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After I read Penelope Fitzgerald’s Booker-winning Offshore, I realized I would have to read every book she published in that short but prolific burst of energy she displayed in the last twenty years of her life. I still can’t get over it: her first four books in four years (including the Booker winner and a Booker finalist), with the next five coming in the next fifteen years (including two more Booker finalists and one — The Blue Flower — which a Booker judge regrets was never submitted and so was passed up). The Bookshop (1978) was her second book and her first Booker finalist. I think I liked it even more than Offshore, which is saying quite a bit.
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?”
I was wary of Penelope Fitzgerald. I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s something about an author publishing her first four novels in four years. But to offset that, this outburst of fiction (The Golden Child, 1977; The Bookshop, 1978; Offshore, 1979; and Human Voices, 1980) began when she was sixty years old — and those were some exceedingly cultivated sixty years. These books were well received, and she has the good opinion of many discriminating critics. So, perhaps she published her first four novels in four years, but when I think about it, there is something miraculous in her literary career: in eighteen years toward the end of her life, she published nine books of fiction. If this was a true artistic explosion and not just someone who tacked together a working formula, it couldn’t be missed. I decided to start by reading Offshore (1979; Booker Prize).
I love how the book begins, such a sly attention grabber:
‘Are we to gather that Dreadnought is asking us all to do something dishonest?’ Richard asked.
Dreadnought nodded, glad to have been understood so easily.
It turns out that Dreadnought is one of several houseboats in Battersea Reach on the Thames. Its owner is Willis, a sixty-five-year-old painter, and he has plans to sell his boat and move to land where he can live with his widowed sister. However, the boat is old and not worth much — but, perhaps it could be worth a bit more . . .
Richard, captain of the boat Lord Jim, is the de facto leader of the small community set in Battersea Reach. It probably goes without saying that Fitzgerald’s characters are people living on the fringe of society. Living neither on the land nor on the sea, these are characters who don’t fit well in society. Besides Dreadnought and Lord Jim (and others), this community also includes Maurice and Grace. Maurice lives on Maurice (the boat used to be named Dondeschipolschuygen IV, but Maurice renamed it when he found out everyone referred to each other by their boat’s name). Maurice’s male clients are there most of the night, but it’s the man who stores his merchandise on the boat that causes the most fear. Nenna lives on Gracewith her two young daughters, Tilda and Martha. When Nenna’s husband, Edward, returned from South America a failure, his wife’s situation on the boat was still below him.
Offshorerevolves around these strange, basically lonely characters. They frequently encounter each other, they are friendly, they do form part of a community, but the loneliness, the separateness remains. And that is all due to Fitzgerald’s wonderful prose. The following quote, for example, says so much about Nenna and her two daughters. On the surface, it sounds somewhat hopeful, as they like to see their situation. But there’s a desperation beyond the obvious. There’s an intimation into what could happen when Martha and Tilda grow up a bit more.
Martha and Tilda were in the position of having no spending money, but this was less important when they were not attending school and were spared the pains of comparison, and they felt no bitterness against their mother, because she hadn’t any either. Nenna believed, however, that she would have some in the spring, when three things would happen, each, like some melting ice-floes, slowly moving the next one on. Edward would come and live on Grace, which would save the rent he was paying on his rooms at present; the girls, once they were not being prayed for at the grotto, would agree to go back to the nuns; and with Tilda at school she could go out herself and look for a job.
Nenna is, in many ways, the central character. The other characters have their unique stories, but more time is spent on Nenna, which is proper. Not only is Nenna’s story intriguing but Fitzgerald has given her a fabulous interior dialogue:
. . . Nenna’s thoughts, whenever she was alone, took the form of a kind of perpetual magistrate’s hearing, in which her own version of her marriage was shown as ridiculously simple and demonstrably right, and then, almost exactly at the same time, as incontrovertibly wrong. Her conscience, too, held, quite uninvited, a separate watching brief, and intervened in the proceedings to read statements of an unwelcome nature.
For glorious pages Nenna is interrogated by this judge as her husband, the plaintiff, sits in the background. Though this goes on for pages, Fitzgerald doesn’t overdo it. This technique doesn’t take over Nenna’s personality, and it still allows Nenna’s sad story to be told.
Though short, this book actually took me quite a bit of time to read. The story and the characters are complex. Though Fitzgerald’s sentences hold this complexity well, they are intricate and complex in and of themselves and take some time to digest. The book demanded time. But it was time so well spent. I loved this book.
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