At times during Michael Bracewell’s new novel the mood becomes so elusive, the change of scene so abrupt, that you start to wonder whether you’ve missed some vital bit of information a few pages earlier. It’s like bedtime reading: that absorption in the story just before you nod off, only to pick it up the next morning and wonder “Who’s this character?”, or “Did I know about that?” The tenor of Unfinished Business feels dreamlike, fragmentary, except that the writing is also exact and alert, anchored very particularly in time and place. Better known as a cultural critic, Bracewell hasn’t published a novel in 21 years. This is quite the comeback.
It focuses mainly on Martin Knight, a Prufrockian clerk in a dark suit, an office “lifer” who commutes from Hackney, east London, to the glass-and-steel canyons of the City to do a job he no longer understands. (Bracewell’s 1992 novel, The Conclave, featured a similar Martin at an earlier stage of life.) His reveries on the train carry him back to his suburban youth in 1970s Kent, public school, and the first stirrings of life as a wistful flâneur, smoking posh cigarettes from the Burlington Arcade and getting dressed up to the nines for cocktails at the Café Royal. He regrets not going to Oxford, instead finding himself “friendless” at college in Liverpool, an aesthetic snob who loftily dismisses his fellow students for their lack of style.
We cut back to the present and the root of his disconsolate drift. Marilyn, to whom he was once married, is the mother of their child, Chloe. Her life with Martin feels so long ago to her as to be “unreal”, though the divorce was “angry and sad and like being under a curse”. She is poised, well dressed, shielding herself behind the lovely smile for which she’s known. We only begin to understand their acrimonious falling-out when Martin drunkenly rambles to a couple of mutual friends at their place in Spitalfields. He detects he’s not a sympathetic figure to them, and “his news after all was the only ugly thing in their beautiful house”. Meanwhile he feels not only sick of soul but of body, a burning sensation in his legs exacerbated by too much gin and red wine. He’s quietly become a mess.
Bracewell plots this unravelling with a precision both lyrical and ruthless. He is a brilliant observer, for instance, of people in restaurants, either in pictures of Hopper-esque isolation or meltingly romantic duets. The contrast couldn’t be more pointed between Martin’s sad solo outings to a glass-walled eaterie overlooking a dual carriageway and Marilyn’s delight with her new beau in the “thrilling dim blueness” of a luxe Italian restaurant. This writer understands the theatrical allure of dining in public. And yet sometimes the set piece of a social gathering will proceed with languid finesse only to be concluded on a strange unpoetic clunk – “Lunch was sorrel soup, chicken pie and lemon tart” – like the sign-off of a diary entry, or the slam of a door.
Any feelings of bemusement may be attributed to the unpredictable rhythms of Bracewell’s narrative, its winding, sinuous convolutions a nod to the working of memory itself. The technique was on display in his previous book Souvenir, a jewelled memoir of London from 1979 to 1986. Even when an episode’s place in the larger scheme is obscure, Bracewell has an amazing gift for putting you in the room with his characters, nowhere more hauntingly than a late digression about a one-night stand that almost happened between Martin and his friend Hannah in a flat on Craven Street – a secretive Georgian terrace running alongside Charing Cross – whose freezing upstairs sitting room “felt as though they were camping out on a dark ridge, alone”. A Bracewellian scene, hung with shadows, murmurous with implication: in the years that followed, “neither of them discussed that evening”.
The overall tone is so measured that the tragic event at the novel’s climax stuns like a concussion – worse than that, because it’s not even the tragedy we thought we had seen coming. The aftermath of the loss steers us towards a bruised diminuendo, and an affecting acceptance that for some it’s time to move on, or move out. “The former things had passed away.” But I suspect this Temps Perdu of a melancholy journeyman will reverberate long after the book is closed.
