[In the following review, Mantel offers a tempered assessment of Incidents in the Rue Laugier.]

“Please accept me as an unreliable narrator,” says Maffy, the shadowy initiator of this shadowy tale Anita Brookner's 15th novel, Incidents in the Rue Laugier, begins warily, as if the business of storytelling might be an infringement of good manners. A history is to be reconstructed, a history of a life that has left few traces. Maffy's mother, Maud Gonthier, “read a lot, sighed a lot and went to bed early.”

Maud was born in Dijon, France, and brought up by a widowed mother in straitened middle-class correctness: these are the facts Maffy knows. That Maud married an Englishman, Maffy's father, a bookshop owner, is also a fact, and the one to which Maffy owes her existence. But how did this marriage come about? Why does Maffy feel that “some gigantic quarrel must have taken place in the past, long before I knew either of them”?

Maud has slid quietly from life, dying, it seems, from lack of interest. Among her few possessions is a rose-pink silk kimono that seems to hint at a sexual flowering, there is also a small spiral-bound notebook, empty except for unconnected phrases, the name of Maffy's father and the word “blood.” From these fragments, Maffy creates this edgy narrative. She must make her mother comprehensible, at least to herself, because she knows she is growing to resemble her. She realizes that the story she presents is a fabrication, “one of those by which each of us lives,” but, she adds, “perhaps the truth we tell ourselves is worth any number of facts, verifiable or not.”

In Maffy's invented narrative, we go back to Dijon, to her mother's childhood. Maud's tubercular father dies early. Her mother, carefully managing on a limited budget, settles into an unlike reserve and sternness, which she passes on to her beautiful daughter. Each summer they go for a holiday in the country to stay with Maud's aunt. Here, at the age of 18, Maud meets two young Englishmen, friends of the son of the house. One of them is David Tyler, who is rich, careless, self-possessed and seductive. The other is Edward Harrison, a kindly young man who dreams of grand adventures, both physical and mental, but is too timid to venture much in real life. Tyler is rather like an Iris Murdoch character, larger than life and fuzzy around the edges; we know he is charming only because the author tells us so.

Tyler seduces Maud, who becomes pregnant. She is not the sort of person for a casual affair, and Edward is left to sweep up the emotional wreckage. He offers to marry her, and they go through with the ceremony, even when a miscarriage makes it, at one level, unnecessary Theirs is the tragedy of passivity. Edward wants Maud to love him with a real, indelicate passion, but can offer nothing to make her do so. Maud will always mourn Tyler—or, rather, the vision of him she carries in her head. Maud and Edward's marriage is an accommodation made between two diffident individuals who sense very early that they are not equipped to get what they want out of life. The modern world sets no value on inexperience in a woman or innocence in a man

In Incidents in the Rue Laugier, Ms Brookner offers us a fastidious and thorough exploration of Maud's inner world in prose that is exquisitely considered. No nuance of feeling escapes her. The scene in which Maud tells her mother of her impending marriage is a classic of high comedy and pathos. Why did her mother let her run off to Paris with Tyler, Maud asks, if she was so certain of the outcome? “We were at dinner, if you remember,” her mother retorts, “Nobody argues at the dinner table.”

Two lives wrecked, all for the sake of table manners? Of course, it is more complicated than that, and the mother's own cynical despair is peeled away, layer by layer.

For its first two-thirds, this sharp, sad book seems one of Ms. Brookner's best. But when the unsatisfactory marriage is described, there is inevitably a loss of power. Maud moves to London, goes for long walks, develops a big Proust habit and wallows in dreamless sleep. Nine years on, there is a child—the narrator, Maffy. What follows would be described by other authors as postnatal depression, something to be got over in a few weeks, perhaps months. But this mother suffers from a dignified melancholy that lasts for 17 years. In a similar fashion, with nothing to goad it forward, the narrative sinks into a chaise lounge and expires. The final note is dangerously trite: “The dead, perhaps even more than the living, have a right to their mysteries. And who knows? We, the survivors, may be called upon to explain them, if only to ourselves.”