This debut novel follows a day within the lifetime of Annabel, an Oxford scholar writing an essay about Shakespeare’s sonnets. She wakes and makes tea, works on the essay, meditates, does yoga, works a bit extra, takes walks, has reminiscences and fantasies, eats within the eating corridor, talks to her boyfriend on the cellphone. The ebook ends because the day ends. For many of the novel, she’s alone in her room. It’s an uneventful day in a secure, cocooned, largely uneventful life.
The good power of Observe is Brown’s reward for the romance of the quotidian. Annabel is absorbed by the trivialities of her day: the “constructing roar” of the electrical kettle, the rising stress in her bladder, her ephemeral lust on seeing traces of muscle sharpening in a passing runner’s calves. She takes pleasure in utilizing the identical peppermint teabag twice, “As if there may be one thing in it she missed the primary time round … she enjoys driving the spectrum from what’s formally peppermint tea by way of one thing extra like flavoured, tinged water. To journey in a lonely nation most individuals wouldn’t name tea.”
Brown is simply nearly as good when she zooms out to point out a fancy state of affairs in a single sharp, attractive paragraph, as on this summary of Annabel’s boyfriend:
Dr. Richard French, 36 years previous, basic practitioner, he did electives in emergency wards and watched folks die on working tables, he prescribes opiates each day and briskly comforts previous women, and as soon as in his kitchen he took his stethoscope and slid the chilly disc below her bra so she gasped, and he smiled – however he’s afraid of her, ain’t that the reality, he fucks her holding his breath.
The character of the solipsistic, over-earnest, pretentious, self-consciously ascetic Annabel can be brilliantly executed. She takes herself too significantly, and is aware of she’s taking herself too significantly, and takes that too significantly. She takes Shakespeare not solely significantly however personally, as solely a bookish undergraduate can. Her conception of the love triangle within the sonnets blurs into her personal sexual fantasies, then into YA romance tropes earlier than straying on into the weirder outskirts of girlish need. Like many very younger folks, she is at all times performing, just a bit bit, for herself.
She can be – unusually for a protagonist of fiction – basically pleased. In actual fact, her happiness, and the fragility of happiness, is a theme of the ebook. Her Oxford is a spot of fabulous serenity and sweetness, and he or she’s an prosperous, younger, white, wholesome individual from a contented, loving household. Sure, her boyfriend is simply too previous for her, however he’s considerate and affected person and devoted. Then there’s her pleasure in solitude and studying, a pleasure so eager it’s sexual. Having hassle ending her essay would possibly actually be Annabel’s worst downside. However others’ issues loom into the body; the thoughts seeks out the ache in reminiscence; a quiet idyll can turn into a spot the place guilt and anxiousness sound very loud.
A novel with out occasions is a stunt, a lot as a novel consisting of a single sentence is. We anticipate it to have its personal creative logic, a logic that transcends the standard type of the literary novel: we would like much less to be extra. If Observe has a weak spot, it’s that, at coronary heart, it’s moderately conventional. It builds to a call with doubtlessly far-reaching penalties for the protagonist, and the choice isn’t about essay writing, however about erotic love. There’s a plot right here, it’s simply very faint and ambiguous, like Annabel’s peppermint tea.
Brown is an excellent author, and he or she largely makes this work. However in the direction of the tip, I discovered I didn’t need to learn one other of Annabel’s intercourse fantasies, or hear one other of her clever pronouncements, and I couldn’t assist noticing that the few scenes the place she talked to actual folks or remembered key occasions had been way more attention-grabbing than those describing her yoga routine. Her concepts about Shakespeare appeared much less and fewer necessary because the ebook went on, and I finally felt that, if Brown wasn’t going to try a Mrs Dalloway or Ulysses, I might need most popular a novel that simply instructed a narrative in scenes that mattered.
after publication promotion
However I’ve at all times been an individual who likes robust tea. So it means one thing that, regardless of my fidgeting, I each loved and admired this novel. It was largely a pleasure to journey in a lonely nation most individuals wouldn’t even name story, to dwell within the satisfactions and strangeness of much less when it’s simply much less.
