Customer Reviews

The Bay of Angels

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

This writer has got to be the best wordsmith around. In each novel the sentences stand alone, dynamic, fresh and gleaming in intensity. The story is important, the characters are profound but these are often upstaged by the absolute pleasure of reading such sharp writing. I can't be the only person buying the latest novel of Anita Brookner every year as soon as it hits the shelf.

Much has been said about Brookner's lonely women and feminist approach and I will leave that to others who are better informed than me to remark upon. What I look for in every novel is the dramatic turn which never fails to be exciting. In THE BAY OF ANGELS, there are several but the most outstanding is the moment when Zoe returns to reclaim her stepfather's house in Nice and finds it already occupied, cocktails in hand, by his greedy relatives. The attitudes and survival tactics of the women who share the clinique with Zoe's sick mother are searing. Best of all is the moment by the sea when Zoe's reflects on the angels flying up from the bay and inward to land where they will reinforce the already celestial commercialism of earth.

A friend of mine in London once remarked to me that he sometimes sees Anita Brookner early in the morning on the Kings Road heading towards Waitrose supermarket. I was astounded, "doesn't anyone stop her," I asked imagining that she would be beset with fans. "No," said my friend, "nobody knows who she is." I would prefer to think that London is so vast that it renders one anonymous and invisible which is often the very dilemma ensnaring her characters.

I don't think we can find more sensitive and more accurate writer than Anita Brookner in describing and touching the "alive meat" of the loneliness of a woman - without self pity and no melodramatic epizodes - just the simple and the very true facts.
I have read more than 10 books by Anita Brookner, and each one of them was and still a great experience and an enrichment for the soul and the mind!.

I am perhaps one of the most rabid of the countless readers who eagerly await each year's new Anita Brookner novel, but, I have to admit, I was fairly disappointed in this one. I can't help feeling I must have missed something, because I am stunned by how utterly uninvolving the characters and the plot were to me. Brookner's prose, as always, is breathtaking, so I would recommend this to any fan, with the caveat: "Wait for the paperback". New Brookner readers would do better to start with Look at Me and Hotel du Lac or my more recent favorites, Falling Slowly and Undue Influence

First off, I love Anita Brookner and have read everything I know of that she has written. She writes, in my opinion, the most elegant prose and has a unique gift for penetrating layers and sublayers of her characters--many of whom are completely neurotic so I guess this could be annoying for some readers. I like it. There are threads in the books-the mother/daughter thread, for one that is very interesting. There is also the woman-taken-advantage-of -usually temporarily-by some cad. And every book has a setting that is so atmospheric that I delight in the long walks, the lonely evenings, the manners of her heroines. Most people I know who read for pleasure prefer simple zip-through novels and read very little non-fiction. I read very little fiction so I am picky and particular. Barbara Pym's "Excellent Women" and "Quartet in Autumn" are two novels I loved. I can't stand the Jan Karon or the Anita Shreve "sets"-so if you want that type of reading, forget Brookner. Evan Connell's old "Mr and Mrs. Bridge" books have a similar penetrating character analysis-or course without the elegance or atmosphere.
Having said all this, "BAy of Angels" is really not terrific Brookner. The main character Zoe is not quite right, so I recommend the earlier titles. If you like them, proceed. She is not for everyone.

Anita Brookner has written not so much a coming of age story as a coming to terms story. Zoe Cunningham narrates her own life story, beginning with her childhood as the daughter of a reclusive but kind widow who takes good care of her but teaches her nothing about coping with any of life's vicissitudes. Three or four decades ago, stream of consciousness fiction was popular, and there are elements of that somewhat formless style here, as Zoe works her way through her fears of losing her freedom, being rejected, choosing a career path, being a "liberated" woman or a genteel but passive lady like her mother, being engulfed by the needs of her mother..... These are common fears that we all have to tackle. It is interesting to see how Zoe ultimately manages to find and make something of herself, help the man she loves do the same, and develop a genuine capacity for understanding and compassion.

In my opinion I did not believe "The Bay of Angels" was a good book. It's content skipped around too much or too little. The author would get stuck on one subject that wasn't interesting too long and would make all the interesting parts of the book really short. "The Bay of Angles" was about a girl named Zoe, her father died when she was young and her mother re-married when Zoe was old enough to be on her own. I would not recommend this book to people who don't know much about Europe and who do not have an attention span for books.

