Penelope Fitzgerald

 

I hope readers of the blog will agree that I tend to be generous in my praise of the large majority of books I review here. But having recently finished Penelope Fitzgerald's Beginning of Spring, I'll have to -- temporarily, at least -- change my tune. I was not impressed.

I came to Fitzgerald's work as a result of its praise; indeed, Spring was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. But there was very little here which moved me. For a start, this novel about Russia struck me as painfully generic. The sections about Moscow seemed superficial and could have swapped out, really, for any major city: had Fitzgerald set this book in Mexico City or Paris, I'm not sure the impact would have been profound. Nor do I think that executing that swap would have been that hard: the fabric of the novel is not so deeply set in Moscow that it cannot be untangled. 

And more than that: there is far too much dialogue in Spring. And much of it, I felt, was not well staged. It was simply call and response, without scaffolding to surround it. You might argue that artifice is not necessary in a modern novel, but I'd tend to disagree: there's a fine line between a novel and a play, and some of the sections of Spring veered toward the latter. 

Perhaps most disappointing for me were Fitzgerald's characters, who were, for the most part, as generic as their surroundings. By the end of this book, I didn't care much for their revelations, or realizations, or actions. They seemed two-dimensional at best, and without the wholeness that generates that connection between reader and imagined figure. This is a book about an English man named Frank, living in Moscow, caring for his children. That in itself struck me as stilted: Frank, really? 

If there was a connection here with Tolstoy -- which some critics have argued -- that was lost on me, because the most interesting characters in Spring are those with the most incomplete renderings. Frank's caretaker, for instance, seems to have an intriguing arc, but what motivates or compels her remains a mystery. 

All told, this is not a novel I would recommend, and it's one, truthfully, that confused me: the praise it has garnered seems to point either to portions I've misunderstood, or which have simply not moved me. Either way, I'd take a pass on Spring.