[In the following review, Yardley offers a favorable assessment of Latecomers.]

Anita Brookner's eighth novel will not be to all tastes, as it is less what we customarily call a novel than a meditation: a leisurely, ruminative consideration of the strange yet powerful ties that draw people together and of the mysterious yet endlessly gratifying workings of love. It is a book in which almost nothing happens and in which there is relatively little dialogue to ease the reader's passage through Brookner's dense, richly textured descriptive and contemplative paragraphs. This is very much to my own taste—Latecomers seems to me arguably Brookner's most moving, accomplished and interesting book—but those readers who feel otherwise will be excused without penalty.

With the exception of Family and Friends, Brookner's previous novels have been less about love ascendant than love thwarted. The paradigmatic Brookner protagonist is a shy, unconfident woman whose intellectual life is often full but who is frustrated in the pursuit of romantic and sexual happiness. From time to time these women score their victories, but they tend to be small and evanescent; Brookner has made her name as a chronicler of quiet despair, and in the best of these novels—my own favorite is Look at Me—she does this with sensitivity, empathy and no small measure of wit.

But Latecomers is quite another matter. Long before it begins, the romantic and sexual connections have been made: between Thomas Hartmann and his wife, Yvette, and between Thomas Fibich and his wife, Christine. Both marriages are now in their late middle periods, and both have produced children, now grown: a daughter, Marianne, to the Hartmanns, and a son, Toto, to the Fibichs. Both families are prosperous; the men, who have been friends since they were thrown together as schoolboys after escaping from Germany in World War II, have a successful greeting-card business and more recently have expanded into photocopying machines.

The four parents are happy people to whom life has been generous; they are also people to whom happiness has come relatively late, as their lives began with relatively little hope or promise and only slowly were transported from darkness into light—they are, as Hartmann notes with pleasure, latecomers. But happiness is a fragile thing, and theirs is all the more so for having been hard-won; not merely does the shadow of the war hang over the two men, but both marriages are imperfect and subject not so much to dissolution—these are old-fashioned people to whom divorce would be impermissible—as to tension, misunderstanding and fatigue.

It could be said that each marriage has survived in spite of itself. There is little physical affinity between the Hartmanns—she is beautiful but devoid of passion, and he has found his satisfactions elsewhere—and the Fibichs are bound more by an “odd drive … towards partnership” than by any strong attraction. A further complication is that both sets of parents are not entirely content with the children they have produced; Marianne is devoid of fire and Toto is overbearing. Hovering over all else is the knowledge, confirmed daily in ways both small and large, that all four parents are steadily, inexorably growing older, becoming obsessed by what Hartmann calls “Torschlusspanik: the panic of the shutting of the door.”

Each faces that awareness in a different way, but it is in Fibich that their fears crystallize. Since fleeing Germany all these years ago, he has been haunted by memories of the parents he never again saw; he is convinced, for all the joy of his life in London, “that his true life lay elsewhere, that it remained undiscovered, that his task was to reclaim it, to repossess it, and that for as long as it remained hidden from him he would be a sleepwalker, doomed to pass through a life designed for him by others, with no place he recognized as home.” Hartmann, realist and fatalist that he is, tells his friend to forget the past and glory in the present, but this Fibich cannot do until he confronts his past—until he goes back to Berlin to discover whether “the past would be returned to him as an illumination.”

It is not; what he discovers is that “life brings revelations,” and that he has been so caught up in his past that he has failed to see them. This comes to him in a moment of understanding that is at the core of the book:

“Ah, he thought, the truth bursting on him suddenly, nobody grows up. Everyone carries around all the selves that they have ever been, intact, waiting to be reactivated in moments of pain, of fear, of danger. Everything is retrievable, every shock, every hurt. But perhaps it becomes a duty to abandon the stock of time that one carries within oneself, to discard it in favor of the present, so that one's embrace may be turned outwards to the world in which one has made one's home.”

Back in England, back in the embrace of “the little family that had kept him whole,” Fibich is restored to his “true” life, which turns out to be precisely. What he has had for all these years: his wife, his son, his beloved friends. “Look!” he thinks. “We have come through!” Life in time will end, but so long as we have it, we must live it: the moral may seem obvious, but in Brookner's hands it acquires new meaning and resonance.

This is because she explores that moral within a setting that is entirely believable. Latecomers is a book not about romantic love but about love in the real world: about accepting and loving people for what they are rather than what one might wish them to be, about the slow, secret ways in which people work themselves so deeply into each other's hearts that extrication is unimaginable, about the acceptance and even celebration of human imperfection. It is written with grace and elegance that border on the astonishing, and in every line there is an undercurrent of wry amusement by which we are reminded that this is not tragedy but comedy. At her own pace and in her own fashion, Anita Brookner works a spell on the reader; being under it is both an education and a delight.