ANITA BROOKNER's "BAY OF ANGELS" returns the beloved Booker Prize winning author to the top of her form after a slightly-less-excellent trio of lessor novels. Brookner's specialty is her insight into the lives of non-glamorous people, and how well she gets inside their head and lets the thoughts spill out in page-after-page of wonderous prose. A suspense-of-a-different-kind leads a young woman through the complexities of dealing with her mother's second marriage and move to the south of France, her stepfather's sudden death, and the effect this has on her mother... as well as the young woman's career, romantic life, and everyday living. Choose this book and forget about serial killers, shallow romance, secret agents, and all the other drivel which clutters the best seller lists. This one is AAAA quality about real people you can get into.

Zoë Cunningham is the first-person narrator. Her story begins when she was a girl, living in London with her mother Anne, who was widowed shortly after Zoë was born and then became reclusive. When Zoë is in her late teens, her mother improbably meets Simon, who, as he says, is "nearly the wrong side of seventy". He seems to have money and they get married and move to Nice. Zoë splits her time between London and Nice, but out of loyalty to her mother she never establishes an independent existence. Then Simon dies and Anne retreats further inside herself, and her ebbing health forces her to be moved to a convalescent facility. Meanwhile, Zoë meets a possible male companion, but he is tethered to his sister, who seems destined to spinsterhood.

Zoë is a very introspective and passive person. The novel essentially consists of her analyzing, in sometimes excruciating detail, the situations she finds herself in, none of which truly makes her happy, both because she feels caged by her loyalty to her mother and due to her extraordinarily quiescent personality. She inwardly rails against her lonely existence, but outwardly she does nothing about it, because that might entail giving offense to someone. So she grudgingly acquiesces in being buffeted about. And all the while she meditates on life's lessons, reaching the following conclusion by the end of the novel: "Life has brought me to this condition of acceptance, and at last I understand that acceptance is all. * * * The plot will unfold, with or without my help."

I note that many other Amazon reviewers have criticized THE BAY OF ANGELS for its navel-gazing and lack of plot. Those are understandable reasons for dissatisfaction. One wants to give Zoë a kick in the duff and admonish her, "Stop thinking about what's happening to you and just DO something! Take a chance!" But, in truth, there are a lot of Zoës in the world, and I think THE BAY OF ANGELS captures their loneliness and passivity quite poignantly. It also is elegantly written. One of the blurbs in my edition of the book is, "If Henry James were around, the only writer he'd be reading with complete approval would be Anita Brookner." It has been decades since I have read any Henry James, and thus the comparison would not have occurred to me, but based on what I recall of James I find the blurb to be apt.

The novel is sprinkled with gentle, rueful aphorisms. Here are two:

"A peculiar innocence was gone for ever. By innocence I really meant ignorance of the world's demands."

"One is never free. One has only the illusion of freedom. One is never free of obligations, whether explicit or implicit. The latter are the worst."

Then there is this exquisite moment when Zoe briefly contemplates suicide (á la the much more assertive Virginia Woolf): "Late at night I found myself, as I knew I should, on the beach. The air was calm, the night particularly beautiful. It would have been entirely possible for me to walk out into the sea. That I did not do so was the result of a sense of duty to myself. I wanted to know the rest of the story, however it might turn out."

THE BAY OF ANGELS (2001) was Anita Brookner's twentieth novel in twenty years. It is the third Brookner novel that I have read. It is quintessential Brookner -- in the sense that it is about a reserved, refined, intelligent but lonely British woman in the last quarter of the 20th Century -- but here that loneliness may be a little too concentrated, too solitary. In any event, the novel doesn't quite measure up to the two earlier ones I read. I would not recommend THE BAY OF ANGELS as anyone's introduction to Anita Brookner. Nor would I recommend it to anyone who needs plot and/or action in their fiction. But having expressed those caveats, I can say that the novel does have its merits and that when I reached the end I was glad I had resisted the impulse to give up on it.

I've read most of Brookner's novels. I've recommended her work to others, but I cannot recommend this book. Her characters are often passive but the two women in The Bay of Angels excel at inertia. Brookner's beautiful style doesn't compensate for how very depressing this novel is. The women in this book can't seem to DO anything.

I've been listening to the book on tape, and am giving up. The characters are totally self-absorbed, shallow and uninteresting. A story may develop as time goes on, and Zoe may find some gumption and energy by the end of the book, but Brookner takes too many pages for me to persevere. Sorry.