BOOK REVIEW / Gigi plays the virginals

IT IS 1971, and Maud Gonthier is a woman strangely out of place. Duty is her mainstay, and she is a demure companion to her widowed mother. The holiday at her aunt's country house near Meaux is to be the usual round of tennis and walks with her cousins, until the arrival of her cousins' English friends, Harrison and Tyler.

This is a summer of fiction - a brief, shining moment of enchantment. It evokes the lost domain depicted by Alain Fournier, where love brings together three young people taken away from normality to a magical place, and the consequences of that short time resonate through the rest of their lives.

Centre stage is Tyler, the Englishman-as-cliche: debonair, charming, a David Niven or Cary Grant in the making. His ruthlessness, kindness and dominant personality enchant his hostess and his friends as much as Maud. "They were all in love with Tyler, as much for what he represented - youth, health, beauty - as for what he was." Maud, though, is a less obvious type. There is none of the charming, soignee French heroine about her - this girl in her teens is no Gigi or Claudine. Instead she becomes like all those other Brookner women: quiet, self-composed, bearing life with passivity instead of reacting with zest.

This is more than a mere study of Maud's endurance. It is a story of a journey of discovery by Maud's daughter into her mother's secret life - her marriage to Harrison. For Harrison, too, the summer at Meaux and later in the rue Laugier was a time of enchantment, a time before his dreams came to nothing and "the door to the future clanged shut in his face", as he decides on marriage. Indeed, it is the time spent in the rue Laugier which becomes the kernel of this story, the time of psychological watershed, as the emphasis shifts from Tyler to Harrison.

The daughter's bafflement and admiration reflect Brookner's own puzzlement about the uncharted territory of lifelong commitment, about the compromises and irrevocability, about the horrors behind the velvet curtains as the married pay the price for their years cemented together by decorum and custom. Yet there is also a sense of affection for these two, who find a strategy for survival together. At the same time, we admire Brooker's painterly qualities; the meticulous light and shade of her characters, the subtle, economic precision of her writing, its technical dexterity and the controlled application of her art.

Reading this latest Brookner provides all the usual pleasures; the wry smiles, the sympathy for the plight of these lonely people. Maud and Harrison's lives are haunted by one summer, and we in turn are haunted by their fate, chosen out of duty, integrity, and conformity.

The skill with which Brookner portrays women like Maud - the minutiae of their lives, from the food they buy to the clothes they wear - is in sharp contrast to her attempts at drawing a man like Tyler. Brookner herself describes him as Steerforth to Harrison's Copperfield, but even when he is centre-stage, he remains in the shade.

Brookner's triumph here is also her downfall. The colours of her palette never change: pastel, muted shades, occasionally shot through with something sourer and sharper. After finishing Incidents in the Rue Laugier, will anyone be able to tell Maud apart from the Harriets, Fays, Ediths and Ruths of the previous Brookner novels?