Tag Archives: Penelope Fitzgerald

Book review

The Bookshop is set in the sleepy coastal Suffolk town of Hardborough — “an island between sea and river”. In 1959 the novel’s ‘heroine’ Florence Green opens a bookshop in the long-vacant property called Old House, one of the oldest properties in the town. There is surprisingly some local opposition to her venture. This opposition centres on local notable Violet Gamart who has been toying with “the idea of converting it (Old House) into some kind of centre — I mean an arts centre — for Hardborough“. Old House is an unlikely location for an arts centre – it has stood empty for years, is quite small (from what we can tell) and is riddled with damp, not to say that it also seems occupied by a ‘tapper’, the local word for a poltergeist. Is there something more to Mrs Gamart’s plans than meets the eye – what is problematic with the idea of a bookshop?

Florence ignores Mrs Gamart and goes ahead and opens her shop, employing a young assistant, ten-year old Christine Gipping, to help out. Christine is by far the liveliest and most interesting character in the novel, although the author’s continual reference to her pre-pubescent state is a little creepy:

“Christine replied that now the evenings were getting longer her elder sister would be up in the bracken with Charlie Cutts… ‘You don’t need to worry about anything like that with me” she added, “I shan’t turn eleven till next April. Mine haven’t come on yet.”’

Lightly comedic episodes ensue as Florence struggles to make a success of her venture. She secures the patronage (of sorts) of Edmund Brundish, who is the nearest thing Hardborough has to aristocracy, and turns to him for advice when trying to decide whether to stock Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. The novel is a best-seller but the usual suspects are horrified at both the book’s subject matter and the shop’s subsequent success. I was hoping that the novel might explore the explosive impact Lolita would have had on a small-minded English town in the late 1950’s, but that opportunity is passed by.

I was quite harsh towards The Gate of Angels, Fitzgerald’s 1990 novella about a fictional Cambridge college, not least because of its lack of authenticity. Novels don’t have to be realistic, of course they don’t, and the author can introduce elements of fantasy for many different reasons. But novels that purport to realistically portray a social setting and believable characters need to at least aspire to being authentic, or alternatively to have a really good reason why authenticity is departed from. And time after time Fitzgerald fails this simple test. The poltergeist that haunts the bookshop is an obvious example – perhaps it represents the town’s hostility towards Florence’s enterprise (although it pre-dates the shop’s opening). But there is no real attempt to integrate the ‘rapper’ into the narrative – it is just there, then it is not. Another example relates to the portrait of ten-year old Christine. While she is a well-developed character, are we really expected to believe she chipped/lost her two front teeth by them being hit by frozen washing on the laundry line? That’s just nonsensical and not in the least amusing. Possibly it is intended to show how hard life is for the Gipping family, and how resilient they are despite everything thrown at them – but teeth broken by frozen laundry is such a clumsy unconvincing way of showing this. Similarly we are invited to believe that Christine is the first child in her family to not pass the eleven plus. She is instead assigned to the local technical college, which her mother describes as “what we call a death sentence. I’ve nothing against the Technical, but it just means this: what chance will she ever have of meeting and marrying a white-collar chap ?” Only about one in eight children passed the eleven-plus, so the idea that bright Christine would have been the old child in their family not to pass is hard to credit. There’s also a description of a new housing development built on the edge of quickly eroding cliffs – another instance where the novel forfeits all credibility for the sake of a clumsy metaphor.

Probably most ludicrous proposition in the novel is the idea that a ‘stupid’ backbencher could draft, propose and pass through all its Parliamentary stages a major change to planning law, including late amendments which allow compulsory purchase orders in a wide range of circumstances, which is then implemented in a matter of months, simply to find a mechanism to lever Florence out of her shop. A generous buy-out proposal from Mrs Gamart would have been infinitely simpler. I understand that Fitzgerald wants to demonstrate that life and the powers that be are unfair to well-meaning people like Mrs Green, but this is an incredibly heavy-handed way of making that point.

There are moments in the novel which almost bring it to life. I did enjoy for example Mr Brundish’s encounter with Mrs Gamart, when his lack of an internal monologue leads him to speak his mind openly to her:

‘”You had better offer me something” he said loudly, and then, in precisely the same tone: “The bitch cannot deny me a glass of brandy.”‘

There’s far too little of this character, and Fitzgerald kills him off casually almost immediately after this encounter in order for her primary scheme – the compulsory purchase of the shop – to go ahead. Instead we see far too much of Milo North, a lazy dilettante whose purpose in the novel never really comes into focus.

