Much is left unsaid and left to the reader to imagine. How words are able to destroy words, and lives. Sketching slightly surreal, absurdist rules, she inventively illustrates how the law is ruthlessly turned into a cunning weapon, tailor-made by and for the ones in power to get their ways, incorporating raw institutional injustice.

Particularly colourful and striking is Fitzgerald’s farcical depiction of the representatives of the legal profession, preposterous and not of any use to Florence (‘The solicitor explained that rights were in no way affected by the impossibility of putting them into practice’). Hers was at such a low ebb that it no longer gave her the instructions for survival.ĭelightfully perceptive and witty, her prose parsed with gemlike bouts of irony and understatement, Fitzgerald deftly portrays the quirky characters populating this subtle tragicomedy, from the somewhat clumsy, quixotic, lonely outsider Florence to the crisis marking later middle age for the upper middle-class in East-Suffolk, ‘after which the majority became watercolourists, and painted landscapes’, the spiteful and scheming Violet and Florence’s bright and feisty shop assistant, the ten year old Christine Gipping. Will-power is useless without a sense of direction. She blinded herself, in short, by pretending for a while that human beings are not divided into exterminators and exterminates, with the former, at any given moment, predominating. Notwithstanding her innocuous kindness, in her optimist denial and determination, Florence refuses to give in to the lady’s wishes, and gossip, class and money issues, political and legal machinations and a poltergeist will sweep the small community in the battle of local loyalties, independency of spirit and authority. By purchasing the dilapidated, clammy ‘Old House’ for her bookshop, she almost parenthetically thwarts the plans of the local ‘first lady’ and patroness of all public activities in the town, Violet Gamart, who actually envisages the Old House not as a bookshop but as an art and music centre, worthy of competing with mighty Aldeburgh.

When she decides to open a bookshop in the dozy coastal Suffolk town of Hardborough (Southwold), she will have to find out that a kind heart is not of much use when it comes to the matter of self-preservation. Life is no bed of roses for the middle-aged widow Florence Green. She did not know that morality is seldom a safe guide for human conduct.Īs gentleness is not (necessarily) kindness, courage, hard work and virtue is not invariably rewarded, I learned as a child listening to George Brassens’s song about the poor brave little white horse that never saw spring.

Penelope fitzgerald the bookshop review