Women in an unkind universe

Anita Brookner’s 22nd novel, “The Rules of Engagement,” might also be called a song of innocence and experience, for, like William Blake’s famous songs state, it is a study of contraries. Ostensibly it is the story of two Englishwomen who find themselves dazedly wandering between two worlds: the culture of their childhood years, when romantic love was considered to be the ultimate goal for women, and the current era, in which personal freedom is considered the ultimate goal. But in the end, it is a story about the damage that life seems to inflict on everyone, innocent and guilty, altruistic and manipulative alike.

Born in the same year, 1948, Elizabeth and Betsy first meet as schoolgirls: “Because we had the same Christian name it was decreed that she should choose an alternative. For some reason -- largely, I think, because she was influenced by the sort of sunny children’s books available in our milieu -- she decided to be known as Betsy.” An orphan being raised by a “faded aunt,” Betsy is trusting, eager to please and full of idealistic aspirations: a true romantic. Elizabeth, who narrates the novel, considers herself a more prudent, indeed calculating, character. Although she dislikes her mother’s brittleness, conformity and harshness, Elizabeth finds as she gets older that she has some of those qualities herself.

While Betsy goes to Paris and falls in love with a dashing young student revolutionary, Elizabeth allows herself to be safely married off to Digby Wetherall, a respectable bourgeois man much older than herself. Although Betsy’s passionate liaison might well seem to qualify as a specimen of genuine life experience, she retains her aura of hopeful innocence even after the affair’s tragic ending. Indeed, as she relates her experiences to Elizabeth, it seems that she still sees her lover in the same dazzling, fact-obscuring glow as on the day she first met him.

Elizabeth, meanwhile, has been (in her own opinion, anyway) a good wife to Digby: running his household, entertaining his friends and providing him with modest companionship and whatever sexual comfort he requires. She has also, however, been having an affair with one of his business associates, a rich, worldly, impregnably married man named Edmund Fairlie. It doesn’t seem to disturb her that she is hardly Edmund’s first mistress, or that the two of them don’t talk much, or that he has made it clear that his wife and family will always come first.

In many ways as big a fool as her friend Betsy, Elizabeth lives for those illicit evenings at the flat Edmund keeps for such encounters. “All my life,” she later reflects, looking back upon this liaison, “ ... I had longed for direct engagement, for total intimacy, and had encountered it only once....” But there was no real closeness in this relationship. Not only was it, as she goes on to admit, “shabby,” “second-rate” and “deplorable” in the eyes of the world; it also contained no intimacy (let alone “total” intimacy) beyond sex itself and the arrangements needed to set aside a time to meet for it. Moreover, it was a relationship with very stringent unspoken “rules of engagement”: Elizabeth was not allowed to ask questions or make demands.

Personal histories were not shared, nor were emotions discussed. Indeed, in what Brookner’s longtime fans will recognize as a classic Brookner touch, Edmund’s selfishness and worldliness are what make him so desirably “masculine” to Elizabeth. In this perverse way of thinking, Elizabeth seems a close cousin to the hard-edged, masochistic Edith Templeton, a novelist of lesser achievement for whom Brookner has expressed admiration.

Elizabeth well understands the similarity between herself and her more innocent friend Betsy: “[W]e were both in love with virtual strangers, whose intimacy was a closely guarded secret. Like simpletons, or perhaps just like women ... we had been seduced by outward form and had made the mistake of believing that this outward form represented the truth. But truth is not so easily discerned.... I, in my hard-hearted way, was aware of this, but Betsy was so clearly above board that she was a victim of her own good faith.”

Yet Elizabeth, although supposedly the wiser one, also believes that “it was the intensity of one’s feelings rather than any idea of merit that determined one’s choice. Therefore love is a matter of pure solipsism.” Making bad choices gives her the feeling of freedom and authenticity -- even though this feeling proves to be nothing more than an illusion.

To reveal any more of what happens would be to deprive the prospective reader of the considerable pleasures of experiencing the story as it unfolds in all its inventiveness. Suffice it to say that neither Betsy’s innocent romanticism nor Elizabeth’s more cynical realism is an adequate defense against the inevitable damage that life inflicts.

Elizabeth sees “goodness” and “freedom” as a pair of “ideologies” that are “difficult to reconcile.” Unlike Blake, she never finds a way of integrating these contraries. A weakness of this novel is that we are never allowed to get to a vantage point beyond Elizabeth’s somewhat misguided and arbitrary dichotomizing. A typical Brookner protagonist, she spends vast amounts of time ruminating upon her choices, feelings, perceptions and all those Prufrockian “decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.” Even when she acts recklessly, she can provide us with an exquisitely subtle disquisition on why she did.

This, of course, is one of the great strengths of Brookner’s fiction: her ability to lay bare in limpid, measured, luminous prose her characters’ least admirable, most desperate motivations. Although Brookner writes about comfortably-off people who lead quiet enough lives, her vision of a universe governed by a Nature that endows us with unrealistic desires and unrealizable dreams is stunningly bleak.