The Rules of Engagement: A Novel - Hardcover

Brookner, Anita

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400061652 ISBN 13: 9781400061655

Publisher: Random House, 2003

Synopsis

In this masterly new novel, the Booker Prize–winning author of Hotel du Lac and Making Things Better gives us an exquisite story about the changes in relationships over time, and how our life choices can both reflect the past and direct the future. Hailed as “one of the finest novelists of her generation” (The New York Times), Anita Brookner here weaves an impeccably crafted tale of two women, friends from youth, and the decisions and men that define their destinies.

Elizabeth and Betsy knew each other as schoolchildren. When they meet again later in life, one is safely married, the other most unsafely partnered. Together, they discover that despite their very disparate lives, they still have in common the capacity for making dangerous choices. Ultimately, their inclination to implement these decisions reveals the fate that was spelled out in their characters from the start.

About this title

About the Author

Anita Brookner was born in London and, apart from several years spent in Paris, has lived there ever since. She trained as an art historian and taught at the Courtauld Institute of Art until 1988. The Rules of Engagement is her twenty-second novel.

Reviews

Anita Brookner, who has just published her 22nd novel, The Rules of Engagement, was, before she became a novelist, a distinguished scholar of 18th-century French art. It's interesting, though perhaps unsurprising, to learn that she focused on both Ingres and David -- artists whose work is elegant, static, beautifully composed, highly controlled and exquisitely finished, sensuous but oddly without passion. Ingres once said that the surface of a painting should be "smooth as a [peeled] onion." All these comments might be made of the immaculate style of Anita Brookner.

The Rules of Engagement is set in a world that has become familiar to her readers, after 21 versions: upper middle-class London. Elizabeth and Betsy are classmates who meet on their first day of school. Their relationship over time -- intricate and nuanced, composed of affection, competition, envy and support -- is the focus of this book.

Elizabeth, the protagonist, is worldly, unintellectual and unambitious. Her place in the world seems secure: Her family is well off, her father successful, her mother a beauty. Betsy, by contrast, is unsophisticated, intellectual, earnest and impecunious. Her place in the world is perilous: Her mother is dead, and her father dies soon after. She is raised by a dim and colorless aunt. Betsy timidly longs for inclusion into Elizabeth's family, but Elizabeth's cold and snobbish mother has other ideas.

" 'Can't you find someone more suitable?' she would say, meaning someone richer, more fortunate, more useful." When Betsy visits, Elizabeth reports of her mother, "I could intuit exasperation in the way she tapped her cigarette on the lid of the silver cigarette box before lighting it with a flourish. 'Do you want to show your friend your room?' she asked, after a brief silence. 'And show her round the garden, why don't you.' We were dismissed."

Secrets, however -- and we know by now that withheld information plays an important part in Brookner's work -- are present even in those early days: Elizabeth's apparently peaceful life is a sham. Her parents "do not get on," and after years of acrimony they divorce. Elizabeth never revealed this information to her closest friend. "I was sufficiently ruled by my upbringing and the codes of my class to know that I must lodge no complaint, express no dissatisfaction, and carry on as if all were for the best in the best of all possible worlds."

After school, Elizabeth and Betsy go their separate ways, Elizabeth to a cooking course, then a dull marriage with Digby, a wealthyish older man. Betsy goes to university on scholarship, then to Paris, where she takes up with a young revolutionary. The novel starts after the two friends reconnect -- when Elizabeth is settled into her stultifying marriage and Betsy returns from Paris with the free-spirited Daniel.

Daniel, says Elizabeth, "was beautiful, with a lithe mythical beauty that brought to mind certain classical statues seen in reproduction, as if only now was I face to face with the real thing." But Daniel walks around the room, humming rudely, while the two women sit and talk, and Elizabeth passes judgment. "Nevertheless I found him repellent. His activity, his humming deprived him of ordinary accessibility and removed any possibility of normal exchange of the kind practised in the circles in which I moved."

Elizabeth has chosen Daniel's opposite. Her husband, Digby, "was not a young man. He was twenty-seven years my senior, but for that very reason seemed to promise an extension of the parenthood and guardianship which my father appeared to have relinquished without regret." Kind, conscientious and worn out, Digby has veined hands, and likes to nap after dinner in front of the TV. Elizabeth married him, she says, "because I was bored and unhappy. . . . And because without him, or someone like him, I had no future."

Elizabeth has a flexible moral code and feels no compunction at taking up at once with one of Digby's closest friends, a fleshy, handsome cad called Edmund. Edmund's wife, the worldly and lethally cold Constance, has always despised Elizabeth. The situation is one familiar to Brookner's readers: a passive, undemanding woman who feels herself an outsider, bored by her soporific husband, uncherished by her heartless lover and despised by his powerful and sophisticated wife. Betsy, having shed Daniel, returns to London. Once Betsy meets Edmund, Elizabeth watches fatalistically as the toils of life engulf them both.

