A review of the unusual novel “Brian” by Jeremy Cooper
This is a strange novel in format, tone and subject. The 180 pages are written as a single piece of narrative with no chapters or breaks, no plot and no direct dialogue. It is a melancholic work dealing with loneliness, isolation and obsession. It is the story of the eponymous London character who has a dull job and no friends but finds meaning in cinema. We meet Brian when he is approaching 40 and leave him when he is around 70. In the intervening 30 years, nothing really happens, but we share his visits to the British Film Institute (BFI) to see a whole succession of films – over 150 are name-checked – which are almost invariably art house, many foreign, and his speciality post-war Japanese works.
Brian does not own a mobile phone but carries a notebook everywhere. He is a man of routines who does not like to make decisions: “Brian felt comforted by sticking to trusted habits” and he was “the kind of person who needed a sheaf of reasons to act”. “In his daily life Brian was endlessly anxious”, “He felt uncertain in almost everything”, and “”Everything he touched went up in smoke, always had, since childhood. He was a disaster zone.”
We are told that “There were times when Brian felt that the only thing he understood anything about was film. Nothing much else made sense. Not that he could always make sense of the movies he saw either.” We learn that “Given the day-by-day anxieties with which Brian contended, the ability to focus attention on the niceties of films was effective distraction from an existence beset on the outside by recurring banalities.” In essence, “his contradictory purpose in watching film was to escape from the world and at the same time learn about it.”
I feel that I understand Brian: on and off for the last 50 years, I’ve been a member of the BFI and I’ve seen a lot of films, although my tastes are much wider than his. I love cinema. I’ve even met people like Brian, especially on film courses: characters who have no partners, few friends and minimal social life who find solitude and solace in the darkness of a cinema.
The author of “Brian”, 77 year old Jeremy Cooper, is an art historian who doesn’t have a mobile phone and hasn’t watched television for 25 years, but he loves cinema. Although the novel is not autobiographical, there is more a little of Brian in Jeremy who told a newspaper interviewer: “I live alone in a secluded rented cottage in west Somerset doing the same thing at the same time seven days a week” and “Almost all the films which Brian sees I too have seen, none of them re-seen for writing the book. I’ve only ever watched film live on a cinema screen.”
I guess this is why the novel is oddly compelling and why the author Zadie Smith has written a screenplay.