Town politics and a few poltergeists

Small-town life gets romanticised to a large extent by those of us who have roots in them but have to pursue livelihoods in bigger, more dynamic cities. I am hardly alone in returning to my hometown and imagining a life that could be several beats slower, that birdsong and a house with more square footage could be a possibility if I were to start something of my own there. A well-stocked bookshop perhaps.

Every now and then when the urge strikes me to scour the internet for commercial properties for rent and visualise shelves heaving with curated selections of fiction, I remember what happened to Florence Green, the protagonist of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop. There are but only a few stories that serve as a sobering reminder that small, quaint towns can be as difficult to navigate as big metropolises.

When The Bookshop came out in 1978, the reviewers sniffily accepted that Fitzgerald had written a good book but it was dismissed as being “women’s fiction”, among other things. It was eventually shortlisted for the Booker and Fitzgerald’s reputation grew in subsequent years as an author gifted with acute psychological insight into the motivations of people mired in quotidian conflicts with each other and the world around them.

In The Bookshop, Florence is a middle-aged widow and we find her at the start of the book spending sleepless nights in 1959 because of “…her worries as to whether to purchase a small property, the Old House, with its own warehouse on the foreshore and to open the only bookshop in Hardborough.”

The town of Hardborough is on the coast in East Anglia and it’s where Florence has lived for eight years. She has a small pittance she’s inherited from her dead husband and goes about trying to procure financing from the bank for her purchase of the Old House. Once she gets the building though, she finds that her hitherto anonymous existence in the town has vanished and she’s squarely in the sights of the local grandees and upper crust. From the start, one of them, Mrs Gamart, is not quite enamoured with Florence’s plan to open the bookshop. Mrs Gamart mentions that some of the townsfolk with means had wanted to purchase the Old House and turn it into an arts centre, not something so commercial as a shop.

If getting on the wrong side of the local culture influencer isn’t bad enough, the Old House also has a poltergeist that takes to rapping on the walls. Even as the spectre scares Florence and her young shop assistant, Christine, in the wider town there are attempts to undermine her enterprise.

Things come to a head when, on the advice of one of the most untrustworthy characters in town, Florence puts copies of Nabokov’s Lolita on display in the shop window. She attracts the ire of Mrs Gamart whose animosity under a polished veneer becomes absolutely venomous. The end of this darkly comic novel drives home the point that a thick skin and a shrewd sense of people’s motivations are necessary to succeed in business whether it be in a large city or small town. Being gentle and idealistic about one’s aspirations won’t help — especially when facing opponents like the politically connected Mrs Gamart.

Fitzgerald was well into her sixties when she found publishing success. Her works glow with a quiet genius that isn’t immediately apparent. You won’t find the showmanship and flourishes of 20th-century star authors in her books. But long after you’ve finished The Bookshop, the story and its characters will continue to haunt you. That, in itself, is the best possible endorsement of a writer’s skill and talent.

The author is a writer and communications professional. When she’s not reading, writing or watching cat videos, she can be found on Instagram @saudha_k where she posts about reading, writing, and cats.

That One Book is a fortnightly column that does exactly what it says — it takes up one great classic and tells you why it is (still) great.