Hotel du Lac
Anita Brookner's 'surprise' Booker winning novel
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Earlier this year, I happened upon an old film version of Anita Brookner’s Booker winning novel Hotel du Lac. Having read the novel many years ago, picking it up at random from a secondhand book fair, I hadn’t known anything of its controversy, and simply remembered enjoying its gentle, satirical storyline.
The film, made in 1986 and starring Anna Massey as central protagonist Edith Hope, is a pure joy! A quintessentially genteel English film, it is set against the backdrop of a luxury hotel, out of season, in the pristine setting of Lake Geneva, surrounded by the towering mountains. It tells the story of a bunch of characters staying at the Hotel du Lac of its title. Amongst them Edith Hope, a romance novelist, who we come to learn has taken refuge at the hotel due to her self-imposed exile.
In 1984, Anita Brookner, then a Cambridge University art historian, was the surprise winner when Hotel du Lac won the £15,000 Booker Prize for fiction, much to the annoyance of, it seems, pretty much everyone. In what should have been a joyous moment for Brookner, critics remain baffled as to how she managed to swipe the prize from whom they felt was the rightful winner of that year’s prize, JG Ballard for his novel Empire of the Sun. The judges described Brookner’s winner, her fourth novel, as "a work of perfect artifice," surprising not only critics and readers but the bookmakers, who had rated the novelist as a 6-1 outsider, considering J. G. Ballard such a runaway favourite that Ladbrokes stopped taking bets on him to take the prize.
In awarding Brookner’s novel the Booker, the judges’ claimed the novel was "written with dry humour, minutely observed and always at a very low key". This gave it the "elegance and apparent simplicity of the 18th century".
Born in London in 1928, Brookner was the only child of unhappy Polish parents who had arrived in England with the name of Bruckner, tweaking this into Brookner to avoid bearing such a Germanic name following WWI.
She was educated at James Allen’s girls’ school in Dulwich, south-east London, before going on to King’s College London. Brookner claimed to have disliked this experience, where she studied a degree course in French and history, and suggested that she couldn’t even remember the third subject she took.
She did, however, know that she liked art. One of her lecturers noticed this, suggesting that she should switch to reading art history as her third option, which advice she gladly followed.
She began teaching in 1959 as a visiting lecturer at Reading University, later gaining a lectureship at The Courtauld Institute of Art in 1964. By 1977 she became Reader in art history, which she remained until she retired in 1988. A couple of years later she was appointed CBE.
From 1981, she turned to writing fiction with her first novel, A Start in Life, going on to publish at the rate of a novel a year from thereon, easing up only at the end of the century.
“I don’t like writing fiction much; it’s like being on the end of a bad telephone line – but it’s addictive.”
The anger that her winning of the 1984 Booker Prize provoked was unprecedented.
Critics included Malcolm Bradbury, who called her winning novel "parochial", and insisted that it was not the sort of book that should have won the Booker, whilst The New Statesman called it "pretentious"...ouch! They did relent that "it wasn't her fault that she won the prize." Indeed. How a female author of such a quiet, ‘parochial’ novel should have been awarded the prestigious prize over Ballard’s novel (who incidentally, and rather incendiary to the critics, never managed to win the prize with any of his books) was a mystery to them.
Brookner herself half-apologised that her books were "quite nice but unimportant" and suggested it might have been better if Empire Of The Sun had won in its place. (This makes me not a little bit annoyed: not that I am judging which book should or should not have won the prize; just the fact that a female novelist should feel the need to have to ‘apologise’ for winning a prize that the judges decided she deserved!
Reading about the critics comments towards Ballard’s more ‘important’ novel put me in mind of Virginia Woolf’s suggestions to female Cambridge students in A Room of One’s Own, where she points out that women’s writing was often overlooked where it dealt with more domestic themes, rather than the assumed importance of male writer’s work on topics such as war, history, and politics.
Hotel du Lac is written in a clean, simple yet suggestive prose. It tells the story of Edith Hope, a romantic novelist on a "curious interlude in her life". Forced into temporary exile, she holidays at the Swiss hotel of the book's title after (we only discover around half way into the novel) a romantic indiscretion that has outraged her friends so much that they have ordered her away to have a good long think.
Again, I found this storyline almost echoing her later win of the Booker: both Edith and Anita, it seems, are made to feel shame: the fictional Edith for her romantic choices, and the real-life Anita for her taking of the Booker.
At first, Edith mopes around a bit, failing to write her latest novel, as she tries to decide how to continue her life. This general feeling of melancholy and listlessness is echoed by the atmosphere of her surroundings. Pathetic fallacy works wonderfully in this novel, and is brought to great fruition in the film. The hotel is shown as stuffy, snooty, evoking the perfect atmosphere for Edith to ruminate on her indiscretions.
"As far as guests were concerned, it took a perverse pride in its very absence of attractions, so that any visitor mildly looking for a room would be puzzled and deflected by the sparseness of the terrace, the muted hush of the lobby … There was no sauna, no hairdresser and certainly no glass cases displaying items of jewellery; the bar was small and dark and its austerity did not encourage people to linger."