Anthony Quinn’s latest novel is Molly and the Captain (Abacus). Unfinished Business by Michael Bracewell is published by White Rabbit (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
At times during Michael Bracewell’s new novel the mood becomes so elusive, the change of scene so abrupt, that you start to wonder whether you’ve missed some vital bit of information a few pages earlier. It’s like bedtime reading: that absorption in the story just before you nod off, only to pick it up the next morning and wonder “Who’s this character?”, or “Did I know about that?” The tenor of Unfinished Business feels dreamlike, fragmentary, except that the writing is also exact and alert, anchored very particularly in time and place. Better known as a cultural critic, Bracewell hasn’t published a novel in 21 years. This is quite the comeback.
It focuses mainly on Martin Knight, a Prufrockian clerk in a dark suit, an office “lifer” who commutes from Hackney, east London, to the glass-and-steel canyons of the City to do a job he no longer understands. (Bracewell’s 1992 novel, The Conclave, featured a similar Martin at an earlier stage of life.) His reveries on the train carry him back to his suburban youth in 1970s Kent, public school, and the first stirrings of life as a wistful flâneur, smoking posh cigarettes from the Burlington Arcade and getting dressed up to the nines for cocktails at the Café Royal. He regrets not going to Oxford, instead finding himself “friendless” at college in Liverpool, an aesthetic snob who loftily dismisses his fellow students for their lack of style.
We cut back to the present and the root of his disconsolate drift. Marilyn, to whom he was once married, is the mother of their child, Chloe. Her life with Martin feels so long ago to her as to be “unreal”, though the divorce was “angry and sad and like being under a curse”. She is poised, well dressed, shielding herself behind the lovely smile for which she’s known. We only begin to understand their acrimonious falling-out when Martin drunkenly rambles to a couple of mutual friends at their place in Spitalfields. He detects he’s not a sympathetic figure to them, and “his news after all was the only ugly thing in their beautiful house”. Meanwhile he feels not only sick of soul but of body, a burning sensation in his legs exacerbated by too much gin and red wine. He’s quietly become a mess.
Bracewell plots this unravelling with a precision both lyrical and ruthless. He is a brilliant observer, for instance, of people in restaurants, either in pictures of Hopper-esque isolation or meltingly romantic duets. The contrast couldn’t be more pointed between Martin’s sad solo outings to a glass-walled eaterie overlooking a dual carriageway and Marilyn’s delight with her new beau in the “thrilling dim blueness” of a luxe Italian restaurant. This writer understands the theatrical allure of dining in public. And yet sometimes the set piece of a social gathering will proceed with languid finesse only to be concluded on a strange unpoetic clunk – “Lunch was sorrel soup, chicken pie and lemon tart” – like the sign-off of a diary entry, or the slam of a door.
Any feelings of bemusement may be attributed to the unpredictable rhythms of Bracewell’s narrative, its winding, sinuous convolutions a nod to the working of memory itself. The technique was on display in his previous book Souvenir, a jewelled memoir of London from 1979 to 1986. Even when an episode’s place in the larger scheme is obscure, Bracewell has an amazing gift for putting you in the room with his characters, nowhere more hauntingly than a late digression about a one-night stand that almost happened between Martin and his friend Hannah in a flat on Craven Street – a secretive Georgian terrace running alongside Charing Cross – whose freezing upstairs sitting room “felt as though they were camping out on a dark ridge, alone”. A Bracewellian scene, hung with shadows, murmurous with implication: in the years that followed, “neither of them discussed that evening”.
The overall tone is so measured that the tragic event at the novel’s climax stuns like a concussion – worse than that, because it’s not even the tragedy we thought we had seen coming. The aftermath of the loss steers us towards a bruised diminuendo, and an affecting acceptance that for some it’s time to move on, or move out. “The former things had passed away.” But I suspect this Temps Perdu of a melancholy journeyman will reverberate long after the book is closed.
Anthony Quinn’s latest novel is Molly and the Captain (Abacus). Unfinished Business by Michael Bracewell is published by White Rabbit (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.