The Dear Deceit

by Christine Brooke-Rose, Joseph Andrew Darlington (Introduction)

The third in Brooke-Rose's sequence of early realist novels, The Dear Deceit, first published in 1960, chronicles in reverse the misadventures of Alfred Northbrook Hayley, a scheming opportunist whose canards and manipulations are met with fatigue and irritation among his family, and whose romantic, financial, and religious struggles form in part a striking autobiographical portrait of Brooke-Rose's own father, Alfred Rose. By moving in reverse order from adulthood to childhood, the novel is structured as a form of genealogical investigation, subverting the conventional bildungsroman by presenting a sequence of sometimes disconnected episodes rather than a coherent lifestory. This first paperback edition contains an illuminating introduction by Joseph Andrew Darlington, who traces via archival material the parallels with Brooke-Rose's own family history, and her careful splicing of fiction and fact. The Dear Deceit is perhaps her most sombre work, if still sharp with satirical observation and witty, cutting dialogue.

306 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1960

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

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Miss Brooke-Rose’s third novel pips to the post Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow in its use of the backward structure—relating the life of Alfred Hayley from his failed marriage, romantic dalliances, scheming knavery, to his teenage cockiness in reverse order with increasing surfeits of intriguing and superfluous descriptive detail per overstuffed-and-indulgent chapter. As we know from Joseph Andrew Darlington’s fascinating piece in the Verbivoracious Festschrift Volume One, Brooke-Rose based the entire cast on her own eccentric family (the Brookes and the Roses), and this perhaps explains the deadening of Brooke-Rose’s endemic wit in favour of meticulous, drier depictions of her cast of characters—not wishing to satirise her forebears in the prior sharp and playful (disrespectful?) manner has rendered her prose a more serious and personal affair. This leaves The Dear Deceit the least humorous of her novels, if a wonderful exercise in fictionalising one’s lineage and conducting a genealogical investigation in novel form—those interested in the intense, serious, darker side of CB-R should encroach upon this soon-to-be-republished (VP) novel.

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 4 out of 5]

CBR's first 2 novels had stayed within the world of London literary intellectuals. The big ideas like religion and communism had filtered in only as objects of fashionable chatter; it was a smart thing fro some smart people to turn to the church, but not much is said about what they learnt from it.

This, her third novel, see three great shifts. First of all we're seeing a much bigger picture. This novel contains a family saga running from the 1870s right up to the end of the 1950s. It is based on CBR's research in to the chequered life of her absent father. The locations visited include Alabama before World War One, New York, a British military intelligence centre in World War Two, and London at various times. The plot takes in business intrigues and frauds and failures, as well as many different lives and loves. Secondly, it is a great stylistic change for CBR. The start and end chapters are written from the 1st person perspective of a somewhat priggish male, of about her age. The intervening chapters unfold the story in reverse-chronological sequence, and are presumably being reconstructed (or speculated?) in the initial narrator's consciousness. Whoever this narrator may be, they are clearly omniscient as they see in to Alfred Hayley's heart and can record the truth of his deceptions and self-deceptions.

The third difference is that this is a novel that takes the Big Ideas seriously, even if it is not offering a position on them. We get the story of the transformation of religion in western culture. The early years (the later chapters) are in the declining days of the Victorian disputes over faith, in which the battle with Darwinism was only one small part: High Church versus Chapel, and the appeal of Rome, are still matters lively for educated folk, but fading fast in the popular mainstream. Afterwards comes syncretism as the smart thing to espouse, and then finally the "return" to the Church, as a gesture of repudiation of how the world has changed in the meantime.

Other reviewers have said this book lacks CBR's usual wit, but that would just be a consequence of the chosen style. We do in any case get several instances of cross-lingual punning, a harbinger of her later novels. The closing chapter was faintly reminiscent of the start of "Amalgamemnon", the references to airport culture of course picked up later in "Between". This would be a good place for any CBR-beginners to start, much better than "Xorandor", which is where I started.

Incidentally, the Verbivoraceous reprint editions all have typos due to errors in scanning the texts. These are usually obvious, but I suppose it's possible there may be a few inadvertent disruptions in the meaning of passages. Of course the author of "Thru" and "Textermination" would have loved the thought of that.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably somewhere in the 4.25/5 range. The growth of CB-R is rapidly becoming apparent. I can't help but get hints of McElroy in her approach to prose.