Latecomers
By Anita Brookner
First published by Jonathan Cape © 1988. This edition, Grafton Books 1989

‘Gentle’, ‘a book of charm’ say the reviews on the back cover of Anita Brookner’s ‘Latecomers.’

Brookner, who made her name with her fourth novel, the 1984 Booker Prize Winning ‘Hotel du Lac’, has a reputation for genteel melancholy. But in ‘Latecomers’ she demonstrates her ability to wield a scalpel, mercilessly dissecting the characters’ motives, exposing their desperation not to miss out on life’s opportunities, revealing their increasingly limited choices during the business end of life, adulthood.

The novel is about human relationships and their fragility, familiar territory for Brookner, and centres on two characters, Hartmann and Fibich, lifelong friends, now in their sixties and their relationships with each other and their wives.

Both Hartmann and Fibich had fled the holocaust in the 1930s and met as schoolboys in London. Both characters’ families were subsequently killed during the war.

Hartmann deals with this by becoming a ‘voluptuary’– “Why dwell on the past, particularly when the past was so uncongenial.” But Fibich, despite comfort and material success, cannot forget what he has lost.

The two characters run a successful printing business together but anxiety is the prevailing atmosphere surrounding their homes and their marriages. Hartman has a studied disregard for personal insight, and so manages to uphold the disposition of ‘bon viveur’, and it is his original business idea which is funding the wives and children of their bound-up personal lives.

Yet no-one seems to be able to develop properly, even though their lives are unfolding, because they cannot locate the prime causes of their motives and character.

Apart from the odd outing to London, the book is very much a one-room indoor play early on.

This is a cruel novel, after the European style of writing. It reminded me of Vladmir Nabokov, and well worth reading for its word craft and observations, stripping everything back.

The book is, above all, mature and a masterpiece. Towards the end, emotions open up, recalled dreams and fragments of childhood are pieced together in the quest for wholeness.

Hartmann and Fibich have yielded to their past, and its effect on their lives and relationships. I finished the book in tears.