Dinah Brooke’s 1973 novel Lord Jim at Home had been out of print for five decades — and had never gotten a U.S. release — until McNally Editions republished in 2023 with a new foreword by the novelist Ottessa Moshfegh. I always save forewords until after I’ve finished a novel, so I missed Moshfegh’s implicit advice to go into Lord Jim at Home cold. She notes that the recommendation she received to read it “came with no introduction,” and that “I wouldn’t have wanted the effect of the novel to be mitigated in any way, so I’m reluctant to introduce it now.”
I am not reluctant to write about Brooke’s novel because I am so enthusiastic about it and I think those with tastes in literature similar to my own will find something fascinating in its plot and prose. However, l agree with Moshfegh’s advice that Lord Jim at Home is best experienced free from as much mitigating context as possible. I had never heard of the novel before lifting it from a bookseller’s shelf, attracted by the striking cover; I flipped it over to read a blurb parsed from Moshfegh’s foreword attesting that Brooke’s novel “was an instrument of torture. It’s that good.” The inside flap informed me that reviews upon its publication “described it as ‘squalid and startling,’ ‘nastily horrific,’ and a ‘monstrous parody’ of upper-middle class English life.” I was sold.
Lord Jim at Home is squalid and startling and nastily horrific. It is abject, lurid, violent, and dark. It is also sad, absurd, mythic, often very funny, and somehow very, very real for all its strangeness. The novels I would most liken Lord Jim at Home to, at least in terms of the aesthetic and emotional experience of reading it, are Ann Quin’s Berg, Anna Kavan’s Ice, Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and James Joyce’s Portrait (as well as bits of Ulysses). (I have not read Conrad’s Lord Jim, which Brooke has taken as something of a precursor text for Lord Jim at Home.)
After finishing Lord Jim at Home, I read it again by accident. At first I intended to take a few notes for a possible review, but after the first few pages I just kept reading. On a second reading, Brooke’s novel was just as strange—maybe even stranger—even if I was able to read it much more quickly, finding myself quicker to tune into the novel’s competing (and complementary) narrative registers. I found it far more precise, too, in the rhetorical development of its themes; Brooke’s styles and tones shift to capture the different ages of its hero. The novel begins in a mythical, archetypal mode and works its way through various registers, exploring the tropes of schoolboy novels, romances, war stories, adventure tales, modernism, realism, and journalism. But despite its shifting modes, Lord Jim at Home is not a parodic pastiche. Rather, at its core, Lord Jim at Home skewers how aesthetic modes—primarily those derived from notions of class and manners—cover over abject cruelty. As Moshfegh puts it in her forward, Lord Jim at Home is “an accurate portrayal of how fucked-up people behave, artfully conveyed in a way that nice people are too polite to admit they understand.”
I’ve tried to be clear that I think it’s best to come to Lord Jim at Home without too much context—it’s best to just go with the novel’s strangeness. Below, however, I offer a more detailed discussion of the novel, its language, and some elements of the plot for those so inclined.
Lord Jim at Home begins in the mode of a fairy tale, and, like many true fairy tales, turns dark pretty quickly. We meet the hero of our story, the Prince, along with his parents, the King and Queen. They live in an expansive “house on the cliffs,” attended by a staff that includes the Prince’s cruel nursemaid and a chauffeur who drives them to Sunday dinners at the house of the Judge, the King’s aged father. The world Brooke conjures is far from idyllic though. The poor rich Prince is given to the care of his abusive nurse, an ally of his father the King. Like Laius of Thebes, the King initiates the infanticidal oedipal anxieties that steer the plot’s trajectory:
‘He’s got to learn who’s master, says the King, pulling the satin covered eiderdown up round his shoulders and tucking it under his chin. The infant Prince is his enemy, gathering strength to put his eyes out, chop his balls off, take his kingdom. I am bigger than you, and I am stronger than you, thinks the King, and I will win.
