The Power of Small Things

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Several decades ago I was lucky enough - for just one term - to have an English teacher by the name of Penelope Fitzgerald, who helped a small group of us study E M Forster's 'A Passage to India' for our Oxbridge entrance. She was natural, funny, generous and off-the-scale bright, while allowing us teenagers to feel that we had brains too. We did not know, and she made no mention of the fact, that she also wrote novels for a living and had, just that year, WON THE BOOKER PRIZE. It was for her novel 'Offshore'. She was sixty three, and apparently commented after receiving the award: 'I knew I was an outsider'.

I share these facts because I think they say so much about Penelope Fitzgerald herself, and the way her tender, self-effacing personality informs her stories and her characters. As she remarked once, "I am drawn to people who seem to have been born defeated or even profoundly lost." Nowhere is this more beautifully depicted than in 'The Bookshop', a bite-sized gem of a novel that tells the story of Florence Green, a widowed middle-aged woman, who decides to fight down local opposition in order to fulfil her dream of opening a bookshop in the small coastal town of Hardborough.

Based loosely on Southwold, the implications in the fictional name of Hardborough quickly become apparent, partly for geographical and climatic reasons. A neglected town, isolated and exposed to the elements, it is not an easy environment in which to live. Yet, as soon as Florence arrives, she is drawn to - and quite undaunted by - the wild, often hostile weather on the East Anglian coast, and embraces the solitariness of the place; nor does she quail at having to eke out a meagre living from the very limited funds left by her late husband.

Far more challenging are the cold and closed hearts she encounters among the Hardborough community, many of whom are inherently set against Florence and her project from the get-go. At first, Florence has enough determination to be unfazed by this hostility. Honest, shy, certain of her own failings, she is used to being overlooked and under-rated, and readily finds reasons to forgive all the obstacles and lack of enthusiasm that soon begin to come her way. 'It was very good of them to ask me,' she tells herself, after an excruciating party for which she has made a monumental effort to dress and behave acceptably, only to be ignored and/or patronised; 'I daresay they find me a bit awkward to talk to.'

With a tiny dilapidated property called 'Old House' offering the perfect location for Florence's bookshop, she presses on eagerly with her scheme, managing to get as far as opening her door to a few customers. Even when setbacks mount, forcing what she hopes will be a temporary closure, she keeps going, displaying her own sweet nature and a steeliness of purpose that belies her bird-like frame and naturally timid demeanour. The reader wills her on. If there is any justice in the world, then dear, well-intentioned Florence Green and her modest dream deserve to triumph. There are some good souls in the community of Hardborough who share the same view.

Yet Penelope Fitzgerald is as fearlessly honest as she is brilliant. She knows that life offers no easy answers, especially not for the likes of 'small' people taking on 'big' forces. Tragic dynamics are in play, but somehow Fitzgerald lays bare all the nuances of comedy too, so that we sometimes smile even as we watch Florence suffer. There is a lightness of touch to every single sentence, even the quietly devastating final one that brings the novel to its close.



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