The Gate of Angels

Rating:
Summary: "The prospect of an alternative."
Review: "The Gate of Angels" by British novelist, Penelope Fitzgerald, is set in 1912. The plot concerns the relationship between two very different people who meet under less-than-perfect circumstances. Fred Fairly is a Junior Fellow at the small university, Saint Angelicus--a place where "no female animals capable of reproducing were allowed on the college premises." In his capacity as a Junior Fellow, Fred is supposed to remain a single man, and that's probably just as well. He leads an almost monastic lifestyle in cramped university quarters. He's the son of a clergyman, and is experiencing a crisis of faith amidst his mother and sisters' enthusiasm for the Suffragette movement.

Daisy Saunders is from an impoverished working class background. She lives alone with her ailing mother who cooks horse hooves for the nasty grey gelatinous gravy they both survive on. Daisy begins working at age 15, and she commonly logs 12-hour days in a dark, airless room. Daisy longs to be a nurse, but as a woman from the working class, there's little hope that she'll ever achieve that goal. Daisy is destined for exploitation by the class system that will deny her a chance to prove herself. This is an age in which character and brains meant far less than one's class.

The novel begins with Fred Fairly and his life at Saint Angelicus. Fred is a rather stuffy young man, and unfortunately the sections of the novel that deal with Fred are almost insufferably dull. I was struggling with the novel--forcing myself to have the mental energy to finish it, when the novel shifted gears and introduced Daisy. Daisy appeared, and the novel suddenly improved. She's a wonderful character, principled, hard working, and dedicated. The character of Fred seems rather anemic next to Daisy. At the point of Daisy's entrance into the novel, I became riveted to HER story, and I had the sensation that I was reading a very Somerset Maugham-esque novel. The chapters concerning Daisy are alive and have a ring of authenticity that is sadly lacking in the initial section of the novel. The archaic nursing techniques add absolutely fascinating detail to the story. Penelope Fitzgerald created another marvelous female protagonist in her novel "The Bookshop", and that book, is in my opinion, Fitzgerald's far superior work--displacedhuman


Rating:
Summary: Heavy on the versimilitude
Review: I can't remember where I first heard of Fitzgerald, although I suspect it was from one of the well-read subscribers to Rondua, the Jonathan Carroll mailing list. She is not a magic realist or fantasy author (as far as I can tell from reviews of her work and the present volume), although the book in question could be considered a ghost story it one wanted to interpret it that way. Of the authors of my acquaintance, she most resembles Robertson Davies in style and form. I don't think that I am creating a relationship based on subject material, although I must admit that Davies also wrote a couple of novels of love and the university, as well as a collection of ghost stories.

The year is 1912. Fred Fairly is a Young Fellow at Cambridge's St. Angelicus College, which has fairly strict ideas on the proper conduct of its members, including a requirement of non-marriage. While biking, Fairly collides with an unlit cart and is injured. Upon regaining consciousness, he finds himself in a bed with a fellow victim, who, by circumstance and a gold ring on her fourth finger, is mistaken as his wife. Fred finds the prospect not displeasing.

In other hands--say P. G. Wodehouse or Thorne Smith--such a plot would be filled with spirited high jinx, including mistaken identities and timing difficulties. Fitzgerald's humor is not of that sort. Like Davies, it derives less from exaggeration and more from verisimilitude. This is not to say that there are not amusing passages. I especially enjoyed Fred's family: his suffragette mother and two younger sisters and his put-upon father, the Rector.

This is Fitzgerald's eighth novel, and her ability in story and sentence construction is masterful. Although I found this book to be a little dry for my particular taste, I expect I will try a different vintage of hers at some later date.

Rating:
Summary: Better than "The Blue Flower"
Review: I was unsure about this book because I wasn't that moved by Fitzgerald's "The Blue Flower" but "Gate of Angels" really enthralled me. There is a lot of humor and affection here, and also an echo of Evelyn Waugh in the college setting. I have the feeling that I will read this work several more times with increasing enjoyment.

Rating:
Summary: nipped in the bud
Review: I've read most of this author's other books and really liked them. This one was a bit too strange for me. I have to say the ghost story took some imagination--Fitzgerald has a lot of preoccupation with the supernatural--she must have had a few occult experiences. Anyway, I could follow the book and saw what she was doing, but unlike others, I didn't find it all that funny and I didn't ENJOY it like The Bookshop, or Offshore or Innocence. To me it seemed deadly serious and I had to force myself to finish it. it may be a lack of familiarity on my part with Cambridge and that era, but this one is getting donated to the library.

Rating:
Summary: A small miracle
Review: Penelope Fitzgerald is truly amazing. This novel is short, easy to read, and often very funny; at the end, you think "How charming!" and put it down. But it keeps echoing in your mind: no detail in the book is insignificant, and everything is subtly linked together to support its central themes. (Compare Pope Benedict's grace, the inscription on Aunt Effie's ring, and the angels on the college gate; or consider Fred's mother and sisters against Professor Matthews' seemingly irrelevant ghost story. And note Professor Flowerdew's qualms about the new atomic theory, which relies on the "unobservable" ... ) The book is far more moving than most novels five times its length, and leaves an indelible impression on the reader.

