Pankaja on the discovery that one of the novels she had written pre-sannyas is now being re-published, receiving accolades the likes of “a daring writer long overdue for reappraisal.”
One of the surprising gifts that taking sannyas gave me was an alias. Completely unintentional, I never changed the name on my passport or bank account, and even once wrote an article for the Guardian about choosing to leave my children with their father while I went to live in the ashram in India. But for decades no one needed to connect these 2 people – I snuck happily under the radar!
Maybe a couple of decades ago I did look up this Dinah Brooke on Google, and there was one mention of her – a feminist magazine in America had reprinted a paragraph from her last novel, Games of Love and War, which had actually been cut out of the English edition.
Most of my family accepted my sannyas name, though I had no problem about sticking to Dinah with those who didn’t.
But now the ’70s are back in fashion, and a new American Indie publisher is reprinting old books. Of course many of the authors are long dead, but the publisher’s lovely representative in London, who happens to live just up the road from me, managed to dig up one who is still alive and kicking – and hi Dinah, now I need to integrate you into my life again! We used to be very identified with our identity as a writer (I’m getting a bit confused here!)… I remember reading about one author whose mother was dying, but he was in the middle of writing the last chapter of his novel, and didn’t go to see her until too late. Yup, I could totally identify with that.
Back in Pune 1, I did a Hypnosis group with Santosh, where we had to write our own obituaries – and I really went to town with the purple prose about this misunderstood genius – me. In Pune 2 I still hadn’t quite let go, and asked Osho a question in which I accused him of talking away my creativity – and boy, did he take out the hammer! ‘Third rate, trashy novels,’ pieces of junk like old newspapers…hmm… It took a long while to process that – maybe I still haven’t… and now I have to deal with lovely young people being really enthusiastic about them! No problem with putting both names on the back of the book, and they know me as Panky… so now I just need to welcome the fleeting moments of success that have popped up out of the blue – and fantasise about a quick trip to New York!
Lord Jim at Home
by Dinah Brooke
Kindle, Paperback and Hardcover, 264 pages
UK: Daunt Books, October 12, 2023
waterstones.com – amazon.co.uk
ISBN-10 : 1914198662 UK
ISBN-13 : 978-1914198663 UK
USA: McNally Editions, October 3, 2023 – mcnallyeditions.com
barnesandnoble.com – amazon.com
ISBN-10: 1946022640 USA
ISBN-13: 978-1946022646 USA
eBook ISBN: 9781946022653
A brilliant, chilling picture of the English middle class at home.”
— Illustrated London News
A very clever and very alarming novel [with] an almost heroic quality, a mythical truth.”
— Isabel Quigly, Financial Times
There is a lot of pain in Lord Jim at Home. And a lot of humour… 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… It is an accurate portrayal of how fucked-up people behave, artfully conveyed in a way that nice people are too polite to admit they understand.”
— Ottessa Moshfegh, from the Foreword
Giles Trenchard is born into privilege – and an atmosphere of hidden violence and isolation. Wholly unloved, he is shipped off to one boarding school after another. Always hoping to live up to his family’s expectations he joins the Navy on the outbreak of war. The camaraderie of life offer him some semblance of purpose and contentment. Yet on his return from war, he finds himself adrift and one day – like the hero of Joseph Conrad’s classic Lord Jim – he commits an act so shocking that it calls his past, his character and his whole world into question.
When Dinah Brooke’s Lord Jim at Home was first published in 1973 it was described as ‘squalid and startling’, and ‘nastily horrific’ and ‘a monstrous parody’ of the upper-middle class. It reveals Brooke to be a daring writer long overdue for reappraisal, whose work has retained all its originality and power. Seething with cruelty and darkness, this strange, compelling novel is as unforgettable as it is unnerving.
Related external link
- In The Telegraph – by Claire Allfree, 12 October 2023: Dinah Brooke, the brilliant forgotten novelist who gave it all up to live in an ashram – As her superb book – inspired by a cricketer who murdered his parents – is reissued, Brooke talks about her extraordinary life
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