Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop

Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop

I’ll come to the actual novel in a moment. Before I do, I’d like to take a look at the two covers above. Which of the two do you prefer? If it’s the one on the right, then I’m afraid that we shall have to agree to disagree. It’s a shame I couldn’t find a clearer image online, but actually, I suppose it’s not too bad, part of a uniform set of Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels reissued a few years ago. Certainly, I like it more than the cover of The Blue Flower, which is a horrible digital image. This at least is an image of something which is actually real, even it misrepresents the contents on sale in the shop of the book’s title, which are modern hard and paperbacks from the 1950s. These look like Victorian books, in rather poor condition too from the looks of the spines. Paperbacks, of course, don’t convey the sense of knowledge and timelessness that we get from an old decaying hardback. What I really dislike about the most recent editions is the wide expanse of blank space with which they frame their single images. The cover from the earlier edition (the edition I’m thankful to say mine was) presumably comes from a time when book publishers routinely put works of art on the covers of their books. A practice which now seems confined to lines of classic fiction. Although even there, Vintage appear to have broken with convention.

The cover here, a detail from the painting Cicero Reading, makes some of the same associations as the later image. It’s not a dogeared paperback with a cracked spine he’s reading. It’s also an image of antiquity, both the Classical past of the real Cicero and the Italian Renaissance when that past was rediscovered and the painting from which the detail comes. It conveys powerfully a sense of leisure and wealth. Not wealth in the sense of financial wealth, although of course that is present, and is often the only thing which permits a person to enjoy the leisure depicted, but also a sense of cultural wealth. The wealth that comes from being able to appreciate art and literature, to discriminate, to possess taste. So often in the humanist culture which has developed since the European Renaissance we seem to frame this inheritance explicitly in terms derived from the culture in the Italian states in the 14^th and 15^th centuries.

I think I’ve mentioned covers once or twice before on this blog. And no doubt I shall continue to do so. Clearly, it goes without saying that anyone who doesn’t judge a book by its cover, for whom that isn’t part of their response to a book, is missing out, is something of a fool. And this cover does resonate with some of the themes of this short novel, since the bookshop and the values it represents is ultimately driven out of the East Anglian village of Hardborough, to be replaced by an Arts Centre.

The first of Penelope Fitzgerald’s books I read was The Blue Flower, her last. I can't improve on A.S. Byatt's blurb, ‘A masterpiece. How does she do it?’ Since then I’ve worked my way back through the other historical novels that make up the second half of her fiction writing career, and now I’m starting on the novels written out of her autobiographical experiences. No doubt I shall end with her very first book, The Golden Child, before moving onto the biographies. Although this isn’t, perhaps, explicitly an historical fiction then, it still feels very clearly set in its historical moment of 1959. Early on there’s even a rather pompous bank manager who opines about the, ‘vastly different world which the 1960s may have in store for us.’ More subtly there are references to the devastating floods of 1953 which the official post war memory supposedly blotted out, a marvellous evocation of children receiving their 11-plus results in which we are suddenly privy to what success or failure is going to mean to an entire generation once their lives have played out, and of course the publication of Lolita is an important plot point. Even more subtly than that, there’s possibly even a hint of the way in which the whole post-war project failed in the political machinations which ultimately drive out Florence Green. Like Florence, Mrs Gammart is an incomer to the village of Hardborough, but also a meddler, someone who likes to impose her views on others, and the closest the novel has to a villain.

As ever with Penelope Fitzgerald’s writing there’s an elusiveness to it, so much packed into such a short space. You have to keep your wits about you, else you’ll miss important action, since it’s often elided, or occurs between scenes. And she has a wonderful ability to sum up a character and their history in only a single line, whilst still somehow respecting a sense of the mysteriousness of human beings. On Florence Green, we’re memorably told on the first page, ‘She had a kind heart, though that is not of much use when it comes to self-preservation.’ It generalises from the specificity of the character in a way which is almost aphoristic. I particularly liked the line about Mr. Brandish, the aged aristocratic figure whom the sly narrative voice informs us in some way is Hardborough through his aristocratic and family connections – the fact that as far as the rest of the village is concerned, he’s always been there – and whom Florence somehow befriends despite their only meeting the once: ‘Shabby, hardly presentable, he was not the sort of figure who could ever lose dignity’, which captures a certain lost aristocratic grandeur. Of course, ultimately that was displaced by the Mrs. Gammarts of the world.