Fitzgerald is highly thought of and considered by some critics to be under-appreciated. I can’t agree. When you compare this slight, unconvincing novel to J L Carr’s A Month in the Country for example, you can see the huge gulf between them. Both are sketches of life in rural England, but Carr’s characters come alive, are recognisable and have interesting stories to tell. It would be unfair to say Fitzgerald’s don’t come to life in the same way but they are light sketches compared to the vividness of Carr’s portraits.

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald, 1978

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Book review

Part of the unwritten contract between authors and their readers is that we agree to suspend our scepticism for the duration of the novel. We know we are being told a story, that the events described didn’t ‘really’ happen and the characters never lived, but nevertheless we put our disbelief to the backs of our minds and go along with the idea that they did. In return the novelist will either take us somewhere we could never go in real life – to the Moon and Back, to the Centre of the Earth – or will portray a realistic scene that could, in theory, have happened. Realistic novels depend on a degree of authenticity. They don’t need to be hyper-real; we don’t really care if some of the fine detail of the recreation doesn’t stand up to academic scrutiny or for minor historical inaccuracies. The test is does it feel real. In A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf discusses this issue, using the term ‘integrity’ to describe this aspect of writing:

‘What one means by integrity, in the case of the novelist, is the conviction that he gives one that this is the truth. ..It is rather that Nature, in her most irrational mood, has traced in invisible ink on the walls of the mind a premonition, which these great artists confirm; a sketch which only needs to be held to the fire of genius to become visible.’

Readers will have their own standards and criteria for deciding which authors achieve this standard, who have the ability to reveal to us the truth. But the opening paragraph of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Gate of Angels struck me as being particularly inauthentic, and I thought it might be useful to examine why. Inauthenticity in a realistic novel, when there is no suggestion that the author is deliberately breaking the literary equivalent of the fourth wall (for comic effect, for example, or to emphasise that this is, after all, just fiction) is for me a cardinal sin.

The Gate of Angels opens with this vivid, comedic description of a storm:

“How could the wind be so strong, so far inland, that cyclists coming into the town in the late afternoon looked more like sailors in peril? This was on the way into Cambridge, up Mill Road past the cemetery and the workhouse. On the open ground to the left the willow-trees had been blown, driven and cracked until their branches gave way and lay about the drenched grass, jerking convulsively and trailing cataracts of twigs. The cows had gone mad, tossing up the silvery weeping leaves which were suddenly, quite contrary to all their experience, everywhere within reach. Their horns were festooned with willow boughs. Not being able to see properly, they tripped and fell. Two or three of them were wallowing on their backs, idiotically, exhibiting vast pale bellies intended by nature to be always hidden. They were still munching. A scene of disorder, tree-tops on the earth, legs in the air, in a university city devoted to logic and reason.”

How, one might also ask, could an author get an opening paragraph so badly wrong, so profoundly inauthentic?

This paragraph is often quoted by reviewers, cited as either an example of Fitzgerald’s powers of descriptive writing, or her comedic genius, sometimes both. One online review describes it “as compressed as poetry—and funny, too”. But when I read it I was struck by its dishonesty, the obvious way that it has been constructed to make a fairly clumsy point.

In her biography of Fitzgerald, Hermione Lee claims that Fitzgerald’s inspiration for the opening of the novel came when she saw “through a Cambridge bus window some cows in ecstasy over willow branches that had been broken off by strong winds; she viewed this as an instance of reason giving way to imagination in ‘this orderly University city”. Ah yes, the good old struggle between reason and imagination. I have my doubts. There’s no question that the author is trying to contrast here the wild disordered weather with the serenity of the university, introducing the broader themes running through the novel of the opposition between reason and imagination, science and faith, and so on – strong, traditional themes no doubt, if laid on a bit thick. She is also trying to engage our attention, so we keep reading (not unreasonably) and entertain – the scene is deliberately comic and absurd. But the paragraph is so full of implausibilities and false similes that the point is completely undermined. Instead of contemplating how ridiculous academics can be when blown off course by the powers of imagination, I for one had a far less constructive reaction.

For a start, if the storm is sufficiently strong to blow branches off willow trees, the chances of any cyclists venturing out and about, let alone riding three abreast as they do in a paragraph or two, would be slim. Am I being too serious, too literal here? The simile comparing these distressed cyclists to sailors in peril is I would guess intended to conjure thoughts of the Tempest or Twelfth Night. But it doesn’t really work. Cyclists are not at all like sailors. Can you honestly say when you read that line you had a mental image of a storm-tossed ship? Using metaphor to describe something that is nothing like the thing being described can be effective – the evening in Eliot’s Prufrock is not literally “spread out against the sky, Like a patient etherized upon a table” but we know what he means. But Fitzgerald isn’t T S Eliot. and this comparison just invites the comment “Well they wouldn’t, would they?”.

