Despite all the experimentation, very few 20th- and 21st-century authors managed to be truly novel. Most just slightly expanded upon streams of consciousness or unreliable narration, adding their own unique twist. By my standards, there were perhaps a dozen wholly novel English novelists. Of these, Brooke-Rose is likely the most obscure and most recent.

This is a review of her entire oeuvre, but I’ve placed it under the Omnibus since that is the best place for one to begin reading her as well as the largest book of her work available. Of course, her work, like with all brilliant writers, is ineffable except in the reading. I'll try though.

If you want to skip to the most interesting parts, scroll down to the review of Out.

Gold & Dissertation

After earning her doctorate from University College, London, she published the poem Gold in 1955. It's about 30 pages long and takes the form of a medieval dream vision cum debate poem. Her process is extensively discussed in Verbivoracious Festschrift Volume One: Christine Brooke-Rose, but the heart of the matter is that she combines several different forms, some of them entirely novel, into highly constrained writing five years prior to Oulipo's birth. In fact, she'd later have the audacity to reject an invitation to Oulipo.

Gold begins with a description of ... gold (or should I say "quicksilver qualmed in cryptic ploy"). An angel appears and takes our narrator to the USSR where we're treated to a clever conceit of Soviet workers and the grinding of rocks to obtain gold, an ultimately useless object. The speaker goes to heaven and meets Mary of Nazareth and learns the true gold is humanity.

The poem was an implementation of her dissertation (later published as A Grammar of Metaphor) where she attempts to unite two clashing schools of thought on medieval poetry. Nominalists argued language to be wholly a human artifice whereas realists believed language a code with meaning independent of objects. In other words, the latter claimed e.g. "beauty" to have an invariant meaning independent of language; the former that our conception of objects and abstracts is arbitrary and changes over time.

She focused on the metaphor, dividing it into the categories of simple replacement, verb metaphor, copula, genitive link, verb added to noun, and auxiliary phrase. By doing this, she sidesteps the debate to an extent, and instead focuses on reducing language to its structure.

Quartet

Following Gold, we had four realist novels: The Languages of Love, The Sycamore Tree, The Dear Deceit, and The Middlemen. I'll keep it short because, though largely moderately interesting, these novels are much more conventional than what was to come.

In The Languages of Love, we get a satire of post-war London’s society à la Iris Murdoch. Julia Grampton, a newly minted PhD, falls into a love triangle. Most misconceive this as merely a shallow Hampstead novel (and, indeed, Brooke-Rose admits it collapses into the object of the satire occasionally), but it does have some substance. We're treated to a further exploration of the nominalism/realism debate, like Gold as an effect of Catholicism and the Soviet Union. More importantly, she explores how Catholicism relates to social boundaries and propriety.

In The Sycamore Tree, an author publishes a novel which makes fun of someone the author has never met, prompting a libel case. More interestingly, we follow the character Zoltan's madness. Through this tale, the leitmotif on realism vs. nominalism and East vs. West is again explored (I bet you're getting tired of hearing that phrase) but from a more nuanced, less binary perspective. She parodies her previous ideas to an extent through the exaggerated Hungarian Zoltan.

The Dear Deceit is her first novel novel. It was published in 1960 and takes the form of a bildungsroman told backwards, from old age to birth.

Notice the year. This was 9 years before the film scene in Slaughterhouse Five and 31 years prior Time's Arrow by Martin Amis. For this brilliant innovation, though merely a shadow of her later genius, she gets far too little recognition.

The book follows her father's life, starting at deathbed, through the investigations of a Captain Cordelia Blair. The major effect of this is that we begin to theorize as to what caused so-and-so circumstance, as opposed to the more passive consumption most opt for while reading a bildungsroman. The principle theme is that of fact vs. fiction, what is real and what is hearsay. In other words, an expansion upon the idea of realism vs. nominalism (I swear that's the last time I'll use this phrase, though it is germane later on).

The Middlemen: A Satire follows two sisters: Serena, who lives a mundane life, and Stella, a globetrotting lover of businessmen. Were it by anyone else, I'd never finish this novel. It's tropeish and tiresome, though the ending was a tad cathartic in a sadistic way.

Omnibus (Out, Such, Between, Thru)

This is the ideal place for a Brooke-Rose neophyte to begin because it's experimental, but not overly difficult initially.

Out straddles the line between nouveau roman à la Robbe-Grillet (whom she'd later translate) and sci-fi, relating the story of a post-epidemic world where developed nations have been destroyed and white people are subservient to black people.

