The Bay of Angels

This is my second Anita Brookner novel and in fairly short time I might add. After thoroughly enjoying Incidents in the Rue Laugier I was interested in seeing if I was as enamoured with this one. I am pleased to say the answer is yes. I can also repeat what I said previously, “....minimal dialogue, long passages that were deep descriptions of individuals and of place.......lacking a particularly strong plot.” But again it works. Brookner is an extraordinary writer, so skilled and adept at her craft that plot hardly needs to be complex. Those that enjoy their literature in this style will not be disappointed.


Thematically, this is a tale of loneliness and commitment to a specific way of life when circumstances force our hand. Only child Zoe tells her story as a first-person narrative of growing up with her widowed and solitary mother Anne. Anne eventually marries a much older and wealthy man, who Zoe likes very much. Unfortunately he passes on and Zoe's world then consists of looking after her mother who declines rapidly. How Zoe deals with all this is superbly told with a deftness that had me the reader thinking that there was a certain permanent pensiveness in Zoe, a pensiveness that pervaded her life from beginning through to her seemingly final destiny of meeting an older man who was not far removed from life's loneliness himself. All told in a so middle class bourgeois and very English way.


Highly recommended for the exemplary writing alone.