📚 'Rather Dated' March: Penelope Fitzgerald’s ‘The Bookshop’ 📚

[MotherofPearl]

Welcome to the Mumsnet 'Rather Dated' book club. This month we are reading and discussing Penelope Fitzgerald’s ‘The Bookshop.’ Please do add your thoughts when you are ready.

About the threads:

We are reading and discussing fiction from the 1930s to the 1990s that would have been described as 'contemporary' in its day. We are reading one book a month. Spoilers are permitted!

We started the chat thanks to a thread where we kicked off with a discussion of Penelope Lively, The Road to Lichfield.

Currently we have these separate threads:

November: Anita Brookner, A Start in Life
December: Margaret Drabble: A Summer Bird-Cage
January: Elizabeth Jane Howard, The Beautiful Visit.
March: Winifred Watson, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.
April: R.C. Sheriff, The Fortnight in September.
May: Elizabeth Taylor, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont.
June: Margaret Kennedy, The Feast.
July: Mollie Panter-Downes, One Fine Day.
August: Elizabeth Von Arnim, The Enchanted April.
September: Barbara Pym, An Academic Question.
October: Dorothy Whipple, High Wages.
November: Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September.
December: Monica Dickens, The Fancy.
January: E.M. Delafield, The Messalina of the Suburbs.
February: F.M. Mayor, The Rector’s Daughter.

Link to the main thread:
www.mumsnet.com/talk/what_were_reading/5029141-the-mumsnet-rather-dated-book-group-all-welcome-to-join?page=2&reply=133984693

[MotherofPearl]

I'm afraid this was not one of my favourites of the books we've read. It was so downbeat and the ending so bleak that I came away from it wondering what the point of the story was. To highlight the limitations imposed by both class and sex in the 1950s? I can see how this was played out with poor Christine (my favourite character), who by the end had been seemingly excluded even from the technical school. And Florence was up against Mrs Gamart's social connections and determination to have things her own way.

I don't like any supernatural features in novels, so found 'the rapper' an annoying device.

I've read a few reviews of Fitzgerald's writing and many comment on her spare, stylish prose. I can certainly appreciate that, and the novel is beautifully written - the descriptions of the landscape were evocative and probably the redeeming feature of the book for me. I'll be interested to hear what everyone else made of it.

I've downloaded Noel Streatfield's Saplings to my Kindle, but need to finish my current book, Madeline Linford's Out of the Window, before I start it.

[LunaNorth]

I found that this book felt older than it was. It read with a 1950s tone, rather than 1970s, and I needed to re-read some of the ultra-long sentences to get a grasp of meaning. Like this, for example,

”But a little more champagne, given her by Milo, caused her mind to revolve in its giddy uppermost circle, and to her cousin’s second husband, who was something to do with the Arts Council, and to her own cousin once removed, who was soon going to be high up in the Directorate of Planning, and to her brilliant nephew who sat for the Longwash Division of West Suffolk and had already made his name as the persevering secretary of the Society for Providing Public Access to Places of Interest and Beauty, and to Lord Gosfield who had ventured over from his stagnant castle in the Fens because if foot-and-mouth broke out again he wouldn’t be able to come for months, she spoke of the Hardborough Centre for Music and the Arts.”

It completely lost me by the third sub-clause.

[LunaNorth]

When she is succinct, she is devastating, though. That final sentence hit me particularly hard, having been in the same position a few years back.

[Terpsichore]

I’d have said it was set in the late 50's/very early 60s - the Lonnie Donegan song that Christine dances to as Salome came out in 1957 (and the little vision that scene conjures up made me laugh so much).

I agree it was bleak, but I did love this. I just adore Penelope Fitzgerald’s spare, elegant, delicate writing so much. There were too many wonderful moments to list - oh, the horse, with his great tongue and eating the angelica 'like a maniac' - just wonderful.

Maybe more later but I have to go out now….

[Terpsichore]

And of course, Lolita was published in 1955….

[LunaNorth]

Yes, it was set in the 1950s, but written in the 1970s.

[Terpsichore]

Oh sorry Luna, yes, exactly. I thought you were questioning when it was supposed to have been set.

[LunaNorth]

No need to apologise! My point wasn’t clear.

[FuzzyCaoraDhubh]

Hello all! Thanks for setting up this thread, MotherofPearl.

