"The Bookshop" by Penelope Fitzgerald

 

In The Bookshop (1978) author Penelope Fitzgerald presents the determination shown and the obstacles faced in her English heroine’s path as she moves to coastal Suffolk and opens a humble bookshop. She spices her story with generous doses of wryly observed humor, but beneath it all is England’s ossified class structure, with its nasty  oppressive dealings, small and large. It is a slender volume, full of quirky observations, laugh-out-loud humor, and all of it done with exemplary economy.

Set in 1959, the story of widowed Florence Green’s foray into retail contains the minutely observed challenges she faces in running the town’s only bookshop. She must deal with such vicissitudes as a vicious and implacable local society matriarch, an onsite storage facility with permanently wet floors and walls, and a cranky poltergeist. 

Along the way, Fitzgerald manages the utmost clarity with the stingiest word use. Florence meets Milo, the slouching, somewhat glamorous BBC employee, whom she captures as going “through life with singularly little effort.” The evil society matriarch has a nephew in Parliament (who facilitates her aunt’s scheming); Fitzgerald sums him up as “brilliant, successful, and stupid.” We learn from David Nicholls’s 2013 introduction that the protagonist shares liberal political views with the author, in that she divides the world into “exterminators and exterminatees, with the former, at any given time, predominating.” 

The author allows us a peek into the internal dialogue of a charming, ambitious, and kindly heroine. Unfortunately she must contend with English village tastes (provincial), rural characters (quirky and plainspoken), and mores (circumscribed). Fitzgerald won the 1979 Booker Prize for her novel Offshore. Clearly, this was a novelist who knew her craft, and plied it with world class skill. The Bookshop is unblinking, economical, charming, and brilliant. Set aside some time, and get acquainted with this lovely accomplishment.