The Blue Flower

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Penelope Fitzgerald wrote her first novel 20 years ago, at the age of 59. Since then, she's written eight more, three of which have been short-listed for England's prestigious Booker Prize, and one of which, Offshore, won. Now she's back with her tenth and best book so far, The Blue Flower. This is the story of Friedrich von Hardenberg--Fritz, to his intimates--a young man of the late 18th century who is destined to become one of Germany's great romantic poets. In just over 200 pages, Fitzgerald creates a complete world of family, friends and lovers, but also an exhilarating evocation of the romantic era in all its political turmoil, intellectual voracity, and moral ambiguity. A profound exploration of genius, The Blue Flower is also a charming, wry, and witty look at domestic life. Fritz's family--his eccentric father and high-strung mother; his loving sister, Sidonie; and brothers Erasmus, Karl, and the preternaturally intelligent baby of the family, referred to always as the Bernhard--are limned in deft, sure strokes, and it is in his interactions with them that the ephemeral quality of genius becomes most tangible. Even his unlikely love affair with young Sophie von Kühn makes perfect sense as Penelope Fitzgerald imagines it.

The Blue Flower is a magical book--funny, sad, and deeply moving. In Fritz Fitzgerald has discovered a perfect character through whom to explore the meaning of love, poetry, life, and loss. In The Blue Flower readers will find a work of fine prose, fierce intelligence, and perceptive characterization.

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Offshore

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Offshore possesses perfect, very odd pitch. In just over 130 pages of the wittiest and most melancholy prose, Penelope Fitzgerald limns the lives of "creatures neither of firm land nor water"--a group of barge-dwellers in London's Battersea Reach, circa 1961. One man, a marine artist whose commissions have dropped off since the war, is attempting to sell his decrepit craft before it sinks. Another, a dutiful businessman with a bored, mutinous wife, knows he should be landlocked but remains drawn to the muddy Thames. A third, Maurice, a male prostitute, doesn't even protest when a criminal acquaintance begins to use his barge as a depot for stolen goods: "The dangerous and the ridiculous were necessary to his life, otherwise tenderness would overwhelm him."

At the center of the novel--winner of the 1979 Booker Prize--are Nenna and her truant six- and 11-year-old daughters. The younger sibling "cared nothing for the future, and had, as a result, a great capacity for happiness." But the older girl is considerably less blithe. "Small and thin, with dark eyes which already showed an acceptance of the world's shortcomings," Fitzgerald writes, she "was not like her mother and even less like her father. The crucial moment when children realise that their parents are younger than they are had long since been passed by Martha."

Their father is farther afield. Unable to bear the prospect of living on the Grace, he's staying in Stoke Newington, part of London but a lost world to his wife and daughters. Meanwhile, Nenna spends her time going over incidents that seem to have led to her current situation, and the matter of some missing squash racquets becomes of increasing import. Though she is peaceful by nature, experience and poverty are wearing Nenna down. Her confidante Maurice, after a momentary spell of optimism, also returns to his life of little expectation and quiet acceptance: "Tenderly responsive to the self-deceptions of others, he was unfortunately too well able to understand his own."

Penelope Fitzgerald views her creations with deep but wry compassion. Having lived on a barge herself, she offers her expert spin on the dangers, graces, and whimsies of river life. Nenna, too, has become a savant, instantly recognizing on one occasion that the mud encasing the family cat is not from the Reach. This "sagacious brute" is almost as complex as his human counterparts, constantly forced to adjust her notions of vermin and authority. Though Stripey is capable of catching and killing very young rats, the older ones chase her. "The resulting uncertainty as to whether she was coming or going had made her, to some extent, mentally unstable."

As always, Fitzgerald is a master of the initially bizarre juxtaposition. Adjacent sentences often seem like delightful non sequiturs--until they flash together in an effortless evocation of character, era, and human absurdity. Nenna recalls, for instance, how the buds had dropped off the plant her husband rushed to the hospital when Martha was born. She "had never criticized the bloomless azalea. It was the other young mothers in the beds each side of her who had laughed at it. That had been 1951. Two of the new babies in the ward had been christened Festival." Tiny comical epiphanies such as these have caused the author to be dubbed a "British miniaturist." Yet the phrase utterly misses the risks Fitzgerald's novellas take, the discoveries they make, and the endless pleasures they provide. --Kerry Fried

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The Golden Child

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Penelope Fitzgerald's first novel is packed with institutional follies and fiercely territorial old trouts. Set in a London museum whose officers only appear august, The Golden Child literally proves that authorities are clowns and clowns authorities. As the book opens, all England is queuing up to see the golden treasure of the Garamantes--the remains of a young king who was interred complete with a trove of toys and goodies. Only the man who unearthed the kinglet back in 1913 refuses to go anywhere near the exhibit, despite his constant proximity: "Sir William, in extreme but clear-headed old age, and after a lifetime of fieldwork, had come to roost in the Museum itself." Meanwhile, everyone--from nations to corporations--wants a piece of the Golden Child. (The exhibit is even underwritten by a company that hopes its puff, "Silence is Golden," will give its cigarettes more positive associations.) What, then, if the relics are cursed--or fake?

As both possibilities grow increasingly likely, and the Museum risks ridicule, its director deputizes Waring Smith to transport the mummy's doll to an incorruptible expert. Too bad if Professor Semyonov is in Russia: this junior officer will simply have to smuggle the toy in! Suffice it to say that Waring's covert odyssey to Moscow is but one of The Golden Child's many witty--and enigmatic--episodes. Near the Kremlin, he comes upon a line that makes him think he's back at work. The citizens, though, have assembled for another mummy altogether:

The park statues were covered with shrouds of straw to protect them against the cold, but the human beings stood there, wiping the frozen drops from noses and eyelashes, waiting with immemorial patience to see what they had been told was worth seeing. In an hour and a half they would be filing past the embalmed head and hands, and the ghastly evening dress suit, of Lenin.