Though friendship seems to be the subject of the story, the underlying motif is its opposite -- a self-willed and inexorable solitude. This is a tale of helplessness, subjugation and renunciation. Elizabeth has always felt isolated, an attitude reiterated throughout the book. "In my empty stoical days," she says, "knowing myself to be excluded from more strenuous pleasures, I had at least formed a notion of how life might be, whether or not I managed some sort of admission to it." Later she says, "I felt at one with all those people on the sidelines of life, forced to contemplate the successful manoeuvres in which others were engaged, obliged to listen politely and to refrain from comment."

Elizabeth, like many other of Brookner's protagonists, resists connection, intimacy and emotional risk. Turning away from both friendship and love, she holds fast to a fatalistic and inexplicable belief that she is doomed to solitude and silence. This melancholy assumption of exclusion, this incapacity to ask anything of life, reverberates in The Rules of Engagement, as it does in much of Brookner's work. The story is told, however, with such elegance and polish that its surface -- satiny, flawless and smooth as an onion, as always -- holds a fascination equal to its content.

Reviewed by Roxana Robinson

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

To read Brookner is to be reminded of fiction's potential to stun, with full, complex characters in a richly imagined world, as she draws on her insights into human nature to explore the strained yet enduring friendship of two women of "the last virginal generation." Born in 1948 and friends from childhood, the open, eager-to-please Betsy and the cooler, analytical Elizabeth appear to have little in common. But they share many things, including stubbornness, strength and, dangerously, the same married lover. Seen through the eyes of 50-something Elizabeth, the novel chronicles the often devastating choices the two women make as they age; as such, it is more a book of thought than action. The reclusive Elizabeth, conscious of the mysterious "virtue attached to being a witness," dissects the minutest of human interactions, imposing elaborate rules of self-governance with which she often does battle. Her gaze is ruthless but brilliantly illuminating. "I saw our childlessness as an indictment, a reproach to what had been our folly," Elizabeth observes of herself and Betsy. "We had seen ourselves always as lovers, whereas sensible persons, or perhaps those with greater understanding of the world, make their peace with existing circumstances.... we had chosen, she and I, to stay within the limits of this exalted and fragile condition." Within those limits, in Brookner's skilled hands, vast worlds of human possibility exist.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Two London girls born in 1948 and both named Elizabeth start school on the same day. One is asked to choose an alternative, and she opts for Betsy, a bid for cheerfulness in light of her dim orphan life. Elizabeth appears to be far better off, but her seemingly glamorous parents' marriage is wretchedly unhappy. Lacking in imagination and fire, Elizabeth marries Digby, a dull man 27 years her senior. Betsy goes to Paris, falls catastrophically in love, and returns to London, where Elizabeth has embarked on a chilly affair. Digby dies; Betsy meets Elizabeth's selfish lover at the wake; the women's guarded friendship becomes even more strained; and, as time drains away, their lives become studies in purposelessness. Each year Brookner presents a morbidly fascinating inquiry into the nature of stoicism and "circumstances of bleak rectitude" as though issuing an annual report on the psychology of helplessly solitary and obscenely idle individuals. Shrewd and idiosyncratic, these tense interior dramas offer piquant pleasures thanks to Brookner's mordant wit, gorgeous language, and acute understanding of the axis between pride and shame, loneliness and misanthropy, integrity and cruelty. She also offers sterling insights into the differences between men and women and the peculiar voluptuousness of obsessive self-regard. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

We met, and became friends of a sort, by virtue of the fact that we started school on the same day. Because we had the same Christian name it was decreed that she should choose an alternative. For some reason—largely, I think, because she was influenced by the sort of sunny children’s books available in our milieu—she decided to be known as Betsy. When we met up again, several years later, she was Betsy de Saint-Jorre. Not bad for a girl initially registered as Elizabeth Newton.

How much nicer children were in those days than the adults they have become! Born in 1948, we were well-behaved, incurious, with none of the rebellious features adopted by those who make youthfulness a permanent quest. We went to tea in one another’s houses, sent each other postcards when we went on holiday with our parents, assumed we would know each other all our lives . . . The Sixties took us by surprise: we were unprepared, unready, uncomprehending. That, I now see, was why I married Digby: it was the right, unthinking thing to do. That was why Betsy took it upon herself to have a career, out of despair, perhaps, at not being provided for. Choice hardly dictated our actions. Yet I suppose we were contented enough. Certainly we knew no better. And now we know too much. Discretion veiled our motives then, and perhaps does so even now, even in an age of multiple communications, of e-mails, text messages, and news bulletins all round the clock. We still rely on narrative, on the considered account. That is how and why I knew Betsy’s story, though I cannot claim to know all of it. There were areas of confusion which it seemed better not to disclose. But she was always painfully honest, rather more so than prudence might advise. That quality made itself felt when we were still children; her desire to explain herself, to be known, was perhaps really a desire to be loved. That too was discernible, and it set her apart. In later life, when I knew her again, that quality was still there, obscured only slightly by the manners she had acquired, and always at odds with her mind, which was exacting. In other circumstances she might have been remarkable. But her hopes had been curtailed, and in the years of her adulthood one sometimes saw this, in the odd distant glance directed towards a window, or the eagerness with which she smiled at any passing child.