And then there are these mysterious horned cows and their strange behaviour. Cows can have horns of course. But in a storm would horned cows really toss broken-off branches into the air? The author suggests it is because the leaves (not the branches?) are “everywhere within reach…quite contrary to all their experience”. Now I am not sure if the author ever spent a moment looking at a willow tree, but their predominant feature is their “aspect” whereby their branches brush the ground – often cited as the origin of the “weeping” adjective. But the author needs some explanation for the cows’ behaviour, and this will do as good as any.

But there’s more. Because these disorientated cows get the branches stuck in their horns (somehow). The branches then obstruct their view, and not being able to see properly they trip and fall. Of course they do. The fallen cows then lie there munching idiotically, unable to get up. This is surely a case of an image being asked to do too much work. I suspect what happened here is that the author thought she needed an image of futility and stupidity. Cows with their legs in the air, stilling munching away, will do the job? But how to get the cows on their back? I know, they have tripped over, because they have got branches in their horns which blinded them. Which requires a tree and fallen branches. So working backwards you arrive at the image, rather than the image inspiring the idea.

At which point the author had lost my trust. I had been shown behind the facade to see the author typing away, constructing a laboured image to make a point, all realism and authenticity, all integrity, left behind. The question I was left with was this – was this deliberate? Did the author consciously create an implausible scene of cows and willows to remind the reader that they are reading a novel, an artificial construct in which neither the cows nor the willows, or anything else actually exist? I don’t think so – setting the novel is a real street in a real city, with characters who meet and talk about real historical people suggests otherwise. The author goes to great length to place her narrative in a realistic setting with believable characters. So we are left with what – just clumsy writing? Or worse, dishonest, inauthentic writing? I’m still not sure.

Supplemental: Authenticity in literature with reference to Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Gate of Angels

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Book review

It was the river’s most elusive hour, when darkness lifts off darkness, and from one minute to another the shadows declare themselves as houses or as craft at anchor.

Well, it can’t be said that I haven’t given Penelope Fitzgerald’s fair crack of the whip. This, the third novel of hers I have now read, won the 1979 Booker PrizeOffshore: Amazon.co.uk: Penelope Fitzgerald: 9780007320967: Books. Three I think is more than enough.  When the Guardian’s reviewed the novel in 2009 the kindest thing the reviewer could find to say was that it “isn’t awful”, which is about right.

Offshore is set in early 1960’s London, described more than once as “swinging” although that seems a bit early to me. Post-war, depressed and crime-ridden would be nearer the mark. It focuses on a community of houseboat owners living on the Thames at Battersea Reach.

This was typical Fitzgerald – more a sketch than a novel, with few plot points, little structure, and an entirely open-ended conclusion. I actually don’t have a problem with ambiguous endings, where the details of what happens next is left to the reader to decide. But there is a difference between this and the approach Fitzgerald uses, which is to just simply stop writing once things have just started to get interesting.

I didn’t find her cast of characters that interesting either. Early 1960’s London was not brought to life – this is a marginal community living on the edges of the city and not prospering very well with it. Characters behave eccentrically with little if any explanation of their motives. Nenna, for example, a Canadian woman living with her two children in one of the run-down barges that are home for this group, is separated from her husband, who has returned from working abroad but made no attempt to contact her. She eventually goes to see him, but he rejects her telling her she is “not a woman”. No, I have no idea why.

Maurice, Nenna’s neighbour, is a male prostitute and allows his boat to be used to store stolen goods. There are other neighbours who appear briefly, but I didn’t find it easy to differentiate between them, even though they are given their own idiosyncrasies. Willis is a painter; Woodie is a retired businessman; Richard lives on a converted minesweeper. The only characters that really engage our attention are Nenna’s precocious children Martha, 12 and Tilda, 6. They skip school and go ‘mudlarking’ finding valuable tiles in a wreck which they sell in order to buy Cliff Richard records.

The novel is mainly pre-occupied with the boats in which the characters live and the river on which they float, and occasionally sink. There is, for me, far too much detail about life on the river, such as the various repairs the boats are constantly in need of. The autobiographical elements of the novel seem to be what interested Fitzgerald rather than her characters or anything resembling a plot.

One disturbing scene jumped out as being something that in 1979 an author might get away with, but today would surely not be published. Maurice’s boat is being used as a lock-up for stolen goods by Harry, a lightly sketched villain. While he is trying to fix the hatch to the boat to give “a mild electric shock to anyone who might try to get into it“, he is disturbed by six-year old Tilda:

“Tilda did not understand what he was doing, but she stared at him …until he became conscious of her and turned around. His eyes were curious….

