Bright light at the end of the tunnel

Christine Brooke-Rose is not an easy read. She is a sublime roller- coaster: hold on and hurtle with her — the ride will be exhilarating. She is dark, despairing, but her bleakness is Beckettian, the laughs never far away.

Now 83, she lives in France, near Avignon. Born in Geneva (British father), she has written 12 novels (four of which are collected in the Christine Brooke-Rose Omnibus), worked as a critic and academic, teaching English language and literature in Paris, been claimed by the French as a nouveau-romancier, a membership she rejects like all other memberships. Perhaps her staunch stand-alone path has led to her status as both eminent and little known. Her latest novel is an elegant disquisition on life and what follows: ‘Montaigne says life’s purpose is to teach us to die. However, the standard of teaching is now so low that the task is getting tougher and tougher…’

Her narrator, like the author, loves puns, word-play; she rages against grammatical decline and the dying of the light; she broods on the solar system, the nervous system, ‘the cardio-vasco de gamma network’, history, herstory, the egotism of ex-husbands. She examines the precariousness of friendship and the gradual destruction of her own body.

She shrugs off pain, coming to terms with new physical impossibilities and the relinquishing of a lifetime’s independence. She is aware that inward-turning is now regarded as unhealthy and weak-minded, but she sees it differently: ‘That withdrawal is the last tiny freedom, the last small piece of autonomy.’ When memory falters she wonders, ‘Can a black hole become an ivory tower?’

Symptoms of destruction are gaily described, legs that burn like fiery bushes, lack of balance, frailty dismissed as mere ‘diswalking and disstanding’.