[.ca] Gate of Angels (ISBN 000654360X)

From Amazon.com:
Penelope Fitzgerald wanted to call her 1990 novel Mistakes Made by Scientists. On the other hand, she laughingly likened it to a Harlequin doctor-nurse romance. The truth about The Gate of Angels is somewhere in between. The doctor, Fred Fairly, is indeed a young Cambridge scientist, and the nurse, Daisy Saunders, has been ejected from a London hospital. If Fred is to win her love, he must make an appropriately melodramatic sacrifice--leaving the academic sanctum of St. Angelicus, a college where all females, even pussycats, are banished ("though the starlings couldn't altogether be regulated"). Daisy, however, suffers from a very non-Harlequin malady, the sort found only in Fitzgerald: "All her life she had been at a great disadvantage in finding it so much more easy to give than to take. Hating to see anyone in want, she would part without a thought with money or possessions, but she could accept only with the caution of a half-tamed animal." Self-protection is certainly not this young woman's strong suit, but we admire her endurance. At one moment, Fred points out that "women like to live on their imagination." Daisy's response? "It's all they can afford, most of them." Set in Cambridge and London in 1912, The Gate of Angels, then, is a love story and a novel of ideas. Fred, a rector's son, has abandoned religion for observable truths, whereas the undereducated Daisy is a Christian for whom the truth is entirely relative. The novel's strengths lie in what we have come to expect from Fitzgerald: a blend of the hilarious, the out-of-kilter, and the intellectually and emotionally provocative. She confronts her characters with chaos (theoretical and magical), women's suffrage, and seemingly impossible choices, and we can by no means be assured of a happy outcome. "They looked at each other in despair, and now there seemed to be another law or regulation by which they were obliged to say to each other what they did not mean and to attack what they wished to defend." Fitzgerald's novel also records the onslaught of the modern on traditions and beliefs it will fail to obliterate entirely: women as second-class citizens and a class-ridden society in which the poor suffer deep financial and moral humiliation. The author sees the present pleasures--Cambridge jousts in which debaters must argue not what they believe but its exact opposite--and is often charmed by them. But under the light surface, she proffers an elegant meditation on body and soul, science and imagination, choice and chance. Her characters, as ever, are originals, and even the minor players are memorable: one of Fred's fellows, the deeply incompetent Skippey, is "loved for his anxiety," because he makes others feel comparatively calm. Fitzgerald fills all of her period novels with odd, charming, and disturbing facts and descriptions. Some, like the catalog of killing medicines Daisy administers, are strictly researched and wittily conveyed: "Over-prescriptions brought drama to the patients' tedious day. Too much antimony made them faint, too much quinine caused buzzing in the ears, too much salicylic acid brought on delirium..." Others are the product of microscopic observation, that is, imagination. Fred's family home is in hyperfertile Blow Halt, a place where no one thinks to buy vegetables, so free are they for the taking. But within this paradise, his mother and sisters are sewing banners for women's suffrage, and nature launches a quiet threat: "Twigs snapped and dropped from above, sticky threads drifted across from nowhere, there seemed to be something like an assassination, on a small scale, taking place in the tranquil heart of summer." --Kerry Fried

ýI donýt say I wonýt Fredý:
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.

nipped in the bud:
A delightful novella, which should have been longer. The questions it sets up, about physics, the soul, and the body, could fill a thousand pages. I enjoyed the characterizations, as well as the love story, and would like to know what's ahead for these two souls.

There are more things in heaven and earth...:
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.

The most Jane Austen-like late Fitzgerald novel:
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.

Better than "The Blue Flower":
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.