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A review by arirang
The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald
4.0
In my review of Penelope Fitzgerald's The Gate of Angels I praised "Fitzgerald's wonderfully compact prose. In 160 pages she manages to tell a (simple) story, create an evocative sense of historical place, introduce us to some memorably baffling characters and explore a number of powerful themes.
....
Against that, the novel suffers from, to the reader at least, oblique (at least to the reader) developments and characters, although ultimately that is a function of Fitzgerald's brevity and a part of her charm. "
I could - indeed I have! - simply cut and paste this for this review, and out of the 5 of Fitzgerald's books which I have read, it mostly closely resembles The Gate of Angels.
As always with Fitzgerald, she has a wonderful ability to provide the one-line character sketch. The fussy sister-in-law of Frank, the main character: "Frank got the impression that Grace always talked about damp." His purposeful wife: "even her curling hair seemed to spring up her for head with determination."
And beautiful sentences. This when the Chief Compositor is absent from Frank's print works: "Hand printing, whose rhythm was still that of the human body, went adrift with the disappearance of the pacesetter, assumed always to be on duty as the given condition of the whole process."
One key obvious difference is the setting - pre revolutionary Russia. There is something quintessentially English about the settings of her other novels (Blue Flower obviously excepted): the conservative countryside (The Bookshop), cloistered Cambridge (The Gate of Angels), or eccentric houseboat life (Offshore).
Here, I had mixed views as to whether Fitzgerald was successful.
She provides similarly adroit character sketches for the Russian characters, and even Moscow itself:
"Dear, slovenly, mother Moscow, bemused with the bells of its four times forty churches, indifferently sheltering factories, whore houses and golden domes, impeded by Greeks and Persians and bewildered villagers and seminarians straying on to the tramlines, centred on its holy citadel, but reaching outwards with a frowsty leap across the boulevards to the circle of workers' dormitories and railheads, where the monasteries still prayed, and at last to a circle of pig-sties, cabbage patches, earth roads, earth closets, where Moscow sank back, seemingly with relief, into a village."
And she manages to pack in a lot of interesting detail of Russian life (e.g. that windows were literally sealed with putty for the winter and the forced opening of the windows marks the beginning of spring), capturing well the flavour of a country where nature is implacable and the authorities capricious:
"In a country where nature represented not freedom, but law, where the harbours freed themselves from ice one after another, in majestic sequence, and the earth's harvest failed unfailingly once in every three years, the human authorities proceeded by fits and starts and inexplicable welcomes and withdrawals"
But, against that, most of the main characters are British by origin and at times it's easy to forget the setting. At times it seems like the Russian and period details are mere facades over an English comedy of manners, although in a sense that reflects Frank's own character and situation, as flagged from the outset:
"Frank had been born and brought up in Moscow, and though he was quiet by nature and undemonstrative, he knew there were times when his life has to be acted out, as though on a stage."
Overall, not as strong as Offshore or City of Angels, but enjoyable nevertheless, and perhaps the funniest of the 5 of her novels that I have read.
....
Against that, the novel suffers from, to the reader at least, oblique (at least to the reader) developments and characters, although ultimately that is a function of Fitzgerald's brevity and a part of her charm. "
I could - indeed I have! - simply cut and paste this for this review, and out of the 5 of Fitzgerald's books which I have read, it mostly closely resembles The Gate of Angels.
As always with Fitzgerald, she has a wonderful ability to provide the one-line character sketch. The fussy sister-in-law of Frank, the main character: "Frank got the impression that Grace always talked about damp." His purposeful wife: "even her curling hair seemed to spring up her for head with determination."
And beautiful sentences. This when the Chief Compositor is absent from Frank's print works: "Hand printing, whose rhythm was still that of the human body, went adrift with the disappearance of the pacesetter, assumed always to be on duty as the given condition of the whole process."
One key obvious difference is the setting - pre revolutionary Russia. There is something quintessentially English about the settings of her other novels (Blue Flower obviously excepted): the conservative countryside (The Bookshop), cloistered Cambridge (The Gate of Angels), or eccentric houseboat life (Offshore).
Here, I had mixed views as to whether Fitzgerald was successful.
She provides similarly adroit character sketches for the Russian characters, and even Moscow itself:
"Dear, slovenly, mother Moscow, bemused with the bells of its four times forty churches, indifferently sheltering factories, whore houses and golden domes, impeded by Greeks and Persians and bewildered villagers and seminarians straying on to the tramlines, centred on its holy citadel, but reaching outwards with a frowsty leap across the boulevards to the circle of workers' dormitories and railheads, where the monasteries still prayed, and at last to a circle of pig-sties, cabbage patches, earth roads, earth closets, where Moscow sank back, seemingly with relief, into a village."
And she manages to pack in a lot of interesting detail of Russian life (e.g. that windows were literally sealed with putty for the winter and the forced opening of the windows marks the beginning of spring), capturing well the flavour of a country where nature is implacable and the authorities capricious:
"In a country where nature represented not freedom, but law, where the harbours freed themselves from ice one after another, in majestic sequence, and the earth's harvest failed unfailingly once in every three years, the human authorities proceeded by fits and starts and inexplicable welcomes and withdrawals"
But, against that, most of the main characters are British by origin and at times it's easy to forget the setting. At times it seems like the Russian and period details are mere facades over an English comedy of manners, although in a sense that reflects Frank's own character and situation, as flagged from the outset:
"Frank had been born and brought up in Moscow, and though he was quiet by nature and undemonstrative, he knew there were times when his life has to be acted out, as though on a stage."
Overall, not as strong as Offshore or City of Angels, but enjoyable nevertheless, and perhaps the funniest of the 5 of her novels that I have read.