The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald - 1978 shortlist

Christmas Time is a lovely time to muse about which books you'd like to read next year and to ...well...read!  

Most of the time, I have a great stack of books beside the bed, half of which I can't remember how they got there or why I ordered them.  This time I am determined to record how I got to this book.  I was idly reading The Guardian Weekly Vol. 190 No 2 &3 and its Books of the Year article. The enclosed recommendations had a devastating effect on my PayPal account and library card.  Several authors (John Lanchester, Penelope Lively and Hilary Mantel) all recommended Hermione Lee's Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. In his column,   John Lanchester describes her novels as "funny/sharp".  Thanks John.  I think you have put me on to a very good thing.

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Like John, I thought I'd better read some of Fitzgerald's work before I read her biography. I'm deeply ashamed to say that I had never heard of her and was only slightly consoled that my other half hadn't heard of her either. Whilst the library service where I work had several of her novels, I was impatient for a good read and so opted for an e-version of The Bookshop through my other city council libraryservice.  

There are pluses and minuses about e-versions.  Negatives are that they don't come with yummy covers - well not on my Kobo touch anyway.  I am a firm believer in judging a book as much by its cover as anything else.  Positives are that you can get a book (usually) when you are in a hurry.  Whilst you can make notes, I still find a tree book better when it comes to reflecting on a book and its merits.  Maybe it comes down to the user - I try to make notes or highlight text that appealed to me but I don't seem to do it very well.  I find flicking through a real book much easier.  

Anyway, enough about me and my incompetence.  Let's talk about the book.  

It's only 107 pages long (e-version; the tree version is about 175 pages).  Can you believe it?  Of late most prize-winning books seem to have to be absolute door-stoppers.  This tends to make me a bit cross and feel defeated before I've even begun.  My first Fitzgerald was looking even better than I'd hoped.  

At first when I was reading The Bookshop I tended to compare its author with Barbara Pym - and not as favourably.  I found the writing a bit jumpy and disjointed.  I wondered if I was missing some knowledge of dialect or whether there were some typos or glitches with the e-version.  I longed to compare the e-version with a ridgy-didge tree book. Has anyone else noticed this?  Here's an example of what I am referring to in some dialogue:

"Why should you mind about that, my dear?"

"They say she can't hold on to it, do they'll have her up.  That'll mean County Court."

I've highlighted the bit I don't understand.  Maybe it's Suffolk idiom.  If you know, please edu-macate or enlighten me.  

Then I started to smile a bit and think "Hmm...this is a damn queer book.  Is it a ghost story?"  

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Well no it's not.  Well there is a ghost - but it isn't the main focus of the book.  The "rapper" as they call it, is quite entertaining for a colonial like me living in a land where there don't seem so many ghosts on hand. It was from about the poltergeist scene onward that I relaxed and settled into the Fitzgerald groove.  As Edmund Gordon says:

"Fitzgerald's greatness doesn't announce itself within a few sentences, but creeps up on you slowly, over the course of a novel." 

Anyway I don't really want to tell you much more about The Bookshop, other than I really really liked it.  

Trevor's review tells you what it's about.  I just want to second his review and say that the writing made me laugh out loud, gasp and say "Oh no!" on several occasions.  

There is some exquisite writing.  I find it hard to articulate why it is so great.  Fitzgerald writes as much about what's not there as well as what is there.  I liked this passage the best (when aged Mr Brundish takes the unprecedented step of emerging from his abode to come to the heroine Florence Green's defence).

"Without attempting to disguise his weakness, without pretending to stop for a few minutes to admire the proportions of the hall, he clung to the banisters, struggling for breath.  His stick fell with a clatter to the shining floor."

I wanted to say in conclusion that I liked how many of Fitzgerald's characters didn't mince words but just said it like it was.  Maybe that can be said of Fitzgerald too.  It is perhaps the economy or thrift of words that I loved most about her writing.  Thrift is an attribute for which I am not famous, but which I deeply admire in others.  In support of this self-assessment, I am now off to purchase my own tree version.  Whilst I would like, in deference to thrift and booksellers to purchase locally, I confess to being rather taken with the Everyman omnibus which features a rather lovely cover portrait of the author.  It would, after all, be a tribute to Florence Green's fondness for Everyman editions.....

Bridget's Review: God on the Rocks

Hmmm...so writing reviews of books that you didn't really enjoy reading turns out to be not as much fun.  Actually, it's overstating things to say that I didn't enjoy God on the Rocks at all.  It's just that I've enjoyed Jane Gardam's other books so much that this one felt like a let-down.  In the interest of making prejudices clear, I really have something against books about children.  I mean, I like children.  I'm sure they would have interesting things to say, if they ever wrote novels themselves.  But I kind of hate reading adults' interpretations of a child's world.  In most bildungsroman, I really only like it once the narrator has reached, say, fifteen.

While nearly all child narrators are somehow precocious (otherwise they wouldn't know all of the big words that their adult puppetmasters force upon their lips), they do provide a tempting canvas on which to paint a distorted picture of the adult world.  Children are credited with understanding the world in a unique and prescient way; because they don't always understand what is going on around them, they can give us fresh interpretations.  But again, I usually come back to the cynical position that we are not actually seeing things through the child's lens of confusion and wonder, but rather from the artificial construct of that lens by the author.  I don't know, maybe that doesn't bother other people.  Maybe I need to get over it.

