It sometimes feels as if there are only two types of new books these days: underedited books thrown out by very busy publishers into the market to see what sticks; or, conversely, overworked first novels from writing MAs that have had all the lumps sieved out and are as bland as babyfood.
So how bracing to read something as odd, nasty, unpredictable, funny and just downright different as Lord Jim at Home. Of course, it was written in 1973.
Young Giles Trenchard, born into an upper-middle-class family between the wars, has a miserable childhood and an undistinguished war, then becomes a drifter, weaving in and out of 1950s London. Dinah Brooke’s novel was originally described as a satire (there are many references to Joseph Conrad’s original, and the focal point involves a young man performing a terrible deed). But calling it that would be to underestimate the strange power Brooke has to describe the quotidian in a way that’s extremely funny and incredibly sinister. It never takes off in flights of fancy, but stays on a believable and realistic — if horrible — path.
The prose is cut glass, icily distancing us from Giles and everyone he meets until, gradually, it becomes clear that the novel is in fact a horror story of Patrick Melrose proportions (Brooke and Edward St Aubyn share an innate knowledge of, and incredible contempt for, the English upper middle classes).
But Brooke has something more: she genuinely does not care a whit about pleasing the reader. There are no sympathetic characters here; there is no hope of redemption. Even the imagery is relentlessly unpleasant — the sea is “malicious, arbitrary, violent, like a drunken mother”, the Arctic “a Billy Bunter fantasy of shattered birthday cakes”.
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Finding out that the glittering sentences are all based on a true story makes it simultaneously better and worse. This book is a perfect martini with a razor blade at the bottom of the glass.
Lord Jim at Home by Dinah Brooke (Daunt £9.99 pp264). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members.
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