Falling Slowly Book

3.5 stars

Thus far, I have been enamored by Brookner as I've made my way through four of her books: Look at Me, Fraud, Incidents in the Rue Laugier, and A Start in Life. This was the order in which I read them: out of order, haphazard, according to whichever I had out from the library or on the shelves at the time. 



Brookner is the sort of writer whose themes of isolation, loneliness, repression, and disappointment'albeit with an undercurrent of anger and frustration that just barely breaks the surface of her protagonists' consciousnesses, let alone their actions'recur in her novels, sometimes maddening readers by sticking to such a theme, but I've been rather enjoying her repetitions and slight variations on these themes. Instead of heroines whose stories are damningly similar, I find the overlaps to be comforting, to be real, to be rooted in realities that not many writers ever dared to plumb. 

Brookner's books are about real people crushed and made complacent by the world around them, by their families, by lovers, and by themselves... and who can't relate to that?

Here, though, in Falling Slowly'which takes its title from the shipping report ("And finally Mallin Head… Falling very slowly")'Brookner appears to repeat herself within the text rather than across texts. Falling Slowly therefore reads slowly, unlike the others of hers I've read: there simply isn't a rhythm or structure into which a reader can really fall and ultimately surrender. One reviewer on Amazon said they she felt the book suffered from many false starts; I concur, and I feel as though Brookner wasn't sure who the main protagonist was in the first 50-or-so pages.

When the story eventually becomes one of two very different, but oddly similarly conditioned, sisters (sort of like Brookner's version of Austen's Sense and Sensibility through the lens of James, who is mentioned many, many times here, and then finally with the frame of Villette [Jane Eyre is mentioned numerous times, almost disparagingly, but Villette not once]), it then expands further to encompass a wider cast that doesn't quite work. In the four prior Brookner novels I've read, she excels on a small canvas; in fact, her books might well be read as chamber dramas that are so claustrophobic that their eminent wisdom and effect comes from centering on just two or three characters. While Falling Slowly has no huge cast of characters like Trollope or Dickens, it does suffer from repetition across the characters (perhaps as there are more here than usual), and also a structure that really feels like Brookner is, even just up to the end of the novel, feeling her way along, trying to see where the book is going. 



Don't get me wrong: the book is devastating, perhaps more so than any others of hers that I've read. But it's not a good place for one to start if one is new to Brookner. Since I'm only five books into her pretty impressive oeuvre, I'll still say that one should begin with Look at Me to get a really good idea of Brookner's voice, her concerns, and the echoes that can be found across her fiction. This is a four star book, given the insight and the depths her impeccable prose reaches, as always; but this is a pretty weak Brookner, hence the 3.5 star rating. Hey: if you write 24 novels in a career that begins at the age of 53, averaging one book per year, there will inevitably be some that don't reach the heights of others. That's the case here. However, do yourself a favor and get on the Brookner wagon. Almost everything you've assumed about her'at least I know that was the case for me, hence why it took me so long to even read her work, a fact I now bemoan'is terribly, terribly false.