Next

by Christine Brooke-Rose, Brian McHale (Introduction)

Next is, like Ulysses, a novel of (post)modern urban life in which characters circulate on foot and by public transport around the city (London here instead of Dublin), intersecting with each other, then parting, reacting continuously to the urban pleasures and perils that press in upon them.

Genres: British Literature, Fiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

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]

Christine writes about the homeless in an inverted and contemporaneously dystopian (i.e. situated in the present, but also the future) version of London, inventing her own series of phonetic idiolects for her cast of dropouts, who prowl around queuing for benefits, food aid and shelter in a grubby techno-crap world, similar to ours, and yet not. The novel focuses primarily on two older homeless men, one aged 38, the other in his 70s, and the rape and murder of the illiterate Elsie forms the “murder mystery” mentioned in the synopsis (never resolved). Her constraint for this book is the omission of any use of the verb “to have,” which works as a symbolic motif for the socially charged subtext of the work, i.e. the scabrous portrait of an overeducated and disillusioned strata of society, very pertinent to today, and helps to fuel her free indirect consciousness-hopping style rather well. Her use of the phonetic speech was less effective for me (Cockney or Scots or Nigerian voices) as it added nothing in particular to the novel except a more frustrating distance and awkwardness to the otherwise consistently bleak and oppressive tone, but the free-falling typography used to represent fractured internal monologue worked terrifically well. This strange, eerie and powerful novel is completely unavailable, due to Carcanet’s blatant lack of interest in Christine even when they were publishing her (it took her up to a year to get any comment on her completed manuscripts).

[Scribble Orca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grim reaping.

Lacking the usual signature humour, the only bright spot on the horizon of this relentlessly grinding fictional expose of down and out in London are the various versions of Estuarian, the Londoner dialect Brooke-Rose developed for this novel.

Expect the usual constraints (lipograms) of tagless dialogue carried from one character to the next, but with sufficient differentiation of speech and description that even a less-than-careful reader should have no difficulty identifying which letter of the alphabet is speaking (by now it will be no surprise that QWERTYUIOP are the band of homeless roving the book's pages) from among the in-total twenty-six glyphs. An enterprising soul might even be tempted to chart the paths taken around London, the map of which no doubt forming an additional layer of Brooke-Rosean meaning.

Squibbles: CB-R intended with this book to dispel the high-brow elite image with which she had been labelled (owing to both subject content education displayed in her work). However, her less strident repudiation of mimeticism clashes with her formal constraints, and story-teller that she is, she cannot resist creating a narrative that leans (admirably) towards genre, with all the implicit difficulties that raises. Her homeless characters not ventriloquising her agenda have little to say other than display the lyrical variations of Estuarian, those that mouthpiece have a manufactured background (the logic is consistent) just a little too plot pat. The Western English keyboard suggests an insularity contrary to her other work, unintended, and arguably appropriate for the setting.

One of her most reader-friendly books, if only the thing were less hard to acquire.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the most accessible of the Brooke-Rose novels I've read so far.

Following a disparate group of homeless people as they wander around north-west London, looking for food, shelter and (in some cases) companionship.

Perhaps the use of phonetically spelt "norf' lunnen di'lect" is a touch overdone though.

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Published in 1998, this is CB-R's novel set amongst the London homeless at some point in the mid 90s (the 1st Gulf War, Bosnia and Rwanda are all mentioned). The text flows from one character and place to another. There is a story in which one of these lonely souls is found raped and murdered, but we see it all piecemeal as these lives criss-cross the capital, re-encountering each other and transferring the narrative centre between them. The author clearly spent a lot of time recording the speech of this community and her training in linguistics leads to very dense (sometimes impenetrable) renderings of their dialogue. We get a glimpses of the back-stories, and many of these speakers have fallen out of conventional society, but with the opportunity to fall back in rather easily it would seem. I'm not sure the description of the benefits office or benefits payments are strictly accurate for the time period, it may be that CB-R was relying on research from the 70s or 80s which she didn't realise had been rendered out of date by changing to the system. It's also hard to believe they would ever have any chance at the job interviews they get sent to. Some of the topical detail about globalisation and digitalisation is rather quaintly expressed but is really expressing thoughts that have become cliches for younger writers. I wish there were a detailed biography so I could read about the genesis of this book.

[David]

A fascinating use of narrative technique to foreground the individuality of every human. Concentrating on a range of homeless characters in and around London, Brooke-Rose shifts among perspectives without signal, requiring the reader to identify each I-narrator by their individual thought processes. Nearly everyone speaks a roughly Cockney variant of English referred to as "Estuarial" but the thought processes are in a variety of styles. Conversations are often keys to comprehension of individual perspectives when the narrative shifts into a kind of stream of consciousness mode. As always, Brooke-Rose is fascinated by how a story means as well as what it means.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

[Pádraic · Rating 4 out of 5]

The work of Christine Brooke-Rose intrigued me, but it didn't matter much to me which one I consumed first. I ended up with this one, entirely because it was the cheapest on offer. And it's kind of remarkable. To my surprise, despite all the 'experimental' tags that Brooke-Rose receives, there's an immersive world created here. Fractured prose that cuts across the page to reflect fractured lives. Two complaints: the copious dialects threw me, mostly because it's outside my own experience. It got easier the longer I spent with it, but I was never entirely comfortable. Second, the blurb reads like it was written by somebody who's never read another blurb in their life. Minor asides aside, this is a striking swirl of a book, and its jagged edges really only enhance the experience of reading it.