The first few chapters of Lord Jim at Home go into great gross detail of the Prince’s lonely infancy. Instead of bonding and affection, he lives in anxious separation:
The more the Prince’s desire for his mother increases the more he is deprived of her. The long emptiness of nursery days turns bitter. He holds himself in suspension, waiting for her. He no longer releases gifts of himself into the cold tin potty or the marble hands of his nurse. He takes food into his mouth but does not swallow, or swallows but does not digest, and vomits it up again, later, unchanged.
Abjection of the body plays a major role in the novel. Our hero is frequently troubled by the boundaries of what is inside of him and what is outside of him. Motifs of genitals, blood, excrement, and other bodily emissions fill Lord Jim at Home. Sex in the novel is abject too—rushed, indecent, Gothic (more Faulkner than Brontë). When the chauffeur takes sexual possession of the nurse’s body in a scene that isn’t exactly a rape, the narrator likens her bare skin to “sour milk left standing for days.” The Judge, in a parallel to his grandson the Prince, also needs the attention of a nurse (who, like the Prince’s nurse, also wipes wealthy ass). His final days play out as a grotesque comedy of depravity with his compliant nurse; the final punchline of his life conjoins sex and death.
The mythic-fairy tale mode of the novel never really goes away, but as the Prince grows, reality penetrates the narrative. It takes around seventy-five pages or so to suss out the names and full particulars, but our Prince is Giles Trenchard of Cornwall, son of an alcoholic vice sheriff, himself the son of a hateful alcoholic judge. Giles is born into an oedipal chain of loveless judgment: “The Prince grows, but he is never very satisfactory,” one chapter begins. His father finds nothing to love in him, aside from a grudging nod to his abilities on the cricket field; his mother is always slightly alienated.
Giles is sent to the same public school as father and grandfather before him. It’s likely that he suffers learning disabilities (“this boy is incapable of concentration,” an instructor laments) and he is unable to understand social cues. He chews his sheets and wets his bed (“you filthy little boy,” taunts the house matron); he is an outcast, “a sort of Ishmael.” “Giles never learns,” the narrator tells us, perhaps channeling the headmaster’s complaint to Giles’ parents. But Giles learns something–something of the dull monotony of school life, presented as a pointless Sisyphean task:
Every night you struggle and heave yourself up over the top of the highest ledge, to attain which you have been striving all day, and lie on your stomach panting in the darkness, your own breath tearing through your aching lungs, the only hot and living thing, filling your ears with noise. The noise subsides. Slowly you raise your head, and in the faint glimmer of morning light another ledge of black, shaly, crumbling rock stretches above you, blotting out the sky. Behind you the crack of the whip and the voice of the overseer unchanged. You have achieved nothing. Ledge after ledge, summit after summit stretch upwards. There is no end.
Luckily (!) World War Two intervenes, giving Giles and his classmates an ostensible purpose to grow up:
The war does not stop, as some of the boys have been afraid it might. They continue to grow, quietly, with their eyes fixed upon a point in the future when they will become men, and heroes. Their dreams are full of tumult and violence, but so is the world outside.
Unlike his public school peers though, and to the shame of his parents, Giles will not be an officer in the war: “they sigh sharply, roll their eyes, whisper urgently in the corners. It appears there is some difference in serving your country as an officer and as a rating.” Their shame slides into relief as Giles goes to sea. His family can forget his existence.
In one of the most startling and sad scenes in the book, Giles comes home on leave after months on the ocean. His parents decline to meet him at Devonport: “What does he care if his father and mother don’t even come to have a look at the ship? The Navy’s your mother father and mother…” The cold sadness intensifies when Giles arrives at his parents’ home to find his mother in the middle of a bridge game with other society ladies (“She had not forgot he was coming,” the narrator notes). Giles interrupts the bridge party, but his mother’s bridge partner agrees to play her hand for her so that she can greet her son:
‘Oh darling,’ she says again, clasping her hands in front of her and having to stand just a little on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. She looks him up and down. He doesn’t look quite how she’d expected. What was it that was different from Lady Philpott’s son?
‘You’ve changed.’
‘I was blown through a hatchway. All the rest of the lads on Y Gun were killed. I was bloody lucky to escape. They were all blown to smithereens.’
