Lost and Found

Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


It was the recent death of Anita Brookner that made me return to this masterpiece. It won the Booker Prize in 1984, controversially, I seem to recall, firstly because it was such a 'short' story, and secondly because it was won by a relatively unknown woman at a time when the usual hard-hitting literary males were expecting to walk off with the accolade.

To be honest, my sadness at hearing of Anita Brookner's death was tinged by a certain guilt. For many years after 'Hotel du Lac' I read every novel she published - and she published frequently and regularly. Gradually however, I began to grow a little weary of the repetition of her themes - which I saw as loneliness, solitude (the two being very different), money vs love, the stifling urban contexts - and also with her microscopic, Jamesian, attention to detail, which at times made me feel as if I was being slowly suffocated by the density of the prose and the minutiae of thought behind it.

So it was with mixed anticipation that I re-opened 'Hotel du Lac' three weeks ago, only to find that it was even more of a masterpiece than I had remembered. For it might be the 'shortest' of stories, but it has a depth that makes it more than worthy of its status as a great novel. The attention to detail is ever-present, but handled so deftly and with such tight relevance to the plot and theme that a wonderfully cumulative effect of understanding is achieved as the book goes on.

On the face of it the story is simple: a woman is holidaying by herself at a hotel on the shores of Lake Geneva. The woman, Edith Hope, is a novelist and the tourist season is over, infusing the atmosphere with an air of decline. Edith is supposed to be working on a new book but spends all her time observing her fellow guests, a motley bunch, and writing witty descriptive letters to someone called David. Only gradually does the real story emerge, like colours filling a blank screen: David has been her married lover, whom she gave up on to accept a sensible offer of marriage (without love), only to scandalise her world by running out on her bridegroom at the last minute. She has been advised to take this trip to allow the scandal to blow over. The letters to David never get posted. Her heart is broken. Meanwhile one of the guests at the hotel is prepared to offer her another pragmatic marriage proposal, without love or even sex, but promising a sensible convergence of lifestyles and finances. Edith is flattered and also only too well aware that women of a certain age, especially those who have been the subject of public shame, should grab such opportunities where they can.

It is tempting to ruin the story by spelling out what happens. Suffice it to say that Brookner manages the closing of her tale with the same genius that she applies to the rest of it. Several times I was moved to tears, not just because of the mind-blowing subtlety and compassion of the story-telling, but because of the unflinching way Brookner faces down so many of the big questions about being human. We want companionship, but we need love. How can we settle for less without giving up on hope? And where does creativity sit? Do we need fiction to record our disappointments or to fill the void they leave?

Of course my 23 year old self must have grasped some of this, but it is little wonder that, now in my middle years, with a certain portion of suffering under my own belt, such issues resonate even more. I am so sorry that Anita Brookner has died, but so grateful that her loss has brought this book back into my life.



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