10 Works of fiction Penelope Fitzgerald

1. The Golden Child (1977)
2. The Bookshop (1978)
3. Offshore (1979)
4. Human Voices (1980)
5. At Freddie's (1982)
6. Innocence (1986)
7. The Beginning of Spring (1988)
8. The Gate of Angels (1990)
9. The Blue Flower (1995)
10. The Means of Escape (2000)*

*Short stories the others are all novels. I've read most of them.

Day Off Week 29 2020

Things are beginning to get back to normal. Following a reconnoitring trip the day before I found that at our nearby O2 shopping centre a branch of the Soho Coffee Company is not only letting you sit down there but is serving the coffee in China. So I took a copy of a recently purchased novel Human voices by Penelope Fitzgerald and had a good read. In fact the book is such an easy read I had it finished before the day was over. It is the one most like her first Golden Child and features the BBC during the war. it is full of gentle humour and a silvery undertone of sadness punctuated by brilliant turns of phrase from time to time.the novel.

Day off Week 28 2019

This week is a bit different and so I took Monday off, the traditional ministers' day off. I took opportunity to head down to Benjamin Franklin's House near Charing Cross. Like most of these places, there is not that much to see and you have to use your imagination. However, it was in this very parlour that Franklin entertained American ambassadors, on these very stairs he carried his dumb bells and before these very windows he would parade naked to dry himself after his bath. They also have a glass armonica, his invention, the very one used for the Harry Potter music. The man who showed us round, American, was quite knowledgeable but not pushy. Sadly, it was only me and a couple from Texas present. After that I kept up the American theme and had a burger in a Five Guys round the corner. A seventies theme was playing out on the music system so after listening to Thin Lizzy we had the whole of Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven (the subject of our tract last Saturday). That was nice. Through the day I read most of Penelope Fitzgerald's masterful The Gate of Angels. I also managed my 10,000 steps for once. Watched some TV in the evening.

A busy week

I've struggled a little this week partly possibly due to a busy week. (Eleri was the busy one rather than me to be truthful. She works two days a week and spent one day in Macclesfield at the new Go Teach offices). I gave the paper on Proverbs on Monday to about 17 of us, all eager to hear and to ask questions. Good time. In the evening we went to see Toy Story 4 which was good (nice to see a reference to conscience in there, even if only as the pretext for a joke). It is great that there are still one or two films we can all see together.

I've reported on Tuesday, my day off. Wednesday I was out with the other ministers walking across Hampstead Heath. About six of us were present. Good times. Rest of the day went on preparing and then leading the Midweek meeting.

We should have had an officers meeting on Thursday evening but that God postponed. Otherwise the main thing has been preparing for the Lord's Day. I've also started reading Penelope Fitzgerald's The gate of angels (a kind birthday gift from friends). (I had intended writing a post called a month of celebration marking the way my May 22 birthday tumbled into June with a lovely barbecue organised by friends for me and another church member. I was given books, ties and other gifts)

This morning (Saturday) we were out giving tracts in Golders Green. There were five of us. That was good to do again. Otherwise the busyness has just been with visitors - two sons and their wives at different times going to different weddings and two friends with each couple. In the first case the friend is relation from America. She, her friend and Gwion (our son) have travelled to France for the world cup. We are hoping for three extra at church tomorrow then.

The Bookshop

We enjoyed watching this slowly paced film harking back to 1959 and one woman's efforts to establish a bookshop. I have stated before that I am not fully signed up to the view that believes reading well written books is some cure all but we enjoyed the film on its own level. I read Penelope Fitzgerald's 1978 book a while ago and it was interesting to see how the characters were handled in the film. It was a good idea to include the modern book in the shot of a modern bookshop in the closing sequence.

The film is narrated by someone other than the book I think and the film has a dramatic ending I don't recall from the book. Silly things like including a book by Philip Larkin ten years too soon is done just to annoy pedants like me I guess. I'm not sure about the hints at romance between the two main characters either. Why the cowman becimes  aferryman and where th ghost goes I ahve no idea.

The villagers are presented in a pretty negative light. I would like to see more balance which may be the book has.

The Golden Child by Penelope Fitzgerald

I recently read another Penelope Fitzgerald novel, her first (of nine). The Golden Child came out in 1977 and it has been said that it "offers a satirical version of the King Tut exhibition at the British Museum" (of 1972). It also pokes fun at museum politics, academic scholars and Cold War spying. it has 11 main characters and without visual clues I got some of them mixed up a bit adn the denouement which is of the detective genre was not that gripping but it is otherwise good stuff with some very funny lines. I wished I'd marked the funny lines. I read that the original draft was 75, 000 word but the publishers got her to cut it too 50,000. Good thing.