Her initial demotion from Elizabeth to Betsy was thought to be justified, given her uncertainty of status. She took it in her stride, thinking it gave her permission to assume an altogether different character, someone more lighthearted, skimming the surface, responding always with a smile. She longed to be superficial, with the sort of ease that I and my particular coterie took for granted. Adult responsibility, of an altogether unwelcome kind, had already come her way, in the shape of her widowed father and the faded aunt who kept some sort of primitive life going in that flat above the surgery in Pimlico Road. She was unfortunate: that was generally agreed, and it made her something of an anomaly in our midst. My mother professed sympathy for her, but viewed with dislike Betsy’s attempts to be winning when she came to our house in Bourne Street, on the rare occasions when I was obliged to invite her. The enthusiasm with which she greeted my mother’s teatime offerings (meagre enough in those days of austerity) and the attention she paid to the contents of our drawing-room were not attractive, and my mother was not tactful in acknowledging the evidence of Betsy’s social awkwardness. I had many years in which to reflect on my mother’s harshness. Even when young I was aware of a desire to depart from this, to be less brittle, less proud, less conformist than my mother. Now I see that I have not quite managed it. My only victory is that the harshness has been internalized. My judgements even now are sometimes less than charitable.

There was another reason for my mother’s dislike, and that had to do with the cause of Betsy’s profound disenfranchisement. Her father’s negligence, or incompetence, had led indirectly to the death of one of his patients, who happened to be an acquaintance of ours. Pity and dislike, first manifested by my mother, affected Betsy even more than her father’s disgrace, which she inherited. It seemed ordained to follow her through life, for there was nothing she could do to rectify it. His error was, I dare say, a common one: a lump in the breast which he assured his patient was a cyst revealed its malignancy in due course and led not only to that patient’s demise but to his own, after a year of brooding and of unpopular comment in the neighbourhood. I met him once, when I went home with Betsy, the only time I did so; he entered what I suppose had once been her nursery, where we were discussing our homework, turned off the electric fire and opened the window. I found this insensitive, though it may have been protective, but there was little in his demeanour which struck me as kindly. I thought him completely inadequate to fulfil the role of father, but I think he was simply indifferent to children. His better manners were reserved for his patients, in particular for his female patients. Maybe a desire to reassure, or even to comfort, came uppermost in his professional armoury. There was no whisper of impropriety, or none that I was aware of. His greater failure was his dwindling reputation in the year that followed our friend’s death, and his own death, from a heart attack, while sitting at his desk in his consulting-room, an irony he was spared. Irony was not a quality much appreciated in the 1950s. Now of course it is all-pervasive.

Sympathy was expressed, condolences were offered, and then the incident was forgotten, though not the fate of the patient. It was thought fitting that he should disappear, and that Betsy should be consigned to her aunt. This aunt—Mary to her niece, Miss Milsom to everyone else—was even less promising than her brother-in-law. Tall, thin, colourless, and obviously virginal, she inspired a vague repugnance even in those unliberated days. ‘Poor thing,’ said my mother, with a rich show of sympathy, but here again her dislike, or more probably her distaste, was evident, perhaps justifiably so. Miss Milsom had come to keep house after her sister’s death, shortly after the birth of Betsy, and she did so in a conscientious but defeated manner, so that it took her all day to prepare a meal which was no doubt unpalatable. After commiserating with Miss Milsom, or more probably for Miss Milsom, my mother would laugh, showing all her sparkling teeth, as if to demonstrate the difference between Miss Milsom and herself.

Nowadays, of course, we would assume that Miss Milsom and the doctor indulged in sex of a sort, but then we assumed no such thing. Those were innocent days; sex had yet to become the commodity on offer to all that it is now. By the same token there was little show of love between the aunt and the niece, neither of whom had been able to envisage an alternative to their present arrangement, but they were both loyal and obedient people, and they sustained an undemanding harmony, which, though honourable, provided little joy. Betsy proved to be a clever girl, who was obliged to keep her cleverness to herself, except at school, where she developed a passion for the drama, and was given to declaiming lines from Shakespeare and even Racine (we were doing Hamlet and Béré- nice); it was her one opportunity to deliver herself of aspiration (and it was aspiration rather than frustration) and to make contact with adult emotion.

The solution Betsy and her aunt made to their mutual lack of comprehension was their weekly visit to the cinema, usually on a Saturday evening, when they enjoyed a timid contact with the crowd. An early supper, the cinema, and a cup of tea on their return to the flat satisfied Miss Milsom’s sense of a justified indulgence, both for herself and for her niece. She viewed the films as an outsider: not for her the extravagance, the licence, the romance. Even so, something in her disciplined soul responded, whereas Betsy remained faithful to the grander concepts in her favourite Racine. ‘Que le jour recommence, et que le jour finisse/Sans que jamais Titus puisse voir Bérénice . . .’ These lines became prophetic, so that at the very end, when I visited her in the hospital, I would see her eyes widen in her thin face, and hear her murmur, ‘. . . sans que de tout le jour . . .,’ and then fall silent.

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1400061652
• ISBN 13: 9781400061655
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288