You could write a whole blog about the reaction to this book’s Booker Prize win in 1984, without actually mentioning why the novel itself is brilliant. The whole business can say a lot about our desires for what a literary prize should represent compared to the ‘greatness’ of the book chosen and its fellow nominees. And I will talk about it because I find it interesting, but all the noise surrounding it can drown out the book itself it seems.
Hotel du Lac itself can possess a sibling link to Anita Brookner’s novel prior to this, Look at Me. Both are a temperate, thoughtful and interesting study on the lonely life, aging, relationships and men and women. Though it sounds like a dour novel looking at big themes Brookner is so at ease and engaging it never feels like hard work. Her narrator Edith Hope, like many of her protagonists, are lonely women of a certain age and class, and the driving force in Hotel du Lac and Look at Me is their analysis of others, the strange creatures they struggle to identify with that are other human beings.
You could be lazy and say Hotel du Lac can be seen as a part two of Look at Me, a much cleaner, perhaps even colder counterpart. Though the fates of Brookner’s two narrators, Edith and Frances, are their potential world of escape collapsing around them and a return to their harsh reality, Look at Me results in a dramatic and harrowing breakdown through Hyde Park at night, haunted by her own self like a thriller or horror. But Edith’s is a thump back to the ground after a cold offer of a contractual relationship propositioned from a character I was never quite sure if we were supposed to like as a reader, I personally found him irritating and in some ways reprehensible. Yet I’m not sure Brookner has decided herself either.
It is also a much funnier novel, from Edith’s arrival at the Hotel in Switzerland she partakes on a visceral assault of opinions on her guests, surmising their attitudes and relationships, who they are, what makes them tick. Like an alien studying another species, often noting how the wealthy mother & daughter’s relationship seems like an act, all posture and grand emoting. Edith’s emotions are strongest inside, trapped in her mind like many introverts. There’s a similar bemused distance with the young couple in Look at Me, who end up drawing Frances into their whirlwind of social interactions, the performative relationship more successfully luring her than Edith manages in this novel.
It’s a testament to how skilled Brookner is as a writer that the crescendo of the book is Edith crossing out two words and choosing another. The weight of this decision as you leave the book musing on Edith’s fate is just one tiny example of the remarkably deft aspect to her writing. And yet, years later when Brookner was an older woman she has been quoted as refuting the end to this novel, insisting she would change Edith’s choice. A fascinating insight itself into both the author and the close relationship to their work. I think this is one of the elements that most intrigues me about Brookner as a writer, that author and fiction often (at least through my limited experience of her works so far) go hand in hand.
Brookner won the Booker Prize for this over other favourites, perhaps most significantly J.G Ballard’s Empire of the Sun. Though it went on to be a bestseller you can find all sorts of figures in the British cultural canon reacting with distaste to the decision, from Jeanette Winterson to Mark Lawson dismissing it as a prime example of the tastefully dull English novel about middle class people having tea and nothing gritty or dramatic happens. Much hand wringing seems to have occurred at the time that this supposed polite tedium is what is representing English Literature.
That is essentially because something with as much clout (in the literary world at least) as the Booker isn’t about rewarding the best novel with a title and money. It’s not just expected to be a good decision so booksellers and publishers can receive a much needed boost to the industry for sales, its supposed to represent something, a literary exemplar of the status of writing in that year. It’s not Brookner’s fault Hotel du Lac isn’t really built for such a reputation. It is a brilliantly written, intelligent and superbly crafted novel, but it’s unsurprising critics at the time were dismayed this was hailed as the peak of British writing in the 80s when American authors seemed to daring and exciting in comparison. The weight of this prize and what its supposed to hold completely undermines the novel itself. Winning the Booker is a message. Much like the Oscars, its not always the best book that is the winner, that’s not its job. There was some moaning when Milkman by Anna Burns won in 2018 that it was too difficult or experimental, and others contesting the complete opposite, resulting in both wondering if it might dissuade readers from picking it up or damaging the relationship the prize represents to the public.
But it is ultimately, just a few random people’s collective opinion. We don’t have to listen if we don’t want to.
bookphiles 