Quick Take
- Narration: Joanna David reads with the measured, slightly formal English delivery that suits Brookner’s prose style, capturing the restraint and subdued melancholy that define the novel’s atmosphere.
- Themes: Solitary women and the fear of risk, the seduction of other people’s lives, the safety of ordinary existence
- Mood: Subdued, observational, and gently claustrophobic
- Verdict: Classic Brookner in form and feeling, which means it rewards patient listeners who appreciate psychological precision over dramatic incident.
I came to Anita Brookner late, long after her Booker Prize for Hotel du Lac had established her reputation, and my introduction was Leaving Home, which is not considered her best work but which encapsulates her sensibility completely. I was listening on a rainy afternoon in late autumn, the kind of afternoon that seems designed to produce a particular mood of interior reflection, and Brookner’s prose fit the moment as though it had been written for it. Which, in some sense, it had been.
A note on the metadata: the author field lists Mark Haddon, but the synopsis describes an Anita Brookner novel about a cautious English woman named Emma Roberts who goes to France for research and befriends a French woman named Francoise Desnoyers. The biographical note at the end of the synopsis explicitly identifies Brookner as a Courtauld art historian who began publishing fiction in 1981 and produced twenty-four novels. The narrator is Joanna David. This is an Anita Brookner novel, and I have reviewed it accordingly.
Emma Roberts and the Life She Observes But Does Not Enter
Brookner’s heroines are among the most consistently recognizable in late twentieth-century British fiction: solitary, educated, cautious women who watch life as though from behind glass and who consistently choose the known over the unknown. Emma Roberts is squarely in this tradition. She goes to France for research, finds herself welcomed into the beautiful house of Francoise Desnoyers, and spends the novel positioned as an observer of someone else’s more glamorous, more complicated existence.
One reviewer described this as Brookner writing the same novel over and over, which is a fair enough description if you come at it skeptically, but misses what that repetition is doing. Brookner is working a single vein with increasingly refined tools. Emma is isolated, yes. She makes what the reviewer calls the wrong, lonely sad choices. But Brookner’s attention to the particular quality of Emma’s consciousness, to the precise texture of her observation and her self-awareness about her own limitations, is never merely repetitive. It is cumulative. If you have read Hotel du Lac or A Misalliance before this, you will find echoes, but you will also find refinements.
France as Mirror, Not Escape
The French setting gives Leaving Home one of Brookner’s more interesting structural choices. Emma comes to France to research 17th-century garden design, ostensibly to widen her life, but what she finds in the Desnoyers household is not liberation but a more intimate view of the tensions and constraints she was trying to escape. Francoise and her formidable mother exist in a relationship of covert war, and Emma’s position as guest allows her to observe this war with the detached precision she applies to everything.
Joanna David is well cast for this material. Her voice carries that specifically English quality of understated intelligence, the quality of a woman who sees everything and comments on very little, which is precisely what Emma embodies. The French setting could have invited an over-performance of accent and atmosphere. David wisely does nothing of the kind. The French characters sound slightly different from the English ones but are not caricatures, and this restraint honors Brookner’s own approach.
The Horrifying Episode That Clarifies Everything
The synopsis mentions a horrifying episode that puts an end to Emma’s fascination and reconciles her to her duller but safer life at home. It is characteristic of Brookner that this episode is both significant and, in a conventional narrative sense, understated. What happens is serious enough. What Brookner is interested in is what it reveals about Emma’s relationship to risk, to safety, and to the comfortable compromises she has already made, and will now make again, with fuller self-knowledge than before.
This is Brookner’s form of resolution: not transformation, but clearer sight. Emma does not become a different person. She becomes more precisely herself, more aware of the nature of the life she has chosen. Whether this constitutes a satisfying ending depends entirely on what you want from fiction. The reviewer who found it less good than some of Brookner’s other novels was responding to this quality, and the reviewer who found it heartfelt was responding to the same quality. Both reactions are honest.
Who Will Stay and Who Will Leave Early
Leaving Home is for listeners who have already encountered Brookner and want to continue, and for those who are drawn to the tradition of English domestic fiction that runs from Barbara Pym through Penelope Fitzgerald, writers who treat interior consciousness as more important than external event. It is emphatically not for listeners who want plot momentum, dramatic stakes, or characters who grow and change in obvious ways. At five hours and thirty-three minutes, it is short enough that even listeners who find Brookner’s world somewhat claustrophobic can complete it without strain. Those who love her will wish it were longer.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this an Anita Brookner novel rather than a Mark Haddon memoir as the metadata might suggest?
Based on the synopsis, which describes a novel about Emma Roberts researching garden design in France, and the biographical note identifying Brookner as a Courtauld art historian who began publishing in 1981, yes. The author field appears to be a metadata error. The audiobook is an Anita Brookner novel narrated by Joanna David.
Does this work as an introduction to Anita Brookner, or should a new listener start with Hotel du Lac?
Hotel du Lac, which won the Booker Prize, is a better introduction and is more widely available. Leaving Home is a solid Brookner novel but assumes familiarity with the territory she typically covers. New listeners should start with Hotel du Lac or A Misalliance.
Is Joanna David a good narrator for Brookner’s prose style?
Yes. David’s measured, slightly formal English delivery matches the quality of Brookner’s narrating consciousnesses. She does not over-dramatize, which is exactly right for a writer whose power lies in understatement.
Is the French setting used to add atmosphere, or does it play a more structural role in the story?
Structural. France functions as a mirror that allows Emma to see the tensions in other people’s lives more clearly than she can see them in her own, and the contrast between her cautious English self and the French household she enters is central to the novel’s psychological argument.