Rating:
Summary: ?I don?t say I won?t Fred?
Review: That declarative double negative is about as definitive as the various parts of this story ever seem to be. When I reviewed "The Blue Flower" I said Ms. Fitzgerald didn't hand the story to you. In "The Gate Of Angels" I'm still trying to decide what the reader was supposed to find, what resolution we were supposed to arrive at. One Commercial Review suggested the end was left for us to decide, and while that may sound like an easy out from a wraith like ending, it is quite reasonable.

Ms. Fitzgerald is meticulous in what she writes, or perhaps what she only implies in this story. A portion of the story centers on debating, with the participants arguing that position which they personally do not believe. Good deeds are punished, perception though erroneous, too is punished, and when one character falls ill and while being helped exclaims "Surely it can't be...?" again it is a negative, not because the help is proffered, but because of the makeup of the individual who has walked on the grass.

I believe as with "The Bookshop" Ms. Fitzgerald unfolds her story much as it would happen were it true. Sometimes we fear a confrontation, only to find it existed in our minds only. Family that we feel we should know better than all others can surprise and shock. Her books are not all neatly tied up with contrivance like most, not everything is resolved, mistakes and wrongs remain, and all is not fixed.

For anyone who has not yet had the pleasure of reading one of this lady's works, a clarification is important. Comparing anything she writes to commercial supermarket checkout romance novels is patently absurd. This Authoress writes at a level that is universally admired by her peers and Professional Critics alike. To make the earlier comparison of her work can be described most charitably, by hoping that someone who never opened one of this lady's books made the comment. Were this to appear at the cinema it would be a stretch to get much past PG. This lady is a writer of distinction, not a purveyor of mindless trash.

Rating:
Summary: Diamond in the Rough
Review: The canon of great literature - Melville, Hawthorne, Marquez, Morrison, Dickens, Austen, etc. - could really use some modernity. Fitzgerald is the best of any contemporary author that I've found (a professor that I had in college taught only Penelope Fitzgerald in his "Contemporary English Literature" course). It's amazing how much substance can be found in books that never exceed 200 pages. "Gate of Angels," I think, is her swan song - although "The Bookshop" is the best overall read.

Rating:
Summary: There are more things in heaven and earth...
Review: This is a lovely book. Penelope Fitzgerald was a subtle writer. She had a marvellous gift for conveying character and setting with the minimum of fuss. Consequently, her novels are quite short and easy to read. `The Gate of Angels' gives us England at the beginning of the 20th Century. The advances of Rutherford and Mach (among others) were being disseminated. Scientific rationalism was to the fore. This is chiefly represented in Fitzgerald's central character, Fred Fairly, a junior fellow at a Cambridge College. However, his chance meeting with Daisy Saunders begins to challenge his view. While Fitzgerald never explicitly says so, the implication is clear: even in a world where science is thought to explain everything, there are some aspects of that world which will not bow. Some may find the lack of resolution frustrating. However, enough has been said to reasonably leave any further consequences to the readers' imagination.

Rating:
Summary: The most Jane Austen-like late Fitzgerald novel
Review: This seems to me the Fitzgerald novel that is most akin to Jane Austen. The reader wants the right pair to couple (I'm not convinced the couple in _Innocence_ is the right pair; in many other Fitzgerald novels there is no right pair, and the one here is open to question). The irony and syntax seem Austenian, though the epistemological status of atomic physics is not directly addressed in anything by Jane Austen. Certainly, there are unaffluent clergymen aplenty in Austen, and damsels who don't recognize the match the reader recognizes. In Austen there are also plenty of unmarried males who are also slow to recognize their appropriate partner. Daisy is not socially appropriate (if they wed, he'll be marrying down), but Fred Fairly is certain he must have her.

There is a plot, including a court case (also a ghost story), so The Gate of Angels is more like _The Bookshop_ than the other three late Fitzgerald novels (the four not seemingly based to some extent on her experience of particular times and places). Fitzgerald had a phenomenal gift for sketching characters. She was able to develop characters more fully than she did any in The Gate of Angels. I'd like to know how Fred's sisters got on, for instance. Or something of the "private life" of Professor Flowerdew. Sometimes less is not more! Even for someone who was a genius of concision.

Rating:
Summary: The most Jane Austen-like late Fitzgerald novel
Review: This seems to me the Fitzgerald novel that is most akin to Jane Austen. The reader wants the right pair to couple (I'm not convinced the couple in _Innocence_ is the right pair; in many other Fitzgerald novels there is no right pair, and the one here is open to question). The irony and syntax seem Austenian, though the epistemological status of atomic physics is not directly addressed in anything by Jane Austen. Certainly, there are unaffluent clergymen aplenty in Austen, and damsels who don't recognize the match the reader recognizes. In Austen there are also plenty of unmarried males who are also slow to recognize their appropriate partner. Daisy is not socially appropriate (if they wed, he'll be marrying down), but Fred Fairly is certain he must have her.

There is a plot, including a court case (also a ghost story), so The Gate of Angels is more like _The Bookshop_ than the other three late Fitzgerald novels (the four not seemingly based to some extent on her experience of particular times and places). Fitzgerald had a phenomenal gift for sketching characters. She was able to develop characters more fully than she did any in The Gate of Angels. I'd like to know how Fred's sisters got on, for instance. Or something of the "private life" of Professor Flowerdew. Sometimes less is not more! Even for someone who was a genius of concision.