“Want some sweeties?” ‘No’

‘Want me to show you a comic?’ ‘No’

‘Come on, you can’t read, can you?’ ‘I can’

You could get over here, couldn’t you? You can come and sit on my knee if you like, and I’ll show you a comic.’

(The exchange continues, then Harry says)

“You haven’t seen the things I’ve got to show you’

‘What are they like?’ ‘Something you’ve never seen before, love’.

He then chases after her, and while she escapes into a neighbouring barge, there is no doubt he intends her serious harm. This is a disturbing scene when read today, but I wonder how it would have been seen in the late 1970’s? Was it really intended as comic? The tone of the rest of the novel is whimsical and this scene jars alarmingly, irrespective of the author’s intention. The 1970’s were closer to the Second World War than they are to today, and social attitudes have shifted dramatically, but this isn’t funny, and I can’t believe it was thought humorous back then either.

 

 

Offshore, by Penelope Fitzgerald, 1979

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Book review

There are a number of novels buried within Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Gate of Angels struggling for our attention. Juggling such a wide range of themes and structures would be difficult in a novel of conventional length, let alone one of barely 160 pages, and in the end I was not convinced that Fitzgerald pulled it off.

First there is a light academic comedy. The novel is set in 1912 at a fictional Cambridge college, St Angelicus,whereThe Gate of Angels - Wikipedia Fred Fairly, a Junior Fellow, cycles around the city, argues half-heartedly at ‘the Disobligers’, a typically pompous debating club, and falls in love. The locals are all a bit slow-witted, the police bumbling, and the academics fusty and crippled by tradition. The college has a rule that

“no female animals capable of reproduction were allowed on the premises, although the starlings couldn’t altogether be regulated”

The blind Master has such finely tuned hearing that he can detect kittens somewhere in the grounds, and wants them removed as soon as possible.

All in all very reminiscent of something by Tom Sharpe or perhaps early Kingsley Amis. I wouldn’t have minded reading this novel, but the focus swiftly moves on. 

The second element is the novel of ideas. In 1912 physics was in ferment, with Fred’s chosen specialist research field, quantum theory, challenging our ideas of matter, time and space. Not surprisingly St Angelicus is firmly in the traditionalist camp. A novel that looks at the developing ideas about the atom, the debates between scientists, the challenges to faith etc would have been interesting, and from what I can tell was Fitzgerald’s intended focus, but what we get here is only a brief discussion, passing mentions of Rutherford, Geiger and Mach, before we move on to the next component. 

Wikipedia describes The Gate of Angels as an historical novel, and there are certainly elements of this genre here as well. The first world war is imminent, and is going to tear apart everyone’s lives, reshaping the world as we knew it. Everything I have read about this period suggests that a global conflict was expected by just about everyone, and it was really only a question of when, but apart from a quick mention of “the cousins” (the Kaiser and George 5th) this component is passed over quickly enough. The struggle for women’s suffrage features, albeit largely in a comic fashion – the men in the novel are bemused by the concept.

In her biography of Fitzgerald Hermione Lee wrote that her interest in this time period derived from a perception that it was

a time of very great hope… of the coming of the 20th century, hopes of a New Life, a new world, the New Woman, a new relationship between the artist and the craftsman”

We certainly can find some of these themes here, together with the scientific debates I have mentioned, but surely this is an overly optimistic view of the period given the carnage that was to follow so swiftly?

This is also a romantic novel. Fred is involved in a collision between his bicycle and an unlit farmer’s cart. A young woman, Daisy Saunders, is also knocked unconscious in the accident, and they are taken in by a local householder and put into the same bed to recover. The intimacy of this experience causes Fred to immediately fall in love with the young woman. The novel switches to London for several chapters to tell Daisy’s unfortunate story; this is a change of pace which feels at times like a necessary diversion from the academic debates back in Cambridge. Fred’s dogged pursuit of Daisy is quiet sweet in a way, although it’s not exactly Heathcliff and Cathy. There’s also a ghost story thrown in for good measure, before the novel ends abruptly leaving the reader to fill in what we can presume is a happy ending should we choose to do so. 

So as you can see there is a lot going on here. The question I am struggling with is whether the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The typical clichéd critical description of Fitzgerald’s novels is “polished gems”. I’m not convinced. The writing was uneven and much of the characterisation two-dimensional – a number of Fairly’s academic acquaintances are introduced, but none are developed beyond a quick sketch, and are all forgettable. This is only the second novel by Fitzgerald I have read, and reading my 2017 review of The Beginning of Spring I can see I had similar reservations. The 1990 Booker judges entirely understandably preferred A S Byatt’s much more complex and rewarding Possession. Definitely the right call.

 

 

The Gate of Angels, by Penelope Fitzgerald, 1990

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