The book is at its strongest in portraying the comeradeship, if not really relationship, Brian enjoys with his fellow buffs, many of them socially unconventional, and indeed Brian looks down on some of them in the same way that Beavis has contempt for Butthead.

Brian by Jeremy Cooper | Fitzcarraldo Editions Brian by Jeremy Cooper | Fitzcarraldo Editions

This morning I woke up to terror such as I have never experienced before: I was entirely stripped of feeling. I was completely empty, without pain, without pleasure, without longing, without love, without warmth and friendship, without anger, without hate. Nothing, nothing was there anymore, leaving me like a suit of armour with no knight inside.Cooper has maximised the potential of this literary convention to achieve a work of great depth and quiet power. Over three decades, a mother and her artist daughter communicate only by letters, excavating their relationship as it evolves with melancholic, astute precision. At times spellbinding and mesmerising, the work also proves provocative and inspirational. As much a love letter to the lost art of letter-writing as it is a thirty year-long dialogue of familial love, Cooper has produced an understated book that nonetheless resonates powerfully. This book is deeply sensitive to the ebb and flow of relationships over time and the way love is disguised, expressed and experienced, and it achieves that elusive dream of all authors and finds new meaning in the recording of life.’ Brian can also be seen as how art reflects life. Just as Camilla Grudova’s Children of Paradise was a Dario Argento take on a group of cinephiles, Cooper uses a more elegant technique. As Brian loves Japanese films, especially the works of Ozu, the book is a mirror of that genre. Brian (the novel) moves at a leisurely pace taking in all the details from the ordinary to the extraordinary. I studied in London and graduated in 2000 often visiting the BFI, then got a job working at an independent cinema in central London where we showed loads of the films named in this book. I ended up working there for a decade and being the creative manager of that cinema, and in my years there I met and befriended hundreds of film buffs.

Brian by Jeremy Cooper | Waterstones Brian by Jeremy Cooper | Waterstones

First and foremost, I think, Cooper’s novel is a love letter to the cinema. Much of its length is given over to Brian’s thoughts on the films he sees. Even though I haven’t seen most of them myself, I felt again the sense of openness and possibility that comes from being able to range far and wide with films. I was scared to read this becuase I loved the blurb so much that I felt there was no way it could live up to my expectations - but it did. Brian’s character is worth noting: he is anti social, loves routine and can only communicate with other film lovers and even then he is very secretive about his life. At one point on the book he manages to find a copy of a rare Japanese film and refuses any type of credit. It could be how film can help, or exacerbate mental health. This is the 60th of the blue-covered fiction titles from Fitzcarraldo Editions, all of which I've read and reviewed, but it sadly confirmed my hypothesis: their taste and mine in Anglophone male writers simply doesn't overlap. After having published his luminous Ash Before Oak, Jeremy Cooper now brings us Brian, equally a work of mysterious interiority and poetry. It confirms that however solitary life might be, art enriches both our imaginations and our realities. This is a very tender book.’

Brian

For several years he had promised himself he would become a member at the BFI, failing to do so for no reason other than the trepidation he generally felt about doing anything new. The Talacre Gardens fiasco impelled urgent action and after a visit to the watch-repairer in The Cut on a Saturday afternoon not long after seeing The Outlaw Josey Wales, Brian grasped the moment, walked on over to the South Bank and filled in the inexpensive BFI membership form. He felt a rush of rightness as he placed a copy of the month’s programme in his bag to study at home. From then on, he booked in for a screening at least every couple of weeks, berating himself for not having done so sooner. Cooper really captures the way that a deep, passionate interest in something can enrich a person’s life. This could be an interest in art, though I don’t think it has to be. It’s the depth of Brian’s engagement which strikes me as most significant. If you do nothing, you will be auto-enrolled in our premium digital monthly subscription plan and retain complete access for 65 € per month. This type of book can work on many levels: on one it’s a look at how film and the film buff have evolved: from attending cinemas to streaming, plus the availability of global culture became more accessible by the 2010’s and so a wider variety of films were being screened with the technology to clean them up as well.

Jeremy Cooper on Creating Verisimilitude Fact, Fiction, and Film: Jeremy Cooper on Creating Verisimilitude

We do gradually get hints of a very troubled childhood which Brian wishes to forget, his estranged father a bigoted unionist and his, now deceased, mother having spent his early years in prison, Brian placed in an orphanage, for facilitating UVF terrorism. As the years roll by, and more details emerge, I found myself trying to decide what was simply personality, and what was pathology. Which I guess is a question we can all ask ourselves in the mirror. This novel achieves a great deal with its close insistence on the dignity of a quiet life invigorated by the most defamiliarising art form of them all.’

When we first meet Brian, he is about 30 years old, single, living in a small apartment, and already set in his ways. He loves films, however, and one night he decides to ride the local tram to the British Film Institute (BFI), which is showing a film he has long wanted to see. From enjoying that initial experience, Brian soon finds himself going to the BFI twice a week, and after six months or so, he decides to buy a membership in the BFI, to watch films more often. As his attendance increases, he notices a group of men—the same men every time—standing in the foyer discussing the film shown. Being Brian, he is too shy to approach the group, but loving films, he is curious about their conversation. He eventual allows himself to come within earshot of them and discovers a few enticing details: None are called by name, all have interesting things to say, and no one is trying to score points at the expensive of the others. The combined anonymity, camaraderie, and enthusiasm for film encourage Brian to approach the group and comment on a film. His comment is noted by the group and appreciated, and he soon finds himself joining in every night.

Brian by Jeremy Cooper | Book review | The TLS Brian by Jeremy Cooper | Book review | The TLS

Brian aims to be seen as “true” in two divergent ways, in the convincing depiction of an obsessive central character and in acceptable portrayal of actual films and other public events. The novel assumes overlapping areas of unity between fact and fiction, for even in the driest documentary re-telling of an historical episode choices are made—in the language of description, in what to leave out, in presentational design, and as to which external experts to trust on disputed issues. There is inevitably an element of fiction in all factual writing, because the taste and judgement of an individual has informed its composition. In reverse, almost all fiction has a factual core, colored by the life of its writer, by the people they have come across, and by the underlying emotional tenor of the author’s interests. Whether by intention or not, a novel in part documents its writer, at times with the deliberate contradiction of openness versus restraint and verbal shimmer against solid realism.There is an oddly detached tone to the novel which is narrated in the third person, almost like character notes for someone playing Brian in a movie, or the interview notes of a psychologist (although the only time Brian does seek help his GP tells him the NHS no longer funds such things): There’s a strange magic to Jeremy Cooper’s writing. The way he puts words together creates an incantatory effect. Reading him is to be spellbound, then. I have no idea how he does it, only that I am seduced.’