Brian by Jeremy Cooper — solace in cinema in London

Receive free Fiction updates

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Fiction news every morning.

Jeremy Cooper’s seventh novel, Brian, is about a man who goes to the cinema every night for 30 years. Brian lives alone in a small flat in north London, works in the business rates department of Camden Council and eats lunch at the same café at 2.15pm every day. After office hours, he goes to the British Film Institute on London’s Southbank where, alongside a small community of oddballs, he watches works of classic and contemporary cinema. He catalogues his responses to each film and lives by an anxious mantra: “Keep watch. Stick to routine. Protect against surprise.”

For most of the novel we know little about Brian’s past, only that he was born in Northern Ireland, his mother is dead and he does not see his father and brother. “Estranged for decades from his family, Brian had transferred his emotional loyalties to individual directors of film . . .” writes Cooper, who is an art historian as well as a novelist.

Cineastes will enjoy Brian’s accessible and entertaining discourses on cinema and many readers will know the more mainstream films (Reservoir Dogs, We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Big Lebowski) that he critiques obsessively in his notebook. They will also recall the historical events, such as the Iraq war and the London bombings of 2005, that are mentioned in the novel’s timespan of around 30 years, beginning in the mid-1980s.

Occasionally, I wished I could shake Brian out of his reticence, routine and habit of arriving early everywhere (at weekends, he is forever waiting outside shops and galleries before they open, impatient to escape his solitariness). It is testament to Cooper’s powers of characterisation, however, that frustration gave way to sympathy which only deepened as the novel went on.

Eventually, Cooper decides to reveal the source of Brian’s hang-ups and opts for what the American literary critic Parul Sehgal identified as “the trauma plot” (novelists’ tendency to reveal a traumatic event in a character’s past that explains their behaviour). But the back-story Cooper concocts for Brian feels forced and far-fetched, and the novel would have been more affecting had he been allowed to remain an enigma.

Brian is the second slim novel by an art critic this year (after Michael Bracewell’s Unfinished Business) to capture the rapid changes London has undergone in recent decades. Both novels depict a city that is too expensive and risks becoming homogenised by big business. Cooper can be too eager to make these points, leading to moments where the novel sounds like social commentary rather than fiction. Towards the end, Brian spots a homeless woman on the Southbank: “He and the other buffs were her, Brian plainly saw, were it not for the sanctuary of film.” It is a striking observation but a glib way to talk about a complex problem.

Nonetheless, Brian is affecting, funny and, at 184 pages, a skilfully compressed chronicle of one man’s life and the cornucopia of film that enriches it.

Brian by Jeremy Cooper, Fitzcarraldo Editions £12.99, 184 pages

Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café