Lord Jim at Home

by Dinah Brooke, Moshfegh (Foreword by)

Overview

“A ferocious comedy of middle-class dysfunction . . . published to controversy in 1973 . . . A masterpiece.” —Claire Allfree, The Telegraph

When Dinah Brooke’s second novel, Lord Jim at Home, was first published in 1973, it was described as “squalid and startling,” “nastily horrific,” and a “monstrous parody” of upper-middle class English life. It is the story of Giles Trenchard, who grows up isolated in an atmosphere of privilege and hidden violence; who goes to war, and returns; and then, one day—like the hero of Joseph Conrad's classic Lord Jim—commits an act that calls his past, his character, his whole world into question.

Out of print for nearly half a century (and never published in the United States), Lord Jim at Home reveals a daring writer long overdue for reappraisal, whose work has retained all its originality and power. As Ottessa Moshfegh writes in her foreword to this new edition, Brooke evokes childhood vulnerability and adult cruelty “in a way that nice people are too polite to admit they understand.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781946022646
Publisher:	McNally Editions
Publication date:	10/03/2023
Pages:	264
Sales rank:	656,380
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Dinah Brooke left Cheltenham Ladies’ College at sixteen to go to Paris, where she studied sculpture and Greek. She read English at Oxford, attended film school in London, briefly worked for a documentary film company, and spent a year in Greenwich Village. Back in London, she married, had twins, and, in the early 1970s, published four critically acclaimed novels. In 1975, she took sannyas, was given the new name Ma Prem Pankaja by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and lived for the next six years in his ashram in Poona, India. She returned to London in 1981, where she lives today.w

Ottessa Moshfegh is the author of five novels, most recently Lapvona, and a book of stories, Homesick for Another World. She lives in Southern California.

Editorial Reviews

10/16/2023

Brooke’s 1973 novel, first published in the U.K., presents a stinging portrait of an upper middle class British family. In an enthusiastic foreword, Ottessa Moshfegh describes feeling like she aged 20 years while reading Brooke’s bracing account of sociopath Giles Trenchard, only to be restored with “new nerves” by the end. Born to tradition-bound and emotionally remote parents in the interwar period, Giles endures physical abuse from his nurses at home and cruel humiliations from his teachers at boarding school. As a seaman in WWII, he routinely witnesses shipmates getting blown up beside him, and deals with these moments the same way he faces the general privations of a sailor’s life: with stiff-upper-lip stoicism. After the war Giles drifts into an aimless life of cricket, carousing, and excessive drinking, straining his relationship with his increasingly exasperated parents. Though foreordained by the title’s reference to a Joseph Conrad character who falls from grace through a lapse of judgment, Giles’s final desperate act against his family is as shocking as it is unexpected. Brooke structures her novel like a bildungsroman, but aims for a much broader critique of the British class system, notably in the festering moral rot of Giles’s grandfather. Her wide-eyed view of the dark side of the privileged class is as startling today as it was a half-century ago. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

[A] brilliant forgotten novelist . . . [a] superb book . . . a ferocious comedy of middle-class dysfunction, [it] was published to controversy in 1973 . . . Rich in grotesquerie, including several comically repulsive sex scenes, it has the unhinged realism of a fairground mirror . . . Lord Jim at Home is a masterpiece.

The Telegraph - Claire Allfree

"Lord Jim at Home . . . dwells unflinchingly, sometimes gleefully, on the way that scandal washes over a community, and the sorrow and schadenfreude that follow in its wake . . . Brooke has a limpid, assured style: cruel, yes, but not detached or apathetic . . . It’s frigid fun."

Harper's - Dan Piepenbring

"A classic that has lain dormant for fifty years. Ahead of its time, and now looking timeless, it has resurfaced with éclat. It is short and shocking . . . [an] alarming, accomplished tale."

Times Literary Supplement - Margaret Drabble

This gripping tale of power, cruelty and all the consequences—the title’s reference to Joseph Conrad’s novel hints at the themes—was first published in 1973, and it seems extraordinary that it has been largely forgotten until now . . . This novel [is] full of horrors but energetic, funny and tense as a spring . . . Lord Jim at Home, inspired by a real story but full of the kind of truth only fiction can deliver, plants its devilish brilliance deep in the reader and won’t let go.

