Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner

First published by Jonathan Cape, 1984; this edition Penguin Essentials, 2023

Why?

Over the summer I found myself looking for books in the holiday genre, by which I mean novels in which going away is itself the point (rather than holiday reads): hotels, resorts and unfamiliar places where people are temporarily removed from the structures of their normal lives.

An obvious contender was Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, winner of the Booker Prize in 1984. I was ten when it was published, so I can't honestly say that I was following the Booker shortlist at the time, but I remember the title lingering in the cultural conversation well into the 1990s. But I couldn’t remember whether I had ever actually read it.

I ordered a copy and, to my delight, nothing rang a bell. It turned out to be a perfect little gem of a discovery.

Enjoyment factor

Short and sweet, beautifully observed and extremely easy to read.

The heroine, Edith Hope, is a successful romantic novelist who has been dispatched to a Swiss hotel after committing some unspecified social transgression back in England. Gradually, of course, we discover what she has done and why her friends believe she needs to be removed from circulation for a while.

Brookner is brilliant on the small details of human behaviour: the things people say to one another out of politeness, the things they withhold, and the assumptions they make about how other people ought to live. The other guests at the hotel are sharply drawn without ever becoming caricatures, and the whole novel has the satisfying neatness of a miniature.

My only frustration was Edith herself. To my twenty-first-century mind, she seems maddeningly incapable of simply deciding what she wants and living by it. She is intelligent, financially independent and professionally successful, yet remains remarkably vulnerable to other people’s ideas about what constitutes a satisfactory life.

Which, of course, is the point.

It left me thinking

More than anything, Hotel du Lac made me think about how dramatically women’s freedom has advanced even within my own lifetime.

1984 is well within my living memory, yet the premise of the novel rests on a social problem that now seems strikingly dated: what is to be done with a woman who has been “left on the shelf”?

Edith has a career. She earns her own money. She has a home and an intellectual life. She is not destitute or dependent. Yet almost everyone around her behaves as though there is something fundamentally unresolved about her because she is not contained within a neat, respectable relationship.

But Brookner doesn't present marriage as an uncomplicated solution either. The women Edith encounters at the hotel offer a range of possible female lives, none of them entirely enviable. Marriage can provide status and security, but it can also involve compromise, dependency and self-deception. Independence offers freedom, but - at the time - comes with loneliness and social judgement.

The novel feels less like an argument for one particular way of living than an exploration of the very limited range of choices women were still expected to make - and the extraordinary pressure to make one of those choices legible to everybody else.

And then there is the hotel itself.

Once again I was reminded what a brilliant fictional device a hotel can be. It creates an instant cast of characters, throws them together outside their normal lives and obliges them, through proximity and politeness, to interact. Nobody quite belongs there. Everyone is temporarily suspended from reality.

That makes the hotel a perfect place for reinvention, revelation and bad decisions.

In Hotel du Lac, very little actually happens. Yet because the characters have all been removed from their usual settings, tiny conversations and encounters acquire enormous weight. The result is a novel that feels simultaneously slight and substantial: a quiet comedy of manners wrapped around a much bigger question.

How much of the life we lead is the life we actually want - and how much is simply the life other people have taught us to want?