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Palace Without Chairs
A fantasy about a mythical modern kingdom - replete with spies, assassins, communists, a dying king, a vegetarian queen, and a princess who numbers her lovers, chiefly female, in the thousands - Palace without Chairs is Brigid Brophy's storytelling magic in full tragic, comic, absurd, and entirely true.
- GenresLiterature
295 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1978
22 people want to read
About the author
Brigid Brophy
42 books50 followersBrigid Antonia Brophy, Lady Levey (12 June 1929, in Ealing, Middlesex, England – 7 August 1995, in Louth, Lincolnshire, England) was an English novelist, essayist, critic, biographer, and dramatist. In the Dictionary of Literary Biography: British Novelists since 1960, S. J. Newman described her as "one of the oddest, most brilliant, and most enduring of [the] 1960s symptoms."
She was a feminist and pacifist who expressed controversial opinions on marriage, the Vietnam War, religious education in schools, sex (she was openly bisexual), and pornography. She was a vocal campaigner for animal rights and vegetarianism. A 1965 Sunday Times article by Brophy is credited by psychologist Richard D. Ryder with having triggered the formation of the animal rights movement in England.
Because of her outspokenness, she was labeled many things, including "one of our leading literary shrews" by a Times Literary Supplement reviewer. "A lonely, ubiquitous toiler in the weekend graveyards, she has scored some direct hits on massive targets: Kingsley Amis, Henry Miller, Professor Wilson Knight."
Brophy was married to art historian Sir Michael Levey. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1984, which took her life 11 years later at the age of 66.
She was a feminist and pacifist who expressed controversial opinions on marriage, the Vietnam War, religious education in schools, sex (she was openly bisexual), and pornography. She was a vocal campaigner for animal rights and vegetarianism. A 1965 Sunday Times article by Brophy is credited by psychologist Richard D. Ryder with having triggered the formation of the animal rights movement in England.
Because of her outspokenness, she was labeled many things, including "one of our leading literary shrews" by a Times Literary Supplement reviewer. "A lonely, ubiquitous toiler in the weekend graveyards, she has scored some direct hits on massive targets: Kingsley Amis, Henry Miller, Professor Wilson Knight."
Brophy was married to art historian Sir Michael Levey. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1984, which took her life 11 years later at the age of 66.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 5, 2016
"He could tell from the excitement in the voice that the Attache had been enjoying himself in the construction of something like an intellectual fantasy. Its ingredients were evidently extravagant, if not positively paradoxical. In manner it was satiric. What the Chairman couldn't divine was the strategic plan it was meant to serve." (pg. 30)
The above passage may be Brophy's attempt to insert her instructions on how we are to regard this work, and the blurb writer (I have an old 1978 edition, including reference to the still on-going battle for PLA) seems to have picked it up, and even gone further by making comparisons to Kafka, which aren't appropriate. Trouble is, the whole business falls short in execution. The fantasy isn't lively enough, the only extravagance in this vaguely modern Ruritania is for donnish details about linguistics and royal protocol. The epigraphs are from Brophy's own husband's works, which adds to the whiff of in-jokes that don't survive in the outside air. The satire is light and ponderous. There is a big cast of characters, but they each seem to exist for the sake of a single joke, and never a very good one (in this respect she was faithful to her hero Bernard Shaw). There is a vaguely topical, Britain-in-the-70s feel in the references to trade union militancy and decaying institutions in a country that seems to be falling behind the world, but this book must have felt like light relief to cabinet minister Michael Foot, to whom it is dedicated.
The plot takes in assassinations, far Left intrigues, regional separatism, and a military coup, but it's handled as a weak comic opera anyone can exit when they feel like it. It doesn't seem as if Brigid Brophy really felt, much less wanted to convey, any mood of mounting paranoia and anxiety, it was simply a talking point she'd heard about. Like "In Transit", the semi-catastrophic ending is quite harmless and perfunctory, the author's heart is really in all the joking about medieval literature, and giving the homosexual characters a decent portrayal instead of the old stereotypes.
