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Amazon.co.uk Review
But rising damp will not stop Florence, nor will the resident, malevolent poltergeist (or "rapper", in the local patois). Nor will she be thwarted by Violet Gamart, who has designs on Florence's building for her own arts series and will go to any lengths to get it. One of Florence's few allies (who is, unfortunately, a hermit) warns her: "She wants an Arts Centre. How can the arts have a centre? But she thinks they have, and she wishes to dislodge you."
Once the Old House Bookshop is up and running, Florence is subjected to the hilarious perils of running a subscription library, training a 10-year-old assistant and obtaining the right merchandise for her customers. Men favour works "by former SAS men, who had been parachuted into Europe and greatly influenced the course of the war; they also placed orders for books by Allied commanders who poured scorn on the SAS men, and questioned their credentials." Women fight over a biography of Queen Mary. "This was in spite of the fact that most of them seemed to possess inner knowledge of the court--more, indeed, than the biographer." But it is only when the slippery Milo North suggests Florence sell the Olympia Press edition of "Lolita" that Florence comes under legal and political fire.
Fitzgerald's heroine divides people into "exterminators and exterminatees", a vision she clearly shares with her creator--but the author balances disillusion with grace, wit and weirdness, favouring the open ending over the moral absolute. Penelope Fitzgerald's internecine if gentle world-view even extends to literature--books are living, jostling things. Florence finds that paperbacks, crowding "the shelves in well-disciplined ranks", vie with Everyman editions, which "in their shabby dignity, seemed to confront them with a look of reproach."
Review
‘Its stylishness, and this low-voiced lack of emphasis are a pleasure throughout, its moral and human positions invariably sympathetic. But it is astringent too: no self-pity in its self-effacing heroine, who in a world of let-downs and put-downs and poltergeists, keeps her spirit bright and her book-stock miraculously dry in the damp, seeping East Anglian landscape.’ Isabel Quigley, Financial Times
‘Penelope Fitzgerald’s resources of odd people are impressively rich. Raven, the marshman, who ropes Florence in to hang on to an old horse’s tongue while he files the teeth; old Brundish, secretive as a badger, slow as a gorse bush. And this is not just a gallery of quirky still lives; these people appear in vignettes, wryly, even comically animated…On any reckoning, a marvellously piercing fiction.’ Valentine Cunningham, TLS
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Customer Reviews
This so gentle aspiration unleashes genteele vicious activity eminating from the local lady of the manor.
You know the slim volume means the book will not last long, and you want it to go on, but when you ahve finished it you know that she was right in making you step back out of their lives and into your own at just that point.
Fitzgerald's characters are always in some kind of private turmoil, whilst carrying on with day to day living, keeping up appearances. It make syou think long and hard about the life lived behind all our ordinary facades.
One reviewer complained that this was "more of a vignette than a novel". There may be some truth in that observation, but I would think of it more in terms of a novella or long short story. I was reminded of some of Balzac's "Scenes de la Vie Provinciale". It is a book where atmosphere is more important than plot, and Mrs Fitzgerald excels at conjuring up the often melancholy atmosphere of coastal Suffolk (an area I know well). The town is damp, mist-shrouded and surrounded by marshes; she describes it as "an island between sea and river, muttering and drawing into itself as soon as it felt the cold". The Old House is ramshackle, leaky and haunted by a poltergeist, or "rapper" in the local dialect. Florence's main ally in her struggle with Mrs Gamart is Edmund Brundish, a member of a distinguished old Suffolk family. The Brundishes, however, have been supplanted as the leading family in the neighbourhood by the parvenu Gamart outsiders, and the elderly, shabby, reclusive Edmund lives alone in a crumbling manor house, the descriptions of which add to the general mood of decline and decay.
Like some other reviewers, I found the ending rather abrupt as Florence's hopes suddenly collapse in the space of a single chapter. Although Florence is the main character, she is not as vividly drawn as some of the others. I wished the author had paid more attention to the devious and obsessively spiteful Violet Gamart, clearly a much stronger character than her hapless victim Florence and more potentially interesting. Legal affairs play an important part in the book, but the author's knowledge of the law is not always certain. An "indictment", for example, is a document used in criminal proceedings, not civil ones which would be started by a writ or summons. I found it difficult to believe that a local authority would be able to acquire a property compulsorily without paying compensation; the acquiring authority would be obliged to pay the market value of the land, with allowance made for any defects. Seen as a piece of atmospheric writing, "The Bookshop" is a fine work. Seen as a piece of storytelling it is perhaps less accomplished.
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