassed material enough for many more such books, and this proves to be a slight problem. For the majority of her potential readers, whose knowledge of the period must be sketchier than her own, these families merge into a great clan whose relationships become dauntingly entangled.However, just when you nearly give up trying to sort them out, along comes a redeemingly bizarre anecdote to renew your energy. One of the most enjoyable chapters concerns Hugh Percy Lane, an eccentric philanthropist who wanted to provide Dublin with a new Municipal Art Gallery.
Lutyens was, as always, game, but the difficulty was to find a site. A skating rink and some Turkish baths were proposed, until eventually the architect produced a marvellously extravagant design for a new bridge across the Liffey which would itself be a gallery. Brown reproduces his drawing, opposite the suggestion of the Saturday Herald cartoonist, that Lutyens should go one stage further and build the gallery at the top of Nelson's Pillar, cantilevered in the sky What a pity they turned it down.. With so much new fiction seeming to coast along less on merit than on street-cred rating, it's refreshing to come upon a courteous Anita Brookner novel. The disregard for fashion and political correctness, the coyly euphemistic references to all things erotic, seem curiously daring and subversive. It's like encountering a crinolined lady in the middle of an orgy. There are no surprises here, just the guilty nudge of recognition as you identify with one or other of the manifold inadequacies of the characters.
You know exactly what to expect, but in a way that is the point of an Anita Brookner novel. There will be ample evidence of a stern yet vulnerable intelligence, acutely refined observation, passages of elegance and eloquence interspersed with long waffly bits, and an over-riding sense of tedium teeming with snakes. There will also, of course, be a typical Brookner solitary. Here it is Alan Sherwood, "a respectable member of the middle class", a middle-aged solicitor embracing the safety of mediocrity with a desperation that testifies to the fact that he is actually half mad, albeit in that quiet, sane way most of us manage somehow to contain.Encountering a woman on a station platform, for a moment he is reminded of Sarah Miller, a woman he had once known. This encounter sets off the long locomotive of reminiscence which is his life story, one characterised by the overwhelming illusion that he has actually had an affair with this woman.Brookner cleverly creates a chasm between what the narrator thinks he is telling you and what you actually understand.
He is relating a grand passion; you are perceiving a minimal, passing thing, an awkward filigree of indifference, crossed lines and missed chances. The magnetic redhead, Sarah Miller herself, can scarcely be said to exist at all. Her character is a deliberately slippery fish, impossible to catch. She may be just a deeply unimpressive poser but we're never sure. Alan is so completely baffled by her, he can only put her across as some sort of black hole into which all definitions fade.What translates to the reader is a profound, sad sympathy, in particular for his short-lived wife, Angela, a woman as frightened and childish as himself, and Jenny, a guilt-inducing nuisance to absolutely everyone, whose progress into a lonely and suspicious old age is so ably defined it manages to be both cruel and compassionate in equal measure.This is a world of life's losers, those looking in rather than participating Alan is out of control He doesn't choose things, they happen to him No wonder Sarah, whoever she was, passed him by. In the end, ominously, it becomes clear that the woman for whom he actually feels most is poor, neglected Jenny.