There are six vividly drawn guests at the hotel, all with problems of their own.
Most of them are delightfully irritating, particularly the overbearing, wealthy Mrs Pusey and her devoted daughter who take on the unasked for task of cheering up Edith. They succeed in boring and patronising her, however the distraction they and others provide goes some way towards lifting Edith from her ruminations.
Another of the guests, Mr Neville, (played by Denholm Elliot in the film), ends up proposing to a surprised Edith, telling her "I need a wife whom I can trust", despite only meeting her a few days previously. He feels however that it might be an attractive proposition for her, since at the moment, "you are desolate."
The humour here is palpable and there are plenty of moments such as this to lighten the text. The book is elegantly written and has a depth of intelligence and wit that I loved when I first encountered it.
Edith, we are told, writes commercially successful romantic fiction under the pseudonym of Vanessa Wilde (which some critics have pointed out blends the writer Virginia Woolf and her artist sister, Vanessa, as well as hints at the writer Oscar Wilde). It appears that Edith’s fictional women have better luck in love than she herself does. She is shown as a keen observer of others; a fairly shabbily dressed, shy, “mild-looking, slightly bony woman in a long cardigan, distant, inoffensive, quite nice eyes, rather large hands and feet, meek neck.”
Much like her creator, however, Edith is a well-educated woman with an amusing personality. We are to learn that she has had lovers and received a marriage proposal, (in addition to Mr Neville’s) yet remains independent. She has her own flat back home in London and earns a decent independent income. She also affirms her right to stick to the formulaic writing for which she is popular, refusing to kowtow to popular contemporary tastes by infusing them with sex scenes.
What is quite amusing and well written is the attitude Edith’s friends have towards her. Believing her to be a pitiful creature who must be lonely, they try to ‘improve’ her life, whilst never guessing that she has a lover, or that she is quietly content with her existence. She has her independence, her successful writing career, and loves to be at home in her garden. She also has a secret lover, David, a married auctioneer who cannot see her very often.
We learn that she has accepted a proposal of marriage to a kind but dull man, Geoffrey Long, who has given her his deceased mother’s opal ring. Edith, meanwhile, has no fondness for the ring, merely worrying that, were she to go ahead with the marriage, she would lose her beloved garden by moving into Geoffrey’s home. This leads to her getting so far as the Registry Office, before realising, right at the last minute, that she cannot go through with the wedding. Against her usually kind nature, Edith jilts Geoffrey, humiliating him and shocking her friends, and subsequently leaves for Switzerland in order to reflect on her actions and motives.
When hotel guest Mr Neville later proposes to her beside Lake Geneva, she wonders whether his suggestion - to have a comfortable marriage whilst being free to take other lovers - isn’t a reasonable basis for a marriage. Initially feeling this might in fact be a good option, despite the short time they have known one another, she later witnesses Mr Neville leaving the room of another young female guest, and realises she would rather love the unattainable David than endure a loveless marriage to Mr Neville.
Edith states her “idea of absolute happiness,” as “to sit in a hot garden all day, reading, or writing, utterly safe in the knowledge that the person I love will come home to me in the evening. Every evening.”
Though she realises that David will never be this to her, as he will never leave his wife and children, she feels she has found a greater understanding of her life, and accepts her limited but satisfying role with the man she still loves. Choosing loneliness, the absence of her lover, her lack of social position and children, she remains an object of pity to her friends, but importantly, not to herself.
“Not drowning, but waving,” as Edith says; a play on the Stevie Smith poem.
I remember thoroughly enjoying this novel when I first read it many years ago, and watching the film recently reminded me of just how much. I no longer have my old copy, but it is one I plan to source and reminisce in a truly original story.
As to whether the book ‘deserved’ to win the Booker, who can say. I honestly never take much notice of these sorts of prizes myself. Surely a book is as good as the experience each individual reader gets from it, and the fact that a book did or did not win a prize never influences my reading choices.
Clearly, the judging panel of the 1984 Prize thought that Brookner’s novel had what they were looking for. Certainly for me, it is a strong and enjoyable piece of fiction.
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I am not familiar with this work, but I look forward to adding it to my reading list. This scenario reminds me of when Edith Wharton was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1921, yet that remarkable achievement was undermined when reports came out that the jury had selected _Main Street_, but the decision was overturned by the all-male Pulitzer Board arguing that it was not adequately “wholesome” to win & declared that Wharton’s work met that shallow standard. Clearly the Pulitzer Board had no understanding of the nuance & complexity of Wharton’s brilliant social critique—and attack on socially validated sexism that made the controversy particularly absurd!
Like you, Kate, I enjoyed the book first time around but when I returned to it it was much better than I had remembered. That does make me cross, to think how sexist (and preposterous) those male critics were. I'm looking forward to Hermione Lee's biography of Brookner, due soon!