So I didn’t particularly care for The Golden Child.  But there are some good reasons this book might not be as interesting or impressive as her later work.  For one, though already past the age of 60, this was Fitzgerald’s first novel.  She’d been writing short stories for a while and had completed two biographies while in her 50s, but, from that perspective this is actually quite an impressive book.  We can already see the skill and control she will use to create the masterful books for which she’s remembered.  For another thing, Fitzgerald reportedly wrote The Golden Child to entertain her ailing husband.  If it seems to rely more on coincidence, dispensing obstacles without resolution, who cares?  I don’t have to like the book to appreciate what’s going on here.

And the story is fun.  It is a cold morning at a famous London museum, and the public is shivering in line.  The Golden Child exhibit, a royal child’s golden coffin and a variety of accompanying funerary art from the fictional African land of Garamantia, has arrived and is just about to open for traffic.  Strangely, the elderly archaeologist who found the treasure, Sir William, now heads the museum but refuses to go down to see the exhibit.  Making matters worse, someone has distributed to the freezing public a bunch of flyers about some type of curse.

Needless to say, mystery and intrigue — and death — ensue.  We meet a small cast of central characters, central of which is the museum’s junior officer Waring Smith, who, Fitzgerald assures us, “was not an exceptional young man.”  Smith knows something is amiss but cannot put his finger on it.  One evening, after the museum has been closed, he goes down to the exhibit and sees the golden twine has been removed; soon he is waking up, gasping with a sore neck, on the floor because someone or something has just tried to choke the life out of him — and the golden twine has returned to its place.

As fun as the setup is, The Golden Child unrolls much like many other mysteries of its type and forces the reader to give way and roll a bit with the jumpy, shaky plot.  The real fun is in the characterizations, a foreshadow of what’s to come in Fitzgerald imminent explosion of small novels.  For example, we know early on that Sir William, who refuses to look at his own exhibit and may believe in a curse, is a feisty, disenchanted old man.  Here he is talking to one of the museum’s more idealistic directors:

‘The object of the museum is to acquire and preserve representative specimens, in the interests of the public,’ he said.

‘You say that,’ returned Sir William, with another winning smile, ‘and I say balls.’

Connected to the strong characterization is the strong portrayal of the struggles for power amidst the disenchanted or misled heads of the museum.  There is also Waring Smith’s very human struggle to do his job well to make enough to pay his mortgage while struggling to give his wife Haggie the attention she needs and, lately, is demanding in no uncertain terms.

So, in the end, it’s a short and fun book, but generally insubstantial.  I’ve freed myself, and I’m looking forward to moving on.

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 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.