I thought The Bookshop was very good. I liked it. I like a bleak book and I thought this was very well done. I'm not sure it will be on my favourites list however as I didn't feel I loved it while reading it, but there was much to admire about it. I may read it again so as to make my mind up about how much I liked it.

I liked Fitzgerald's sparse, succinct prose.
I thought she was astute and knew people well. I agree that that particular paragraph @LunaNorth is appalling. Otherwise I liked her writing style very much.

I'll skimread it again and will be back soon.

[inaptonym]

Hello! NC here but I proposed this book as it had been years since I last read it. Always slightly worrying revisiting a former favourite, but so far (2/3rds of the way through) it's proving just as excellent as I remember.

And very, very funny. Yes often it's very dark or scathing humour, but there's also warmth and silliness and droll turns of phrase. So while I do remember the bleak ending, and can understand some of the other responses, for me the wit and social comedy predominate in my overall impression of the book, and have brought much pleasure again on this reread.

"Are you talking about culture?" The [bank] manager said, in a voice halfway between pity and respect.

"It'll come to you as you wear it," the dressmaker replied firmly. "You need a bit of costume jewellery as a focus." ...The fitting seemed to be turning into a conspiracy to prevent anyone noticing her new dress at all.

Mr Brundish’s congratulations on black-edged stationery, left over from 1919.
The lending library bunfight over the royal biography.
Books returned on the grounds of possessing 'a distinct tinge of socialism'
The cards that only allow of two attitudes in life: The Romantic and The Humourous.
Mrs Gipping and her possibly murderous marrow moonshine.
Catherine and her best voice intended for playing Florence Nightingale or the Virgin Mary and the description of her as a terrier empowered to act as sheepdog, and just everything about her portrayal, really.
😁
I could quote the whole damn thing, TBH!

Most Austen comparisons are a lazy go-to when it comes to 'small canvas' female writers, but I think Fitzgerald is similarly brilliant at establishing even a minor character's full personality and their exact social niche in just a few lines of pitch-perfect dialogue or a glancing free-indirect thought. She is a genius with adjectives/adverbs. And the unflinching moral backbone underlying it all.

I find Milo North chilling, far more so than Mrs Gamart.
Milo North was tall, and went through life with singularly little effort... What seemed like delicacy in him was usually a way of avoiding trouble; what seemed like sympathy was the instinct to prevent trouble before it started. It was hard to see what growing older would mean to such a person. His emotions, from lack of exercise, had disappeared almost together. Adaptability and curiosity, he found did just as well.

[inaptonym]

And I think that paragraph you quoted quite brilliant, @LunaNorth, both snarky and subtly sinister in showing Mrs G's farreaching web of connections, the shallowness of her interest in any of these things, her mild drunkenness on both champagne and power - and how even so, she's going to win, because thought and action are almost one for someone like her, 'an exterminator'.

[FuzzyCaoraDhubh]

Ah...that makes sense @inaptonym
Yes. A reread is in order!

[Librarybooker]

There is a biography of Penelope Fitzgerald by the very excellent Hermione Lee (I recommend her Tom Stoppard biography very highly)
https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2013/nov/01/penelope-fitzgerald-hermione-lee-review

[inaptonym]

Ah thank you @FuzzyCaoraDhubh and sorry @LunaNorth I hope you don't feel too berated 😅went into enter terrier-mode myself there.

That's a great article @Librarybooker. I too love At Freddie's and Human Voices (so underrated) and am now curious to try some of Philip Hensher's novels.

[FuzzyCaoraDhubh]

went into terrier mode 😅

[StellaOlivetti]

I loved that article, thank you for posting it.
I’m about halfway through The Bookshop, hopefully finish today.
Is Hardborough a fictional Southwold? I thought it was Aldeburgh when started reading but then Florence mentions Aldeburgh by name and the article suggests it must be Southwold.

[FuzzyCaoraDhubh]

The article was very good. Thank you for posting it Librarybooker. Fitzgerald certainly had a hard life and many difficulties to overcome (mainly Desmond by the sounds of it). Much credit is due to her for becoming a wonderful writer.

I was wondering what a crammer was. Some kind of school presumably?

[Terpsichore]

@FuzzyCaoraDhubh

The article was very good. Thank you for posting it Librarybooker. Fitzgerald certainly had a hard life and many difficulties to overcome (mainly Desmond by the sounds of it). Much credit is due to her for becoming a wonderful writer.

I was wondering what a crammer was. Some kind of school presumably?

