The invisible man

Bleak, bleak, bleak. Anita Brookner’s new novel, Stran- gers, is unlikely to inspire resolutions to self-improvement or even cathartic tears. But its main character, a retired bank manager called Paul Sturgis, is a brilliant and affecting creation by a writer whose empathy runs deep, and whose pitch is perfect.

Sturgis, 72 years old, is in good health and financially well off. His trouble — and it is deep — is of another kind. He lives in a well-kept but dark and depressing flat in London. He has no children — only a distant female relative who lives on the other side of town and for whom he has no particular feeling. He visits her out of a sense of obligation, to give order to his days, and because he senses that, with death looming, it is ‘essential to possess not only a relative but a relative who would prove to be near at hand.’

Alas, she dies halfway through the novel, leaving Sturgis with no choice but to harden his heart, ‘haunted by a feeling of invisibility,’ reflecting on what ‘a terrible thing [it is] to live without witnesses.’ ‘His habits,’ writes Brookner, invoking Philip Larkin’s Mr Bleaney, ‘were ineradicably solitary’; ‘a sadness . . . had become the very climate of his life.’

Sentences like these appear on every page, with no hint, for a good three chapters, of anything so hopeful as a plot. But Brookner isn’t merely scene-setting or building suspense; she is describing truths that feel like burning in the oesophagus and may never be alleviated. Thus, the reiteration and circling back ring true.

The shame of death — the disgrace of leaving behind a body and belongings that must be disposed of by others — is never far away, and even as Sturgis is ‘briefly glad that he had no children whose lives might be overshadowed, even ruined, by attendance on him,’ he longs for familial connection.