A Closed Eye

Harriet Lytton is a naïve and undemanding woman who expects very little of life and that is what she receives. Married to a respectable man old enough to be her father, Harriet's only taste for passion comes when she meets television journalist Jack Peckham, the unruly and attractive husband of her friend Tessa. Tessa and Harriet have for many years been bound together by their childhood friendship and the imposed alliance of their two daughters, Imogen and Lizzie. But events conspire to shatter the gentle rhythm of Harriet's settled life. Sadly constrained by her own cautious decisions, she faces the cruellest losses of all: those of hope and desire. An altogether convincing portrait of failed love and solitude, reminiscent of so many of Anita Brookner's protagonists.

The characters in A Closed Eye are so real and ring with such truth that they haunt me days after finishing the novel. Rarely has an author so clearly explained her characters' emotions. Anita Brookner is not interested in a gripping plot line. Instead she creates real people whom we compare to ourselves and to our neighbors. She challenges us to reevaluate our own lives, to try to understand our own motives as well as we understand those of her characters. Although detailing the small, mundane lives of her characters, Brookner reminds us that all people face frustrations, failed dreams, and lives of compromise. In a strange way that becomes supportive to the readers and helpful to us in coping with our own troubles. This book is not for romantics looking for fairy tale endings. Reading A Closed Eye is an intense, cathartic experience. I felt Brookner's characters' loneliness and understood their compromises and their choices. I returned from the book to my own world less judgmental and more tolerant of others and of myself. I mourn the lost lives of these characters as I would my friends. Art changes one's perception of the world; that is what this book did for me.

The first half of the book contains, as do almost all Brookner books, a compelling word-picture of a girl, growing to maturity in a social landcape of seemingly appalling emptiness. Her rather distraught mother, sensing her daughter Harriet's inability to manage anything like a full life, manages to get her married off to the safe Freddy (whose safeness seems somewhat perverted in the bedroom - in one small , laconic and chilling scene , Brookner obliquely describes Freddy's style, characterised by the infliction of careless rather than deliberate pain and the sotto voce commands of " quiet!" and "keep still....") Still, it seems enough for Harriet despite her intuitive feel that it must be possible for it to be better.When her daughter Imogen is born, both she - and in a lesser and perhaps more pathetic way Freddy - bring the child up to be a perfect monster of selfishness and ingratitude. One can almost SEE Immy, prancing and demanding as an infant, self-centred and contemptuous as a girl. Imogen is beautiful, shallow, not particularly intelligent but full of what it takes to succeed.One of her chief 'attributes' is her ability to reduce her ageing father to humiliated shame at daring to be the father of such a beauty and he mother to fruitless pleadings to be allowed into her life. Harriet is doomed,it seems, to a life half-lived in matters of love. Her friend Tessa ( a bit of an Imogen herself as a girl) had married Jack, a deeply attractive man of the sort our mother warned us about - uncomitted to the point of pathology. Anita Brookner's admiration for this character is apparent, especially the part where she gives him terse-but-manly lines to say on Tessa's deathbed. Of course Harrriet is in love with him, always has been, but true to her usual style, never manages much more than a kiss, though it is an apocalyptic one. (Germaine Greer once said that as a girl she thought that apocalyptic kissess in novels should be understood as full blown sex....??). Jack and Tessa's daughter Lizzie (about whom I both wanted to hear more but was afraid to do so in case she turned out to be a life not even a quarter lived..) has been semi brought up by Harriet, mostly due to the fact that Tessa regarded Lizzie as a kind of hostage for Jack's eventual return(s) and needed somewhere safe to park her. Poor Lizzie, forever in the shadow of the unspeakable Immy; did she know her moment of Phyrric victory when she is carried away on Jack's shoulders and Immy sees that Lizzies father is so superior to poor old Freddy? It's scenes like this that keep me reading Anita Brookner , no matter how cross and depressed the heroines make me. Imogens death in a rather banal car crash scenario ( why, I wonder - would not death-by-botched abortion, a scene perfectly possible, given the grounds already laid for it with the cool and distanced Lizzie, have been better, dramatically speaking?) sets Harriet free - if freedom to take your decaying and cantakerous hus