Ending in Misery: Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop: book and movie

 This was up for the Booker Prize.

Obviously, spoilers will be involved.

This a good book—a short one—although I’m not sure I’d read it again. It was recently made into a movie as well with interesting variations that may or may not be considered significant.

Summary

Basically, Florence, a woman has always dreamed of opening a bookshop and has done so in a small seaside town, around the publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s famed and controversial Lolita since that figures in, somewhat. She goes through legal expense to rehabilitate a house that had been abandoned for over five years.

After months, she’s finally able to open the shop and invited to attend a party of the local important person. She thinks it is to celebrate the opening of her bookshop. Instead, she is told that the house, though long abandoned, had been intended to be used as a local arts center that might also present lectures. In the movie, Florence gives the offer to reroute her dreams no quarter. In the book, though, Florence entertains the idea until she realizes that she is not intended as the arts center’s leader but Milo North. More on this later.

She befriends Mr. Brundish, the town’s recluse, who has had rumors spread about his divorce although the truth is less romantic. He's is a shut-in and does not leave his house.  In the book, he is highly respected for some unnamed reason (perhaps for his age and living so long in the village). The town’s respect for the recluse, therefore, impresses the town that he corresponds with the bookshop owner. It is made clear that the recluse has difficulty moving—which makes his sudden demise less surprising. Florence asks him for advice on whether she should sell Lolita in town, and he says yes, because it’s a good book—the controversy is irrelevant to whether it should be sold.

Florence also befriends a young girl, Christine, who works for Florence at the shop. Christine plays a larger role in the movie than the book—not just that she’s young and working, and just because she’s working in the same shop as the book Lolita is sold in. Mrs. Gamart appears to have, we readers suppose, brought in an investigation whether the girl should be employed at the bookshop.

Mr. Brundish knows what Mrs. Gamart is up to and leaves his house to tell her to stop, but he dies on the walk back home. In the movie he tells Florence what he plans to do. In the book he does not. This is critical in that in the book, the owner accepts the Colonel’s lie (his? or his wife’s?) that Mr. Brundish supported the local arts center over the bookshop, which wouldn’t make sense if she thought about it since the guy’s a shut-in. In the movie, she knows and doesn’t confront the Colonel about the lie but does yell at him to get out.

Meanwhile, the bookshop has to close since Mrs. Gamart has a nephew in parliament who creates a law about historical buildings being taken from owners for historical importance. The house is old but, as the recluse pointed out, has no historical relevance, but it’s still taken from the owner. Worse, she has to give the house away since the house uninhabitable (even though she lives in it) because the basement has water in it. In the movie, the owner had hoped to start a bookshop in a different town with her inventory, but the inability to sell her home and shop leaves her destitute. Her book inventory has to be sold off.

Quote

 "You're working too hard, Florence," Milo said....

"Surely you have to succeed, if you give everything you have." 

"I don't see why. Everyone has to give everything they have eventually. They have to die. Dying can't be called a success."

Analysis

What’s interesting is the ending—the utter desolation we feel for the woman. In the movie, there’s the consolation prize—if it can be called that—of the young girl setting the house on fire and being influenced to read herself and to start a bookshop of her own. Not so in the book. She believes the important person that even her one ally in town disapproves of her bookshop.

This is where the quote comes in. What does it mean to work hard and yet not succeed? We have this expectation that all things work out for good if we only work hard, but what if it doesn’t? This is the potent and poignant point of the work.

I asked others what they thought of such an ending: Would it disappoint them? One offered that that’s life, another that her working hard to achieve her goal alone should be the consolation prize. Trying is the thing. Yet I don’t think we’re meant to feel that since we are made to feel each successive blow for our protagonist’s complete dismantling.

Another possibility is that maybe the bookshop owner’s problem was her unwillingness to work within the current power structure. But that’s hard to swallow since the power structure here is corrupt—willing to lie and connive to get what they want (for free). Moreover, in in the book the owner does consider making the shop into an arts center for a brief while until she learns she’s to be excluded. Perhaps she could have pursued this angle a little harder than she does, but her complete demise—the financial tragedy of her life’s dream—seems to be the thing we are to mourn.