"The Bookshop" by Penelope Fitzgerald (review)

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In a small, wind and rain swept East Anglican town, Florence Green, a middle-aged widow decides to open a bookshop in a long-unused, damp 500-year-old property, the Old House. She soon discovers that she has to share the building with a rather vicious poltergeist, but even worse is the opposition of the town’s gentry in the person of its first lady Violet Gamart, who needs the same property to set up a cultural center and doesn’t countenance any opposition. So the battle lines are drawn. It is 1959 and England is still very much a strict class society...

The novel is set in the small East Anglican town of Hardborough, an “island between sea and river,” which was modeled on Southwold in Suffolk (one of the locations visited by W.G. Sebald on his walking tour described in The Rings of Saturn). This is a rather isolated (even moldy) town with a population of only 1,000 so you can imagine the small-mindedness and gossip that are daily fare here. Penelope Fitzgerald actually lived and worked in Southwold in the 1950s — and, indeed, in a bookshop! — and her descriptions of the dreary landscape with its endless salty water lands are masterly and brought to life by many small details. So is her take on the motley crew of local eccentrics.

Florence Green has set up the bookshop with her small inheritance plus a loan from the local bank. She buys the damp Old House (putting up with the ghost) and acquires stock. Happily, she doesn’t have to fight her battle alone. She is helped by Mr Raven, the marsh man, who brings in his Sea Scouts to put up the bookshelves for her — this in return for her help in holding the slippery tongue of a horse while Mr Raven filed down its teeth; a local girl, Christine, wise and tough for her eleven years, comes to help in the shop; and Florence also gets some moral support from the reclusive local squire, Mr Brundish.

And in the beginning she even does quite well. These were wonderful times for bookshops. People still read books — television was in the late fifties still rare in most European countries (coming much later than in the U.S. — I remember the excitement of us kids when my parents bought our first black-and-white TV set in the early sixties). There is no public library in the small town, so Florence also starts a small lending library and this is so popular that the locals almost fight over the most popular books (the gentry of course expecting that these volumes would be reserved for them so that they could read them first). Then as now, the popular books are gossipy volumes about royalty and famous people, to my regret (but not to my surprise), although when Florence stocks up on Nabokov’s Lolita, the rumor that this is a “dirty book” also seems to have reached the isolated town and buyers block the sidewalk as they line up to obtain a copy.

But in the end Florence is no match for Mrs Gamart, the wife of a retired general and as leading cultural luminary, the first lady of the town. Mrs Gamart wants the Old House for her own hobby, the establishment of a local arts center. When, in the early pages, Florence refuses to give up the building, she reacts so subdued that we might think nothing much will happen. But Mrs Gamart moves behind the scenes in a nasty, manipulative way.

Mrs Gamart deftly uses the small mistakes Florence makes: she brings in the law when the pavement in front of the new shop is blocked by locals thronging to purchase Lolita (Florence has stocked up on the novel at the advice of a seedy BBC employee, without knowing herself what it is); she sets education officials on the trail of Florence’s underage school-girl assistant, especially after the girl has affronted her; she pushes the town council to start its own public lending library, so that Florence looses that part of her business; and she finally pulls some strings in parliament so that the town can make a compulsory purchase of the Old House for the cultural center nobody wants and drive Florence out.

Florence believed that she could succeed by hard work and sincerity. Unfortunately, that is all to often not enough in our Machiavellian world (and especially not in the English world which at the time the novel is set was still very much a class society). In the end, she is run out of town with her investment gone, her house gone, her books gone. The novel is a black social morality play that shows us small town life at its philistine worst. Fortunately, it is uplifted by the wonderful descriptions of landscape and people.


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