In conclusion: a book for Brophy completists.
The above passage may be Brophy's attempt to insert her instructions on how we are to regard this work, and the blurb writer (I have an old 1978 edition, including reference to the still on-going battle for PLA) seems to have picked it up, and even gone further by making comparisons to Kafka, which aren't appropriate. Trouble is, the whole business falls short in execution. The fantasy isn't lively enough, the only extravagance in this vaguely modern Ruritania is for donnish details about linguistics and royal protocol. The epigraphs are from Brophy's own husband's works, which adds to the whiff of in-jokes that don't survive in the outside air. The satire is light and ponderous. There is a big cast of characters, but they each seem to exist for the sake of a single joke, and never a very good one (in this respect she was faithful to her hero Bernard Shaw). There is a vaguely topical, Britain-in-the-70s feel in the references to trade union militancy and decaying institutions in a country that seems to be falling behind the world, but this book must have felt like light relief to cabinet minister Michael Foot, to whom it is dedicated.
The plot takes in assassinations, far Left intrigues, regional separatism, and a military coup, but it's handled as a weak comic opera anyone can exit when they feel like it. It doesn't seem as if Brigid Brophy really felt, much less wanted to convey, any mood of mounting paranoia and anxiety, it was simply a talking point she'd heard about. Like "In Transit", the semi-catastrophic ending is quite harmless and perfunctory, the author's heart is really in all the joking about medieval literature, and giving the homosexual characters a decent portrayal instead of the old stereotypes.
In conclusion: a book for Brophy completists.
August 18, 2016
Well that was fun :) . The trials and tribulations of various characters from the small democratic monarchy of Evarchia. Mostly following the members of the royal family.
Clearly inspired in parts by Gormenghast but its players are more real and a little less grotesque. Its a book about characters and setting rather than plot. You could also compare it to Dickens books like Bleak House , or South Wind by Norman Douglas.
Its a very funny book too at least to start with although the humour, while it doesn't disappear, gets pushed into the background during the final quarter.
I actually found Brophy's writing style a little... complex. Its not that she uses long words or anything but the way she puts sentences together, just seemed to throw me off at times and i was forced to reread.
The other thing which i had to adjust too is the scene changes. Some scenes can be very short and when you which to the next your never sure how far the jump will be, will this be 5 mins ahead or days or weeks. As someone who's mind tends to travel on rails this can be a little disconcerting.
Finally due to its lack of plot the ending doesn't really seem to mean much, it comes so far out of left field.
Overall though, much like Gormenghast this is a beautifully drawn (rather than written) book and left me wanting more, which is always preferable to the alternative :) .
Clearly inspired in parts by Gormenghast but its players are more real and a little less grotesque. Its a book about characters and setting rather than plot. You could also compare it to Dickens books like Bleak House , or South Wind by Norman Douglas.
Its a very funny book too at least to start with although the humour, while it doesn't disappear, gets pushed into the background during the final quarter.
I actually found Brophy's writing style a little... complex. Its not that she uses long words or anything but the way she puts sentences together, just seemed to throw me off at times and i was forced to reread.
The other thing which i had to adjust too is the scene changes. Some scenes can be very short and when you which to the next your never sure how far the jump will be, will this be 5 mins ahead or days or weeks. As someone who's mind tends to travel on rails this can be a little disconcerting.
Finally due to its lack of plot the ending doesn't really seem to mean much, it comes so far out of left field.
Overall though, much like Gormenghast this is a beautifully drawn (rather than written) book and left me wanting more, which is always preferable to the alternative :) .
November 26, 2014
An amusing book. Some genuinely funny moments dealing with committees and the Ambassador. I would recommend it though there are areas that would not be to everyone's taste. A slightly odd ending but rather telling.
May 24, 2010
[This note was written in 1983:]. I enjoyed Brigid Brophy's Palace Without Chairs although nothing of hers has ever quite come up to the pyrotechnical brilliance of In Transit.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews