Lord Jim at Home

August 15, 2023
The pitiable subject of a cruel upbringing evolves into a rudderless adult, the nemesis of the privileged family that failed him. Brooke's withering portrait of the British upper class, originally published in 1973, now reissued and available for the first time in the U.S. with a foreword by Ottessa Moshfegh, is a dispassionate, sardonic parable of tragic dysfunction. It traces in detail the origins of Giles Trenchard, a.k.a. "the infant Prince," oldest child of parents referred to as the King and Queen but in truth a boozy solicitor and his ineffectual wife, both products of English social and financial inheritance. Neglected by his mother, bullied by his father, left in the brutal "care" of a nanny, the infant Giles is bruised, tortured, and starved of tenderness. His only weapons in "the dark battles of the nursery" are screams, withdrawal, and the refusal of food. Brooke relates these horrors in a distinctive, chilly tone--"The Prince learns in the end, but a rat would have learned sooner"--while depicting the adults in grotesque terms, notably detailing their sexual proclivities. Even after his horrible nanny is replaced, it's too late for Giles; he's sent to a private school where he endures and fits in but can't learn and makes no friends, even though he's good at cricket. Another school follows, and a psychiatrist, but then World War II intervenes. Working as a humble sailor, Giles endures grim experiences but finds some social acceptance in the ranks. Afterward, it's back to a life of nonachievement, failing law exams, drinking excessively, and stealing from his parents and others. This downward slide, underpinned by disgust and disgrace at home, is not slowed by love for an unsuitable 19-year-old, and Brooke finally reaches the Lord Jim-esque lapse, unsurprising in a tale of such implacable determinism, yet still shocking. A domestic and class horror story delivered in clinical, brilliant prose.

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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.