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2023/027: The Bookshop — Penelope Fitzgerald
‘It is a good book, and therefore you should try to sell it to the inhabitants of Hardborough. They won’t understand it, but that is all to the good. Understanding makes the mind lazy.’ [p. 100]
It's 1959, and Florence Green, a resident for ten years of the small Suffolk town of Hardborough ('where everyone could be seen coming over the wide distances and everything seen was discussed'), decides to open a bookshop. She purchases the Old House, which has a resident poltergeist, and at once meets opposition from the redoubtable Mrs Gamart, who regards herself as 'the natural patroness of all public activities in Hardborough', and who'd rather the Old House became an arts centre. Undaunted, Florence stocks and opens the shop, and recruits a young girl, Christine, to help her. Christine is bolshy, rude and uninterested in reading, but she and Florence develop an odd friendship. Florence also becomes friendly with the town recluse, Mr Brundish. But Florence has made enemies, and her forthright manner doesn't win her any leeway. In the end, Old House Books fails.
This is an odd little novel, very short (156 pages in print), very focused on the story rather than the backstory, leaving much unsaid. I was intrigued by the poltergeist, which was a distinct presence -- perhaps more present than Mrs Gamart and her off-page machinations -- and depressed by Christine's understanding of her probable future. The Bookshop was not exactly enjoyable -- the bleakness of the East Anglian landscape seemed to colour the whole novel -- but I was drawn in by its subtle humour and acute observations of life in a small, isolated town.
Fulfils the ‘Books on the cover’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge.
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I love Penelope Fitzgerald, but the failure of a bookshop is just too sad for me to re-read
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