Brian

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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.’ Why ever not, he wondered. Why had he delayed till he was almost forty to do something so obviously right for him? 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. At Talacre one weekend a woman had walked over to Brian’s bench and introduced herself as Dorothy, Camden Council’s manager of the playground. She had noticed the gentle way he had been playing with the children on and off all summer and, being short of staff at weekends, she wondered if he might agree to keep volunteer-watch over the facility for a fixed couple of hours on Sunday mornings. The thought of community participation, of acceptance within a worthwhile group of local people delighted Brian and when, as it always seemed to, everything fell apart he felt especially hurt. Two mothers had complained about his unqualified status and, with regret, Dorothy asked him not to come again. For his own sake she suggested it might be safest if he did not visit the gardens at all for the time being, as his accusers were a vindictive pair, Dorothy warned.

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. Readers, too, discover a lot about films and filmmakers, about the joys and insights they bring to viewers’ lives, and how, but extension, the arts help people develop rewarding inner lives, even—and especially—for people like Brian. Perhaps the format of the novel Brian is author Jeremy Cooper’s own tip of the hat to Brian’s special appreciation of glacially paced Japanese films in which nothing much happens on the outside, but inside, the characters’ lives are tumultuous yet measured. By the novel’s end—40 years of Brian’s life have been covered—he finally works up the nerve to reciprocate an offered friendship. Anonymously, of course. So as not to draw attention to himself. 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.It is also interesting from a writing technique perspective. Cooper ignores the 'show don't tell' advice for the entire novel, recounting all the events without a single instance of live dialogue. And yet, it was still engaging, and I felt I could easily picture myself in the moment with Brian, and live all the episodes with him. 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. A study in how writing can give lives meaning, and in how it can fail to be enough to keep one afloat, this is a rare, delicate book, teeming with the stuff of real life.’ 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. 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.

Brian by Jeremy Cooper The quiet joy of a deep interest: Brian by Jeremy Cooper

But this book just didn't work for me. It felt more like reading a never ending cinema programme than a novel. But there's no explanation about any of the films, just the briefest of nods towards them. So even though I'd seen dozens of the films in the book and could often decipher what the author was alluding to, even that didn't really help. God forbid you've not got an encyclopaedic knowledge of cinema. The thing about the cinema, in Brian’s experience, seated in a large dark space staring without interruption at a high wide screen, entranced, lost in another’s vision, was that he found feelings inside himself he did not know existed, replaced the next night by a different film and new sensations. And the next. Another film, another set of feelings. Walking slowly home, Brian thought of his own brother, Peter, nine years his senior, with whom he was unable to remember ever laughing. They barely knew each other, had never lived in the same house. Brian stopped suddenly in the street, muttering to himself, and stamped on the pavement several times one foot after the other, furious that playing with those two nice boys had awakened images of Peter and his father and their treatment of his mother. I rather liked this quiet unassuming book. The writing is very clear and straightforward, matching Brian’s life of routine. There’s a slightly relentless quality to the telling without section breaks, but that just kept me reading longer than I normally might. On paper this shouldn’t really work. A narrative about an introverted loner with a deeply unhappy childhood working in a mind numbing clerical job who finds salvation through watching films. More specifically, watching films every night at the National Film Theatre and becoming part of a group of others who also attend frequently who appear united at least initially less through their love of film but more by the fact they appear socially marginalised. I would say that at least half of the content of the short book is dedicated to film. It’s as if Cooper had amassed similarly voluminous notes to his main character having attended the NFT with similar devotion and wondered if he somehow couldn’t make a book about them. That doesn’t sound promising I know. If you combine that with the affectless written style, which particularly accents Brian’s idiosyncrasies (the tone is almost one of a book written for children about an unhappy mouse) you would think that potentially this book does not have much going for it.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. David Hebblethwaite on In the Belly of the Queen by Karosh Taha (tr. Grashina Gabelmann): Women in Translation Month 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.

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

What makes Jeremy Cooper’s seventh novel appealing and convincing is the author’s serene prose and tender, understated empathy…This is an affectionate, thoughtful portrait of a gentle soul.’ As have the two previous novels from Jeremy Cooper, Ash Before Oak and Bolt from the Blue, which contained a lot of nature and modern art respectively but which failed, unlike works from authors such as Sara Baume and the hybrid art/novel works that are a trademark of Les Fugitives, to draw this reader in and makes me want to seek out the things referenced. And Brian does the same, or rather fails to do the same, with film. Jeremy Cooper is a writer and art historian, author of six previous novels and several works of non-fiction, including the standard work on nineteenth century furniture, studies of young British artists in the 1990s, and, in 2019, the British Museum's catalogue of artists' postcards. Early on he appeared in the first twenty-four of BBC's Antiques Roadshow and, in 2018, won 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. The titular character is an office worker who lives a cautious existence, until, after a long process of thought, becomes a BFI member. Slowly he starts to become enamoured by cinema and the book documents his progress from the 90’s all the way to the present day.

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Brian by Jeremy Cooper | Goodreads Brian by Jeremy Cooper | Goodreads

With an effort he managed to clear his head of unwanted family memories and continued on into Kentish Town Road. On paper it sounds like an exaggeration but The Arts really do have a transformative effect on people. Jeremy Cooper’s novel Brian goes into this, the medium, in this case, is cinema.I feel like I should have liked this book more. I feel like I was the target audience for it, but it just didn't work for me. Hard to put into words just how much I loved this story of a solitary Northern Irish man who experiences a sense of belonging for the first time after getting a BFI membership at the age of 39. 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. All his life, everywhere he went, Brian had shunned attention, the scars unhealed from being singled out at school in Kent as different and blamed for being so, by teachers, by other boys and by his mother. To ease this hurt he had made himself an expert at forgetting, a skill by now matured, able most of the time to erase unwelcome thoughts and happenings. It did mean that he needed to hold himself on constant alert, ready to combat the threat of being taken by surprise, a state-of-being he had managed to achieve without the tension driving him crazy. There had been costs, by now discounted and removed from memory. The increasing curvature of his spine was one, outbreaks of eczema another. Accompanying the physical reactions to Brian's taut self-discipline, the mental and emotional strains were easier, he found, to suppress, to pretend did not exist. All of which helped explain why Brian had adapted unquestioningly to nightly visits to the BFI, by which he was enabled, he felt, to escape his destiny of defeat. This was only the second time Brian had been to the BFI, twenty years after his first visit, when he was nineteen, taken to see Kes along with two other youngsters by the manager at their hostel, to show them, Mr Trevor had said, that positive things do sometimes turn up, replacing hardship. Or something like that. It felt long ago, a period from which Brian had managed to move on, without ever finding a comfortable alternative place for himself.