Lord Jim at Home probably wasn’t aimed at the faint-hearted even in its year of original publication, 1973, when alarming the audience was at its height as both method and literary goal. Its target social anxieties – slyly presented and self-mirroring – belong to the two decades following the second world war, when the fear of the managing classes was that, given half a chance, whole sections of society would break the social and cultural contract, reject the capitalist project, and enjoy themselves instead. Fifty years later it reappears in a timely edition with an introduction by Ottessa Moshfegh, someone who has done her own share of alarming the audience.
Born into privilege somewhere in Cornwall in the 1920s, Giles Trenchard receives a bizarre yet commonplace induction into the upper middle class life of the time. His sense of worth is depleted before he leaves the nursery, by the interlocking efforts of a drunken, bleakly dismissive and mostly absent father and a nanny determined to control his bodily processes. He is expected to struggle towards personal agency but always punished for demonstrating it. He is separated from the mother he adores. He’s forced to eat food he can’t stomach. Nevertheless, he visualises himself as “the Prince”. It’s an emotional miseducation that can be completed only by a public school – in this case Rugby, where, already fragile and floundering, he learns to survive through mediocrity, dissociation and doing as little as possible; while beneath the vague, compliant surface that so irritates his teachers, all the suppressed needs, greeds and ambitions of early childhood still writhe. Inevitably, this contradiction will shape his adult life, which Brooke unrolls across the body of her novel, exactly like one of the fouled nappies the nanny draped across Giles’s face at six months old to teach him right from wrong in the context of bowel movements.
