SOURCE: Martin, Richard. “‘Just Words on a Page’: The Novels of Christine Brooke-Rose.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 9, no. 3 (fall 1989): 110-23.

In the following essay, Martin provides a brief overview of the narrative strategies in Brooke-Rose's novels, commenting that the two central concerns of the author's fiction are a fascination with language and “an insistence upon the unreality of fictional discourse.”

Whenever I slide into a realistic scene, say a love scene or something like that, something happens later to destroy it, to show that these are just words on a page.¹

Christine Brooke-Rose's first novel, The Languages of Love, opens with a discussion of “palatal diphthongisation in fourteenth century Kentish” during a doctoral oral examination; her most recently published tenth novel, Xorandor, concludes with an agreement by the narrators to delete the computer files containing their entire text. These moments are representative of two major concerns of Brooke-Rose's...