The Sycamore Tree

by Christine Brooke-Rose

Nina is happily married to Gael, until his recently published book rouses the ire of a not-quite-there critic, Howard, intent on becoming the mover and shaker of London's literary circles. Howard seduces Nina, while Howard's wife Elizabeth becomes involved with an Hungarian exile, who befriends and is befriended by Gael, leading to an utterly unexpected and tragic outcome for all. Christine Brooke-Rose's second novel is a waspish satire of the '50s London literary scene, and a story of madness and ill-fated lust-an entertaining novel from her early quartet of realist-mode tragicomedies.

Genres: British Literature

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1958

About the author

Christine Frances Evelyn Brooke-Rose was a British writer and literary critic, known principally for her later, experimental novels. Born in Geneva and educated at Somerville College, Oxford and University College, London, she taught at the University of Paris, Vincennes, from 1968 to 1988 and lived for many years in the south of France.

She was married three times: to Rodney Bax, whom she met at Bletchley Park; to the poet Jerzy Pietrkiewicz; and briefly to Claude Brooke. She shared the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction for Such (1966).

She was also known as a translator from French, in particular of works by Robbe-Grillet.

NYT obituary.

Reviews

[Scribble Orca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Under threat from some form of Mutilated Jugular, be pleased to be advised of a something-in-place adoing nothing about much:

so, dear GR friends
as you may know
I have the perfect relationship
thus it was with great relish and delight
that I finished Christine Brooke-Rose's The Sick Amore Tree
which I might add has no thing in common with a variety appearing
according to some scholars and other descants
in olden day songs
but concerns the most lewdicryous and debasing scenarios
in which one partner rides off the rails
falling for the most despicable creature imaginable
generating
an enviable fest of investigation into the myriad forms of self deceit and loathing arising
from such a construction.
Was it real?
Perhaps since in the end, our perfect couple
never sundered by the encroachment of the parasite third
leg (wielded as oft and hotly as a cattle brand),
were rendered obsolete by the heroine's timely death, of a gunshot wound.

A carefully avant-garded roman a clef expressing all the themes in content that Christine Brooke-Rose would later exploit and illuminate in structure. And I know this, dear reader, since my perfect relationship withstands all sullies sallies and silliness that fictional real life swings at it.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

The second in CBR’s sequence of realist novels, as recommended by a certain Googling Whale, is a darker production than The Languages of Love, sharpening up its satirical scimitar and tackling mental illness with impressive sedateness. CBR offers a delicious riposte to her male contemporaries, slamming the male-dominated publishing world and the bumbling neurotics and Oxford hysterics at the top, and narrating the tale of Oh Nina—a childlike writer’s wife whose occasional ‘turns’ soliciting male suitors for extramarital bedroom frolics lead her into the arms of the loathsome worm Howard, a frustrated hack trapped in a mismatched marriage desperate to romp with the stunning Oh Nina. The novel is uneven but ram-tough with painful period observation and unflinching satire, from a refreshing piquant female perspective, and although the Oh Nina plot lapses into melodrama, the subplot about a Hungarian poet keeps the novel topical and lively, and unmoors it from English provincialism to place it closer to the Euro tradition where CBR ended up with her thrilling explodissimento works. Someone should reprint this, say a certain Sarcastic Oligarch?

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many of the incidentals (less so the vitals) of this earlier pre-experimental Brooke-Rose novel of the late 50s concern the often-superficial world of literary criticism, a world where book blurb terminology enjoys seasonal vogues of overuse. One such example: the "beautifully-realized characters" which abounded for a period (following that time when everything was "classic in its simplicity"). While I wouldn't characterize The Sycamore Tree as at all simple, I would say that the characters are extremely well-realized, down to their complex and contradictory nuances, self-deceptions, and uncertainties. It's the characters and their interrelationships here that drive and cohere the otherwise ordinary-in-synopsis relationship drama. In the clear forefronting of the characters which would later be obscured behind constraints, experimental machinery, and slight-of-hand sliding panels (yes, poor D, outdone again), Brooke-Rose gives reminder and insight into the exquisite depth that she always brings to her characters, no matter how beset by post-modern devices they may find themselves. CBR un-embellished, then. Though, be reminded, she's a fantastic embellisher, her obfuscations and manipulations arguably rendering her subjects more true and urgently real.

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Academic Gael Jackson has written a novel called "The Sycamore Tree", and the rising young critic Howard Cutting is suing for defamation over the (unintentional) similarity between himself and one of the characters. The story of the legal action is just the starting point for a wonderful novel that mixes satire of the London literary scene with sharper observations from East European emigres. Philosophical questions about the self, reality, and fiction are touched on but no positions or debates are unveiled. Most of the book is spent in the company of smart people who went to top universities and learned to make dazzling comments; the shallowness and narrowness of this world is indicated, though the narrator is not so clear about what lies outside it. Cutting is supposed to be a lower-middle class scholarship boy who didn't get on so well with his dad, but all that background gets covered in half a page and is only slightly alluded to afterwards. And when Nina enters group therapy, we hear: "The sessions were a masterpiece of unguided, clueless conversation between five terrorised, shy, incoherent women whose powers of communication and level of intelligence Nina had never imagined as a possibility among human beings." (pg 186) But such people don't get speaking role in a CBR novel until "Next", in 1995.