Apparently a surprise winner of the Booker Prize back in 1984. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun (1984, UK) was the favourite, although Lodge’s Small World (1984, UK) or Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984, UK), the only other books on the shortlist I’ve read, would have been a better winner than Hotel du Lac (1984, UK). It’s not that Brookner’s novel is bad – it’s nicely written, with some sharp insights. But. It’s set at the time of writing but reads like it takes place in the 1950s or 1960s. It’s horribly old-fashioned.

Edith Hope is a single woman in her late thirties, who writes “women’s fiction” under a pseudonym, reasonably successfully. She has a lover, a married man, and lives alone. She accepts an offer of marriage from a man, but jilts him at the altar (well, outside the registry office). Her friends, upset with her, arrange for her to spend a week or two at the titular hotel in Switzerland. It’s the end of the season, and there are only a handful of other guests: Mrs Pusey and her daughter, Jennifer; La Comtesse de Bonneuil, a caricature of a early twentieth-century European grandmother, and Monica, an anorexic (although this is never said) and beautiful minor aristocrat. A group of men stay at the hotel, among them Mr Neville, the well-off owner of an electronics company, in his fifties, smug and successful. He later proposes to Edith – marriage, but a partnership predicated on comfort and position, not love.

Throughout her stay, Edith writes long letters to her lover back in London, but does not send them. Various little scenes are enacted, Edith learns more about her fellow guests, their back-stories and their personalities. Mrs Pusey is quickly revealed as selfish and mistaken in her level of consequence. Her daughter, who is the same age as Edith, is little more than an accessory. Monica is a snob and dismissive, but surprisingly friendly. Madam de Bonneuil is deaf and a figure of (gentle) fun.

It’s all very smooth, and Edith is an engaging, if overly introspective, protagonist. But it’s all so horribly outdated. Neville takes Edith on a boat-trip across the lake, and wears a deerstalker hat. In 1984? Seriously? Edith wears gloves to her aborted wedding. Women rarely wore gloves to church – or registry offices – in the 1970s, never mind the 1980s. The women are dismissive of feminism, and define themselves in relation to the men in their lives, or who were once in their lives, or all men in general. This is not the early 1980s I remember.

If Hotel du Lac had been written and presented as historical fiction, it might have read better. Having said that, even then it wouldn’t have deserved to win the Booker.