Mrs Mgulu sits graciously at her dressing-table, brushing her thick black hair into sleekness and she takes an interest. Mrs Mgulu sits graciously at her dressing table, having her thick long black hair brushed into sleekness and she takes an interest. She takes an interest in the crackling electricity of her hair which is being brushed into sleekness by a pert Bahuko maid, whose profile is reversed in the mirror. Mrs Mgulu does not choose to be touched by sickly Colourless hands. In the tall gilt-frame mirror the smooth Asswati face smiles, mostly at the front of the head framed by the long black hair, with self-love in the round black eyes and in the thick half-open lips, but occasionally with graciousness at the reflection of the white woman changing the sheets on the bed behind the head framed by the long black hair. The white woman can be seen in the mirror beyond the pert profile and beyond the smooth Asswati face, whose smiling black eyes shift a little to the right, with graciousness, and then a little to the left, with self-love. A psychoscope might perhaps reveal the expression to be one of pleasure in beauty, rather than self-love. The scene might occur, for that matter, in quite a different form. The personal maid, for example, could be Colourless after all.

This repetition is the driving force behind the language, a rhythmic beating propelling the reader forward.

Such is her first masterpiece. As Infinite Jest takes the form of a Sierpinski triangle, Such is modeled after a spiral, specifically the Milky Way. Around when she wrote this novel, she was auditing lectures on astronomy and relativity. The central tale is that of a psychologist, Larry, in the throes of a heart attack. Shadowy apparitions permeate the story and various subplots surround the primary one, drawn inextricably inwards towards the mass of the center. Another central idea is jazz. This is not akin to the facile references of Murakami but rather that of improvisation as creation, of change yet maintaining an identity. It evokes something more fundamental: the essence of jazz. I'm leaving the plot intentionally vague as to not spoil the surprises, but, though I've worn down that word into shorn threads through overuse, I consider it 'brilliant'. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Award, one of the two broad literary prizes I consider consistently great.

Between is about an interpreter's life through airports and hotels. Through morphing the grammar and metaphor, she depicts the protagonist's movement. The plot is not the focus, rather her use of language is. I love this novel more than Such or Out, but it lends itself the worst to review.

— Ideas? We merely translate other people’s ideas, not to mention platitudes, si-mul-ta-né-ment. No one requires us to have any of our own. We live between ideas, nicht wahr, Siegfried?
— Du liebes Kind, komm, geh’ mit mir. Gar schöne Spiele spiel’ ich mit dir.
— We have played those games mein Lieb.
— Why don’t you marry me?
— You know why.

Thru is the best example of self-reflexivity I have ever read (for something a tad more extreme, see Word Rain by Madeline Gins, which I have reviewed). While reading, one's perception of the text is transformed by the content of the words. Every typographic game possible—acrostic, shape poetry, margin notes—is present. I've reviewed a few other books comparable to Wake in some aspect or the other, but this is the only book comparable both in difficulty and novelty. Please just read it. I can't sell this to you—it either intrigues you or it doesn't—there's no in-between, like Wake—the experience is rewarding only if you want to read it, but, if so, it is infinitely so. The book is about writing, about novels, about notes written by readers, about language, about everything.

Go forth and multiply the voices until you reach the undeicidable [sic!] even in some psychoasthmatic [sick?] amateur castrate who cannot therefore sing the part.

Later i.e. better novels

Amalgamemnon was published 9 years later, following an ennui as the result of her mother's death. "Amalgamemnon tried to do some- thing completely different, which is to use what I call non-realised tenses, mostly the future but also the conditional, the subjunctive, the negative and so on, in linguistic terms, assertive non-modalised sequences" is how she put it. An insomniac professor of literature delivers an impassioned monologue on everything, full of puns and neologisms, references to everything. At breakneck pace, we tour dozens of topics, principally society and the individual, the legacy of Greece, the connection between astronomy and our daily life. In a Cassandric trance, she strips bare our misconceptions of the world.

I wrote this review without any of the books in front of me (the books I own are on loan to a friend and the ones I don't I haven't visited the library for), so all quotes have been copied from Goodreads. I'll edit in my own quotes some time soon. I'll add the rest of her nonfiction her later fiction soon.

The Christine Brooke-Rose omnibus

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The Christine Brooke-Rose omnibus (1986)

The Christine Brooke-Rose omnibus (1986)

The Christine Brooke-Rose omnibus (2006)

The Christine Brooke-Rose omnibus (2006)

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