On the surface, Fitzgerald's 1977 novel is a bona fide mystery, complete with a body in the library and a spot of garroting. But adepts of this author will prize it for its pixilated cast of characters and for its gentle, perfect assaults on pretension--whether academic, journalistic, or even gustatory. As ever, Fitzgerald is drawn to explore the power--and sheer inconvenience--of the emotions. No wonder The Golden Child's mysteries go so far beyond those of its genre. --Kerry Fried

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The Bookshop

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Since 1977, Penelope Fitzgerald has been quietly coming out with small, perfect devastations of human hope and inhuman (i.e., all-too-human) behavior. And now we have the opportunity to read "The Bookshop," her tragicomedy of provincial manners first published in 1978 in the U.K., but never available in the U.S. The Bookshop unfolds in a tiny Sussex seaside town, which by 1959 is virtually cut off from the outside English world. Postwar peace and plenty having passed it by, Hardborough is defined chiefly by what it doesn't have. It does have, however, plenty of observant inhabitants, most of whom are keen to see Florence Green's new bookshop fail. But rising damp will not stop Florence, nor will the resident, malevolent poltergeist (or "rapper," in the local patois). Nor will she be thwarted by Violet Gamart, who has designs on Florence's building for her own arts series and will go to any lengths to get it. One of Florence's few allies (who is, unfortunately, a hermit) warns her: "She wants an Arts Centre. How can the arts have a centre? But she thinks they have, and she wishes to dislodge you."

Once the Old House Bookshop is up and running, Florence is subjected to the hilarious perils of running a subscription library, training a 10-year-old assistant, and obtaining the right merchandise for her customers. Men favor works "by former SAS men, who had been parachuted into Europe and greatly influenced the course of the war; they also placed orders for books by Allied commanders who poured scorn on the SAS men, and questioned their credentials." Women fight over a biography of Queen Mary. "This was in spite of the fact that most of them seemed to possess inner knowledge of the court--more, indeed, than the biographer." But it is only when the slippery Milo North suggests Florence sell the Olympia Press edition of "Lolita" that Florence comes under legal and political fire.

Fitzgerald's heroine divides people into "exterminators and exterminatees," a vision she clearly shares with her creator--but the author balances disillusion with grace, wit, and weirdness, favoring the open ending over the moral absolute. Penelope Fitzgerald's internecine if gentle world view even extends to literature--books are living, jostling things. Florence finds that paperbacks, crowding "the shelves in well-disciplined ranks," vie with Everyman editions, which "in their shabby dignity, seemed to confront them with a look of reproach." One senses that classic hardcovers would welcome The Bookshop, despite its status as a paperback original. --Kerry Fried

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At Freddie's

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Age has indeed withered the proprietress of London's Temple School for child actors, but custom has yet to stale her infinite, cadging variety. Freddie--born Frieda Wentworth--is Penelope Fitzgerald's most marvelous sacred monster, a woman insanely devoted to her art. Over several decades she has foiled debt collectors, creditors, and bailiffs at every turn. What matter if Freddie's Covent Garden redoubt is freezing and falling apart, her own office-cum-bedroom a haven for must and dust, mold and mothballs? When one would-be financier has the temerity to display a balance sheet, she orders him to put it away, "in the tone she used to the local flasher." After all, this force of theatrical nature can always rely on actors and theaters for desperate, last-minute donations. On the other hand, it is 1963, and the school is threatened by others specializing in film and TV training, but so far Freddie is sticking to her Shakespearean guns.

The Temple's permanent staff consists of an unskilled handyman and Freddie's assistant and dresser, the possibly malevolent Miss Blewett. Its acting coaches include a man who's made his career out of understudying Nana, the dog-nurse in Peter Pan. Needless to say, the students are not impressed. To further trim expenses, Freddie has hired two new teachers from Northern Ireland. One, Hannah Graves, is qualified; the other, Pierce Carroll, decidedly not--but Freddie hires him for other reasons: "She had heard in his remarks the weak, but pure, voice of complete honesty. She was not sure that she had ever heard it before, and thought it would be worth studying as a curiosity." These two innocents are in academic charge of the young thespians, an egomaniacal, mostly mendacious lot. (In a stage school, after all, insincerity is a good thing.) But Freddie's does house one genius: 9-year-old, unknowable Jonathan Kemp. Even his guinea pig inherits his bad luck, and is soon devoured by one of the theater district's roving felines. Jonathan seems destined to be overshadowed by Mattie Stewart (later Stewart Matthews), a showoff who at least has the grace--even if it is manifested in spurts of violence--to know himself inferior. Meanwhile, we watch Pierce fall in love, hopelessly, with his colleague. Alas, he hasn't a chance against the dissipated actor Boney Lewis, though Hannah tries not to destroy him: "At the corner, she gave him a hug and a kiss, as one does to a cousin, or to the inconsolable."

At Freddie's, Penelope Fitzgerald's 1982 parable of the talents, constantly shifts between such despair and high comedy. Many Fitzgerald-philes feel that she reached her apex in her three European novels--Innocence, The Beginning of Spring, and The Blue Flower. In fact, she had already arrived there with this perfect novel of ideas, ideals, and oddities. --Kerry Fried

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So I Have Thought of You: The Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald

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