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Review by Robert Weibezahl
It's been nearly 20 years since this darkly comic short novel by Penelope Fitzgerald was shortlisted for Britain's Booker Prize and yet, curiously, this paperback edition of "The Bookshop" marks its first appearance in the U.S. I suppose back then the powers that be decided it was not commercial enough for an American audience, an odd bit of literary subterfuge that is itself almost worthy of Fitzgerald's nimble plot. To be fair, "The Bookshop" is unmistakably an English book, its leisurely pace and very civilized demeanor camouflaging a hornet's nest of dastardly, spiteful acts in a small East Anglian town. But you certainly don't have to be British to appreciate Fitzgerald's considerable gift for piercing social comedy, in full evidence here.
"The Bookshop" is set in 1959, in a seaside community called, appropriately, Hardborough. Florence Green, an aging widow, decides that what the town lacks is a good bookstore, so she sets out to use her small inheritance to open one. The logical location is the Old House, a 500-year-old structure that has been sitting empty for many years, in part because it is terribly damp, but also because it is rumored to be haunted.
Florence perseveres, despite the discouragement of the town banker, her solicitor and even the local fish monger, who sees the widow's enterprise as a chance to unload his own shop's premises. But her most formidable adversary turns out to be the wealthy Violet Gamart, self-appointed arbiter of local tastes, who has decided that the Old House would be the perfect site for an arts center.
To say that a battle erupts in Hardborough would belie the gentle tone of Fitzgerald's narrative. No, the clash is a subtle one, a contest of wits that percolates beneath the town's cordial veneer for more than a year. Florence has the shop up and running a long time before Mrs. Gamart even begins to exert the full force of her opposition. When she does, her chicanery knows no bounds and, of course, can almost never clearly be traced back to her.
In her own capable way, Florence deflects the laughable attempts at closing down the shop. These include a brush with an inspector from the Education Authority, who comes to ascertain if the bookstore is breaking child labor laws by employing a local girl to help out, and a hilarious exchange of correspondence between Florence and her solicitor when Violet, in the guise of the local Justice of the Peace, objects to the "temporary obstruction unreasonable in quantum and duration to the use of the highway" caused by a window display of 250 copies of Lolita.
There are all sorts of wonderful eccentrics wandering through the pages of "The Bookshop," and it is to Fitzgerald's credit that these strange characters never cross the line into caricature. And it is miraculous that, in little more than a hundred pages, we get such a clear and complete picture of life in this parochial little town. We should thank the gods of American publishing that, at long last, we can enjoy the wondrous talents of Penelope Fitzgerald.
Robert Weibezahl lives in Los Angeles, where he writes about books and culture.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.
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