Lord Jim at Home

October 16, 2023
Brooke’s 1973 novel, first published in the U.K., presents a stinging portrait of an upper middle class British family. In an enthusiastic foreword, Ottessa Moshfegh describes feeling like she aged 20 years while reading Brooke’s bracing account of sociopath Giles Trenchard, only to be restored with “new nerves” by the end. Born to tradition-bound and emotionally remote parents in the interwar period, Giles endures physical abuse from his nurses at home and cruel humiliations from his teachers at boarding school. As a seaman in WWII, he routinely witnesses shipmates getting blown up beside him, and deals with these moments the same way he faces the general privations of a sailor’s life: with stiff-upper-lip stoicism. After the war Giles drifts into an aimless life of cricket, carousing, and excessive drinking, straining his relationship with his increasingly exasperated parents. Though foreordained by the title’s reference to a Joseph Conrad character who falls from grace through a lapse of judgment, Giles’s final desperate act against his family is as shocking as it is unexpected. Brooke structures her novel like a bildungsroman, but aims for a much broader critique of the British class system, notably in the festering moral rot of Giles’s grandfather. Her wide-eyed view of the dark side of the privileged class is as startling today as it was a half-century ago.