Yes, a place where they coach pupils intensively to get through exams, Fuzzy. Pretty miserable establishments by the sounds of it!

[Terpsichore]

Another very interesting article about Lee's biog (and PF) here, which mentions the 'Westminster Tutors' ie the crammer - and incidentally reveals that one of her pupils there was Edward St Aubyn!

I've got that biog and must read it, but it’s quite a hefty tome and I keep picking something shorter for my next non-fiction…

[FuzzyCaoraDhubh]

Thank you @Terpsichore ! That sounds rather dickensian!

I had forgotten about the foreword (by Hermione Lee) and the introduction (by David Nicholls). I had skipped them before reading and they are both good.

I'm enjoying the reread. Fitzgerald compared a scout to a bale of hay ('square and reliable as a straw-bale') 😄
They are marvellous, those scouts!

[Terpsichore]

I wish some scouts would come and put up a load of shelves for me for a fiver 😏

[ImJustMadAboutSaffron]

The humour comes from the interactions between Christine and Florence, the communications between Florence and her bank manager and the antics of the “rapper”. Ironically the biggest success – when Florence decides to stock Lolita – becomes the catalyst for the eventual downfall. I never concluded whether the rapper was real, or a metaphor for all the problems Florence had to surmount. In the end, the town and its residents were simply too provincial and narrow minded for Florence.

[FuzzyCaoraDhubh]

I agree ImJustMadAboutSaffron about the humour in the book. It's not a completely bleak book.

I think the rapper was real and it was also funny that everyone took it in their stride. It was quirky! I liked it.

It struck me how cruel the townspeople were. They knew Florence. She wasn't a stranger to them. It makes it seem a bit worse in a way that they rejected her and the bookshop.

[inaptonym]

I think the rapper was real. It wasn't visible, but had real-world effects - so at least as real as whatever inhabited Mrs Gamart or Milo North.

Having finished the book again I'm still not fully on Team Bleak but ooof. 😭 Catherine's story hit particularly hard. Her resentment was directed against everyone who had to do with books, and reading....
But thinking how wonderfully un-precocious Catherine and Wally were, it really struck me how unbookish the whole book is. I had a false memory of Lolita playing a much bigger role in the plot, but its contents ended up about as relevant as those overpriced Chinese silk bookmarks, a brilliant rug-pull. If Florence herself ever read Lolita (doubtful), we're not told what she thought, and we never get much of her as a reader at all, or of any character except Mr. Brundish and Milo North. To reinforce the final sentence of the book, it's not a story of books being unwanted - two of the worst blows to Florence's shop turned out to be the opening of the public library and another bookshop which would sell 'a type of novel which which Florence never intended to stock'. What type would that be?

The earlier discussion here may have sensitised me to dates, so for the first time I really noticed this bit from the last (devastating) sentence 'the town in which she had lived for nearly ten years'. What is this phrase doing? Likewise the explicit dating from the first words 'In 1959....' and ending 'In the winter of 1960...[on] the 10.46 to Liverpool Street'. Am I grasping at straws or is there a glimmer of hope, that this is after all just one year in Florence Green's life? Her name reminds that spring returns as winter does?

[StellaOlivetti]

Well, I’ve finished this late last night, sorry to be late. I can see why some people find it bleak, the descriptions of the landscape contributed to this I feel, the salty soil people are buried in, the flatness, the cows appearing to float in the mist, the marshes and of course the endless damp. And I agree with the observation that it’s hard to see what the POINT of the book is; a meditation on class/sex limitations? A discussion of how small places respond to outsiders? But in the end, I don’t think there is a point, PF’s genius is to write small, incredibly beautifully written vignettes of life (vignettes is not quite the right word, but I didn’t want to put ‘slice of life’). I recently read The Beginning of Spring, which is similarly hard to categorise.
I adored this book. I love the way she writes, and yes indeed, she is a genius with adverbs. I also found it very funny. To pick something at random from the many bits I laughed out loud at: the party where General Gamart (Bruno!) says to Violet, why don’t you tell me what you mean “and I could explain it all slowly to Mrs Green.”
I learned from the article above that @Librarybooker kindly attached, that PF was sixty when she started on her literary career, and I do think you can tell. She’s so excellent at capturing, perfectly, what people are like, I could see exactly Violet, Miles North, Christine’s mum, the old reclusive Mr Brundish. That, and the astute, spare, beautiful prose seem to me to be the product of many years of life experience.
I loved it.