Some examples I found

In order to continue living in a very small terraced house in Claphain South, [ ... ] he had to repay to the Whitstable and Protective Building Society the sum of f 118 a month. This figure loomed so large in Waring's daily thoughts, was so punctually waiting for him during any idle moment, that it sometimes seemed to him that his identity was changing and that there was no connection with the human being of five years ago who had scorned concentration on material things.

'[t1he true international solidarity was not between workers, but between queuers'.

The courtyard was entirely filled with people. A restrained noise rose from them, like the grinding of the sea at slack water. They made slight surges forward, then back, but always gaining an inch.

The Beginning of Spring

I am currently enjoying the novels of Penelope Fitzgerald. Having read The Blue Flower and The Bookshop I recently picked up the appropriately titled The beginning of Spring which is set among expatriates living in early 19th century Russia. It is not particularly seasonal but it is very well written and even has something of a plot, something which is often in short supply in many novels I read these days. I guess the Spring thing or the ice thaw is acting as a device to underline the general drift of the novel. Worth a second read. Perhaps the two snippets below will give the flavour

“You can borrow my Blackbird, if you like,' said Ben. This was his new fountain pen, which troubled him. It was guaranteed not to leak, but writers and schoolchildren knew better. Ben wished to be relieved of the responsibility of the Blackbird, without losing his own dignity.”

"Birch Tree Thoughts was at the censor now, and since all poetry was suspect, would perhaps be more carefully read there than it ever would again."

The Blue Flower

Having read and enjoyed Penelope Fitzgerald's The bookshop I remembered that I once owned her Blue Flower although I'd not read it. So on to the Internet and a new copy - foolishly I wanted the cover as above. Anyway it added to the pleasure. The Blue Flower tells a story from the early life of the German poet Novalis. I could tell you the plot, insubstantial as it is, but that was not where the pleasure lay. This is one of those novels where the fun is in the brilliant way that she inhabits her characters and brings them alive in a way that draws you in and makes you so familiar with them they are real (as in this case they were, but you know what I mean). It is quite a skill and when you out a book like that down it is like the end of a great symphony. You feel some sort of echo lingering after it, There aren't many books in that league. Anyway I'm now reading a non-fiction piece she wrote on her father Edward Knox and his three brothers. I actually became aware of this when I saw it footnoted in Iain Murray's biography of Ryle. 

Three Short Novels

I have recently read three short novels. The first I found on my book shelves, one I bought in an independent bookshop (Daunt's in Hampstead) and the most recent I got from a charity shop in Golders Green for a pound.

A kestrel for a knave by Barry Hines was published in 1968. Set in a mining area (only ever referred to as "the City") it tells of Billy Casper, a young working class boy troubled at home and at school, who only finds solace when he finds and trains a kestrel whom he names "Kes". The book was made into a film Kes which I have never seen and is a favourite for often used in Key Stage 4 kids doing GCSE English. The book is so named because of a poem found in the Boke of St Albans. In medieval England, the only bird a knave was legally allowed to keep was a kestrel. Someone told me the main character is based in part on his own brother, by now an expert on birds of prey. It was nice to be taken back to my own childhood in much of the description. The book is fairly well written but smacks of a writing class approach that describes everything in careful detail, leaving nothing to the imagination and striking similes and metaphors that pall in the end. (One kid perceptively wrote "Everything are just so hard to understand esp with the fact that the book is overflows with similes and metaphors. Too much of something is never too good.)
The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald was written ten years later and deals with a much more middle class setting in East Anglia in 1959. A much less sad book, it was an easier read and a much more mature literary approach. Some witty little phrases lurk such as this - "She was in appearance small, wispy, and wiry, somewhat insignificant from the front view, and totally so from behind". It was Booker shortlisted. Good stuff and worth the money.
If I had to rank these three I would put the Isaac Bashevis Singer first. This was published in 1983. The Penitent was originally published in instalments in The Jewish Daily Forward (1973) with the Yiddish title of Der Baal Tshuve. The English translation was made by Joseph Singer for Farrar Straus & Giroux. It tells the story of Joseph Shapiro, emigrating from Poland in 1939 and from USSR in 1945 to the USA in 1947, where he becomes rich and involved with consumerism and lust. He decides to leave everything, including his job, his wife and his lover, and finally expatriate to Israel, where he wonders about the traditional values of Jewish culture. For any serious Christian, it is  a fascinating way to consider worldliness and related subjects. It is full of interesting quotations. For example “A soldier who serves an emperor has to have a uniform, and this also applies to a soldier who serves the Almighty."
All three novelists are no longer living.