Anyway, rant against pseudo-childlike insight aside, I just didn't think that this was Gardam's best work.  Margaret Marsh, the young girl protagonist, reminded me a little bit of surly Mary Lennox from The Secret Garden, but without the eventual sunny breakthrough.  Her mother has just had a baby, and Margaret is disgusted both by the infant and her mother's obvious infatuation with him.  Because of the baby, though, Mrs. Marsh decides that Margaret deserves a special treat each week, as a solace for the reduction in motherly attention.  The treat takes the form of trips to the seaside with the Marsh's servant-girl, Lydia.  While the Marshes are strict and upright Christians, particularly fanatical Mr. Marsh, Lydia plays up her sensuality with tight satin dresses and speaks coarse Cockney English.  Margaret begins a period of growth and change on these day-trips, first in the exposure to some kind of sexual relationship between Lydia and a gardener on an old estate, and then through her experience at the estate itself.  Unsupervised while Lydia conducts her love affair, Margaret wanders onto the private property and its strange denizens.  At this point in the story, perspectives begin to open up and we learn that the estate begins to Rosalie Frayling, now a mummified old woman, who has opened up the house and grounds to mental patients.  Unbeknownst to either Margaret or Rosalie, Mrs. Marsh was once engaged to be married to Rosalie's son, but the affair was quashed by Rosalie's outrage at the idea of her son abasing himself to marry the daughter of the postman.  Meanwhile, Mrs. Marsh decides to reconnect with this son, who has moved back into the village.  How these pieces all come together in a fairly natural way demonstrates Gardam's sure hand with plot.

Gardam is also a beautiful writer, and she does justice to the setting as well as the complex emotional lives of her characters.  In the end though, I wasn't fully moved by the characters.  Blame my irrational hatred of child protagonists, if you want.  But I'd pick up Old Filth or Man in the Wooden Hat first.

Cross posted on my blog.  

Trevor's Review of Fitzgerald's The Bookshop

Since I read Offshore, my goal has been to read everything I can by Penelope Fitzgerald, an author I consider to be among the best of the last part of the twentieth century. Again, this is taken from my blog, where I have a bit more to say, but not much (you can visit it here).

Like Offshore, The Bookshop is a fine look into a small, somewhat isolated community. In this case we are in the town of Hardborough, a seaside town in Eastern England that doesn’t have a bookshop. In 1959, Florence Green is hoping to change that and make a success of one. In a great display of precision and control, the first couple of paragraphs set up the novel and its theme of survival.

Survival was often considered all that could be asked in the cold and clear East Anglian air. Kill or cure, the inhabitants thought — either a long old age, or immediate consignment to the salty turf of the churchyard.

As dismal as that sentiment is, one might simply pass over it because Fitzgerald’s writing is dense and, strangely, urgent. Furthermore, this line is couched in a paragraph about how Mrs. Green is attempting to “make it clear herself, and possibly to others, that she existed in her own right,” since she had been living on the little money her husband left her when he died. So we come to that passage above thinking — at least I did — that this focus on survival was necessary and, perhaps, noble. However, through the rest of this short, brilliant novel, Fitzgerald shows that the way this small community survives is through a form of social warfare as sensible as king of the mountain. Here is one of Fitzgerald’s earliest descriptions of Mrs. Green:

She had a kind heart, though that is not of much use when it comes to the matter of self-preservation.

Nevertheless, after many sleepless nights of indecision, Mrs. Green purchases Old House, which is, as the name suggests, one of the town’s oldest buildings. It’s damp and leaky and possibly haunted (a fact which remains in the background, but give Fitzgerald moments to display her humor: ”The house agent was in no way legally bound to mention the poltergeist, though he perhaps alluded to it in the phrase unusual period atmosphere.”).

The bookshop has its ups and downs, but it is, nevertheless, a moderate success. And this frightens several of the townspeople. For one thing, there’s some jealousy from those doing more poorly, like Mr. Deben, who has been trying to sell his fish shop for several years. Why didn’t Mrs. Green buy his place. That might have benefited them both.

Certainly she knew that Deben’s wet fish shop was about to close. Everybody in the town knew when there were likely to be vacant premises, who was in financial straights, who would need larger family accommodation in nine months, and who was about to die.

Basically, Mrs. Green didn’t want Deben’s wet fish shop, and she’s not entirely apologetic (she knows how to hold her own as well).

The biggest threat comes by way of Mrs. Gamart, who, if the town had one, would be part of the reigning aristocracy. Each summer, when other towns are holding their arts festivals, Mrs. Gamart believes that everyone should support her idea of creating an arts center in Hardborough. It always comes to nothing because before any steam has built up the other towns’ festivals have ended, and, presumably, Mrs. Gamart goes on to worry about other ways to ensure that she reigns over a respectable, cultured town.

Now that Mrs. Green has purchased Old House, though, which is the perfect place for the arts center, Mrs. Gamart, as charming as ever, begins to turn the wheels on several machines meant to destroy Mrs. Green’s enterprise.

As in Offshore, though the story here is centralized and focused, Fitzgerald allows herself the liberty to take the reader on minor tangents to see the lives in Hardborough. Each character and each episode is so well developed that this short book contains more than most long books. And, because by the end Fitzgerald’s community has ceased to be a strange seaside town but is so real, so familiar, we echo Mrs. Green’s question: ”What is natural justice?”