The Guardian - John Self

"How bracing to read something as odd, nasty, unpredictable, funny and just downright different as Lord Jim at Home . . . A perfect martini with a razor blade at the bottom of the glass."

The Times - Jayne Taylor

An unmissable rediscovery from 1973, Lord Jim at Home by Dinah Brooke, turns a cold eye on the family dysfunction of the English upper class. Through scalpel-sharp prose and bitter comedy it lays bare the darkest human impulses.

The Guardian, Best Books of 2023 - Justine Jordan

"You can see why Ottessa Moshfegh is a fan of Dinah Brooke’s pitch-black 1973 novel Lord Jim at Home. A nihilistic satire on upper-class Englishness and emotional violence, it’s shocking and brilliant."

2023’s Biggest New Books The Guardian

A reissued novel from 1973, and the world might finally be more ready for it. Giles Trenchard is the protagonist and—like Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose—is born into privilege and an atmosphere of hidden violence. After boarding school and the Navy, he finds himself adrift like the hero of Conrad’s Lord Jim, and commits a shocking act. Emphatically not for the faint-hearted.

Evening Standard - Alex Peake-Tomkinson

If it weren’t such a pleasure to read, I’d say that Lord Jim at Home—read by a novelist, like me—was an instrument of torture. It’s that good.

from the Foreword - Ottessa Moshfegh

Compelling . . . Astonishingly direct. For those who don’t mind wandering with [Brooke] down the corridors of erotic adventure, there will be some squalid and startling experiences in her company. She uses the historic present like a club.

Daily Telegraph - David Benedictus

A crisp inventory of the horrors of growing up privileged in England between the wars . . . It is an ordinary family household, but seen from the underside it is a Renaissance court with its own rituals, threats and dagger-play . . . Brooke writes clinically and simply in the historic present. She convinces us that accidents are rarely accidental—and that they happen especially in the best-regulated families.

Times Literary Supplement - A. Whittane

Dinah Brooke’s sentences are short, harsh, nervously tense; she writes with concentrated and possessed fury.

The Observer - Anthony Thwaite

Remarkable . . . An often brilliantly interpretive work of fiction. With a coolness more effective than indignation she shows the making of a psychopath.

Sunday Times - Julian Symons

Evocative and excellently terse . . . Miss Brooke . . . has a cold and beady eye.

Sunday Telegraph - Janice Elliott

"You can see why Ottessa Moshfegh is a fan of Dinah Brooke’s pitch-black 1973 novel Lord Jim at Home. A nihilistic satire on upper-class Englishness and emotional violence, it’s shocking and brilliant."

The Guardian

2023-07-26
The pitiable subject of a cruel upbringing evolves into a rudderless adult, the nemesis of the privileged family that failed him.

Brooke’s withering portrait of the British upper class, originally published in 1973, now reissued and available for the first time in the U.S. with a foreword by Ottessa Moshfegh, is a dispassionate, sardonic parable of tragic dysfunction. It traces in detail the origins of Giles Trenchard, a.k.a. “the infant Prince,” oldest child of parents referred to as the King and Queen but in truth a boozy solicitor and his ineffectual wife, both products of English social and financial inheritance. Neglected by his mother, bullied by his father, left in the brutal “care” of a nanny, the infant Giles is bruised, tortured, and starved of tenderness. His only weapons in “the dark battles of the nursery” are screams, withdrawal, and the refusal of food. Brooke relates these horrors in a distinctive, chilly tone—“The Prince learns in the end, but a rat would have learned sooner”—while depicting the adults in grotesque terms, notably detailing their sexual proclivities. Even after his horrible nanny is replaced, it’s too late for Giles; he’s sent to a private school where he endures and fits in but can’t learn and makes no friends, even though he’s good at cricket. Another school follows, and a psychiatrist, but then World War II intervenes. Working as a humble sailor, Giles endures grim experiences but finds some social acceptance in the ranks. Afterward, it’s back to a life of nonachievement, failing law exams, drinking excessively, and stealing from his parents and others. This downward slide, underpinned by disgust and disgrace at home, is not slowed by love for an unsuitable 19-year-old, and Brooke finally reaches the Lord Jim-esque lapse, unsurprising in a tale of such implacable determinism, yet still shocking.

A domestic and class horror story delivered in clinical, brilliant prose.

Kirkus Reviews