The Gate of Angels

Good old Athenaeum Library came up trumps again, with a whole chunk of shelf devoted to Penelope Fitzgerald novels which I look forward to investigating in future. On the recommendation of the reluctant dragon, I started with The Gate of Angels. And what a treat it was!

Penelope Fitzgerald could teach some modern writers a thing or two about writing with precision. Each of her chapters is short, usually only a few pages, and the whole book is less than 200 pages long. And yet she packs an entire world, a whole society, a vivid moment in history, into each scene. Fitzgerald's writing is intensely cinematic; I could definitely see The Gate of Angels as a film. And she knows how to leave gaps for the reader's imagination to fill in. We see the characters act, but we aren't always witness to their thoughts and feelings. Even the happy ending has to be inferred as occurring after the end of the novel. This is fitting in a book which is about chance, luck and randomness, with a series of accidental events pushing Daisy and Fred in one direction then another.

I'm so looking forward to discovering more of Penelope Fitzgerald, even if The Bookshop sounds rather sad. There is a surprising amount going on in so few pages, which is infinitely preferable to the reverse, I think!