It is absurd, but the people at the bridge table pause and gasp at the word bloody. They do not want to think about young men being blasted to smithereens. Giles’ mother has realised what it is that looks different from Peter Philpott. Giles doesn’t have any medals on his chest, or any of those pretty gold ribbons on his sleeve.
‘Shouldn’t they have given you a medal for it?’ she says.
She then sends Giles off to his room so she can finish the bridge game.
I fear I’ve glossed over too much of Giles’s adventures in the Navy, which take up the middle third of the novel and feature some of its strongest prose. Brooke’s late modernist approach mixes high adventure motifs with violent, gruesome imagery, often delivered in long passages that move from third-person omniscience into the mind of a specific sailor and back again. For long stretches, the narration settles on a collective we, the sailors of the Patuson, and then shifts into a you. The reader gets caught up in these shifting modes, which serve to highlight Giles’s core abject alienation. Consider Giles’s reflection on the deaths of his crew mates on the Y Gun, which turns into another of the novel’s strange body fantasies:
It would be interesting to be conscious while your body is cut in half, while you fly through the air in the course of duty, sinking in a misty cloud of blood and fragments of flesh through the clean turquoise water, and sharks with a powerful smooth thrust glide towards you, this feast, here, here are my entrails, still warm, my hands like trailing petals let the shell fall, a star somersaulting down, they gather up my own, my beloved red flesh, stomach, duodenum in the rich sauce of my blood, this dish has taken twenty years to prepare, and much loving care.
The novel’s final third propels to an oedipal end. Giles had had a place and purpose on the Patusan, in the Navy, but he is out of step with civilian life. “It’s so small, England. It’s so fucking small,” laments the narrator, perhaps channeling Giles and his crew mates who find themselves not exactly hailed as heroes in their homecoming. Giles, who lacks so much agency, is forced into the patriarchal line of law, but he has no knack for it. He prefers to spend his time in pubs and at house parties where he joins the “grand freemasonry” of those “who think the world has changed, who are not going to be bound by the conventions of the past.” However, Giles’s family — his native class — “are working to rebuild the old order.” The final chapters take on a clipped, almost journalistic tone as we see Giles sliding into alcohol-fueled dissociation from reality which culminates in his Great Crime. The last pages then revert to the mythic mode; our hero, our Prince must be punished, delivered to the shark that had haunted his dreams: “Shit, piss and semen are sucked into the shark’s mouth.”
The most remarkable moment in the novel comes a few pages before this punishment is delivered. The narrator seems to take on the author’s judgment; indeed, it is hard for me not to read the monologue I refer to as anything but the viewpoint of Dinah Brooke on her own creation:
That was the image in which your wretched soul was formed; you destroyed those that formed you, but you did not succeed. They are still stronger. You have done nothing. Your life is wasted, and your crime. You have murdered, but you have not changed. I love you. I wish that I was you. For many years I have been you and you have been my life. Nothing about you is strange to me. You are the measure of my disappointment. You commit the perfect, the absolute crime, but in secret. You deny it. You do not understand it. You are not present. You commit the crime that could have freed us all, and you are not present in it. You deserve to die. You do not understand what you have done. I wish that I had your neck between my hands so that I could shake some knowledge into you. But your eyes still remain blank and innocent. I hate you because you have exposed the secret. You have laid it in front of us. And yet you see nothing.
You commit the crime that could have freed us all, states the narrator (the author, again, I’d claim), but the crime is detached from all meaning, all ideology. Giles has exposed the secret, laid bare the infanticidal, oedipal anger seething beneath the veneer of polite society, but he fails to understand it. He is neither freed nor transformed by it. In the end, it’s a bit in a game: “The Test match ends in a draw.” The “grand freemasonry” stalls against the old order.
I loved reading Lord Jim at Home. The novel is rich, full; reading it one often feels as if one’s in a bad dream. Obviously, that’s not everybody’s cup of tea. But I loved its flavor, and went back for more. I hope to see more of Brooke’s novels come back into print. In the meantime, I’ll scour used bookstores with mild hopes. Very highly recommended.