The very title of Leaving Home announces a quintessential Brook- ner theme. A heroine in her novels will always face a struggle to escape, not only from an airless, restrictive upbringing (almost invariably embodied in a claustrophobically close relationship with her mother), but also from traits embedded in her own character. Her problem is that she has been so moulded by maternal genes and love, so bonded and bounded by her environment, that her character has become inseparable from her upbringing — and can, indeed, only be described as a ‘mindset’.
Emma Roberts has been brought up by her widowed mother, cocooned in mutual love ‘so exclusive … that it was experienced more like anguish’. She has inherited ‘a tendency to melancholy, to rumination, an acceptance of solitude’.
Emma knows she has to get away; but it will spoil nothing to reveal that this will prove impossible. That is made perfectly clear in the opening chapters. Emma ‘aspires’ to a separate life for herself in Paris, where she might have ‘friendships of my own choosing, parties, love affairs’. But this is an aspiration, not even a hope, and already self-defeated.
This exuberance, which would be, and was, completely out of character, would be the transformation so tantalisingly out of reach. There was of course no possibility of my being able to achieve this, just as there was no possibility of radical alteration of my character, or an end to the hermetic self-absorption with which I had almost made my peace.
Even the aspiration is squeezed out of existence by this formulation: it not only will prove to be, but already is out of character.
The difficulty, of course, is to absorb a reader in a life of ‘hermetic self-absorption’ and dully resented dreariness. Emma does leave London for life as a research student, writing, with no more than lukewarm interest, a thesis upon French classical gardens, which serves to fill ‘the long empty day’. She does acquire a boyfriend of sorts, Michael, but ‘after an initial exchange our relationship was platonic, even celibate’. They walk together in dull French parks.
A French librarian ‘with bold Gallic features’ offers the usual Brooknerian contrast to the self-obsessed but self-effacing heroine: Fran
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