Unwelcome Guests: Anita Brookner's Visitors
If your idea of an excellent novel includes a fast paced plot and plenty of dialogue, read no further. Anita Brookner’s Visitors (or any Brookner novel, for that matter) is not for you. If, however, you enjoy novels that unfold the complexity of characters' inner lives, you will be entranced by Brookner’s insightful explorations; like a flower opening petal by petal to reveal a protected center, Brookner peels back the layers detail by detail to reveal inner secrets.
Brookner's fiction, including her Booker award winning Hotel Du Lac, often delves into the lives of solitary characters, and Visitors is no exception. A seventy-year-old widow, Dorothea May has settled for a dull life of solitude, her days regimented by lunch at the same local restaurant and afternoons spent reading and enjoying the garden. She is presented to the reader as Mrs. May, the formal title underscoring Dorothea’s rigidity and her prescribed role as a wife and now as a widow. Although her last name suggests spring, Dorothea appears never to have enjoyed the trappings of youth associated with the season. Always a solitary person (and avid reader), Dorothea never dated nor had much of a social life when she was younger. Her husband, Henry, literally swept her off her feet when he helped her up from a fall on the sidewalk. She met and married Henry when she was thirty-nine, and until that fateful encounter, she had resigned herself to a future of spinsterhood, like Jane Austen’s Anne Eliot, with whom Dorothea often identifies. But in her old age, Dorothea does have a spring-like rebirth, of sorts, when an unexpected young American houseguest is thrust upon her, upsetting her stagnant routine.
Dorothea stays connected to her husband’s family through his cousins, who dutifully call on Sunday evenings. Brookner devotes the first two chapters to outlining Dorothea’s routine so that we feel the full force of Dorothea’s angst when, at the end of the second chapter, that routine is disrupted. One of the cousins, Kitty, phones to ask Dorothea if she can take in a guest. Kitty’s granddaughter wants to come to London from America to be married. Steve, a friend of the bride and groom, has nowhere to stay. Dorothea tries to refuse but in the end feels obligated to comply.
With the wedding comes crises, and Dorothea becomes roped into family dramas and torn away from her preferred exile. Slowly she comes to rely on Steve’s company as well. As did Henry, Steve arrives when Dorothea is in need of rescuing, for she has almost fainted outside her doorstep. And, like Henry, Steve will unwittingly engage Dorothea in the world of the living, lifting her outside the fictional worlds she chooses to inhabit.
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