A Friend from England

"I feel like each book of Brookner’s is a continuation. She’s created this world with her novels. I haven’t read them all, but I’ve read several, and it’s like they’re part of a family. There’s very little dialogue and there’s a very rich texture to the prose. The prose itself is why I return to Brookner again and again. How to describe her prose? It’s sophisticated and a little musty. She’s known for writing about spinsters, or about women who are not in possession of the brass rings that maybe those around them have come to get. They’re outsiders, and often very curious observers. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . There’s something both calming and disturbing about her writing that brings me back over and over. And I love that she didn’t start writing novels until she was 53. I won’t call her a late bloomer, because up until then she had a full career as a historian of art. But she was a late adopter of a new métier, and she’s a master. She was a consistent writer, too; I think she wrote a book every year for much of her career. When she got older, she started slowing down—maybe one every two years. [ Laughs .] But really, she was on fire. I chose it because this book feels less lonely to me than the others of hers I’ve read. I also love this particular trope: a mismatch pairing of two women not naturally destined to be friends, and at different stations in life. One of them is a little more pitiful than the other, perhaps, and one of them is a little more glamorous. Other books like it include What Was She Thinking?: Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller, or The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud. A Friend From England is also more suspenseful and plotty than some of her books. It’s told from the point of view of a 32-year-old woman named Rachel, who’s essentially been chosen by 27-year-old Heather’s parents to be Heather’s friend and look after her and keep her company and make sure she’s okay. So there’s an obsession in this book with meddling concern. In a way, it’s crazy that Rachel and Heather have nothing in common. They have no past together. There’s no attraction. There’s no glue of a friendship. It’s simply this bond of duty—it’s a strange friendship where all the other elements are boiled away. That’s the focus: this attachment that’s based on a sense of obligation. “How to describe Brookner’s prose? It’s sophisticated and a little musty.” Really, it’s Rachel who’s trying to take hold of Heather’s life. She thinks she knows what’s right for Heather, and actually becomes a little untethered over the course of the novel. At the beginning, she’s very tolerant, maybe a little judgmental, and there’s a distance between the two of them in their companionship. By the end, we have Rachel travelling across the world to track down this woman and trying to shake her out of her life choices. The most amazing scene is at the end, where suddenly the distance between the two melts away and Rachel’s obsession with Heather is just thrown back in her own face. She sees herself completely differently, in a way that’s incredibly painful. There’s a lot in this book about knowledge, and not sharing knowledge. There aren’t very many characters, but there are definitely discrepancies among them about who knows what, and who has observed what about each other—all to varying degrees measuring the happiness of other people. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In the end, the one person who has felt like she’s essentially drafted the shape of her own life is Rachel: she’s the outsider; she’s orphaned. She’s not part of this prosperous family where there’s always a sense of warmth, food and happiness surrounding them. She’s always circled around them, happy enough to get a taste of it when she comes to visit but resigned to being single. She’s not one of those women who becomes all atwitter about marriage or weddings; she holds men off at a distance. She’s engineered this life as a lonely woman, and there’s a sense of total self-deception, of explosion of self-awareness, at the very end that has absolutely nothing to do with Heather. And it boomerangs right back at our narrator’s self-consciousness. She says at one point, “I had been softened and amused by the solemnity with which they had accepted all the farrago of romantic passion. For to me it was a farrago, both on the stage and in real life, something archaic and unmanageable, unsettling and devastating, and to succumb to such a passion would be a quite voluntary step towards self-destruction.” Yes. Her worst possible path, or destiny, just flashes in her face. It almost feels like she just as suddenly shoots right to her death. Rachel feels throughout the book that she’s given herself space and liberty. She doesn’t have to put up with nonsense the way other people do, the nonsense of connection with other people. At the end, she’s essentially completely cut off from the family. But she’s not just back to being alone: she’s alone with her demons. In one sense, yes: she was the chain-smoking, cat-loving spinster. There’s obviously a reason people lump Brookner herself with the Brookner heroine. But my sense of Brookner is that she was more pleased in life, and that she was fascinated by the characters she wrote about. In another quote, she says: I am interested in people who live on their own, people who get left behind, who drop through the net, but who survive. They seem to me quite heroic characters sometimes, but no one inquires about them because they’re people who do without much conversation, whose loudest moments are internal. If such characters persist through my novels that’s because I don’t know much about them, not because I know them too well. I write to find out what makes them tick. And I’m not sure she feels like she was one of those people. It’s like the way Mike Leigh’s films are so great for the same reason: he doesn’t look at the winners. Brookner says she holds these women in very high esteem because she sees them as fierce warriors. There’s something very admirable about the day-to-day survival of a Brookner heroine."