All the characters reappear, in one form or another. Lanik, the Landauers’ former caretaker, becomes a party functionary. Hana too has some sort of official standing as part of a Heritage committee and is briefly valuable to the authorities as historian of the house. Her husband, a Jew like Viktor Landauer, has died in Auschwitz. It is true that in the latter part of the novel the interest tails off, but, like the house, the structure endures. The ending is infinitely moving. The country is on the verge of restoration, of normalisation. Architecture and history come together again. There is a resolution when Liesel, now old and blind, returns after long exile to reclaim her house. Even the repossession seems insignificant; it is always the house that seems emblematic.

It should be emphasised that this is not the sort of house that features in most English novels. There are no echoes of Brideshead here. This house — long, low, rectilinear — does not inspire sentimentality. It is its unfamiliar purity which is its outstanding feature, and this purity also characterises the novel itself. There is little sex, little weather, and a total absence of stylistic flourishes. It is, in sum, a humanist novel, unusual in its breadth and scope, and also in its dignity. Definitely Bookerish.

Anita Brookner’s latest novel, Strangers, will be reviewed next week.

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