Within the last year i've developed the nasty habit of doing two things in bed i never had before: eating and watching television. i know. Disgusting to read, debilitating to experience - as these can only be called habits by the kindest or least caring minds and are in fact addictions of the first order. They do only harm and as the compulsion becomes and less manageable, so the satisfactions become more and more illusory.If i were a dog or some other trainable entity, the idea would be to reward an alternative good behavior - preferably one that could be offered on the spot as a distraction from the bad behavior. Some schools would also encourage the use of an irresistible treat as well - to first distract the beast and then make the prospect of doing the good thing more compelling than continuing the bad one. etc.Which brings us to Penelope Fitzgerald. My friends here at GR actually read on a regular basis. They are forever posting their exploits and my email is full of announcements. Indeed it is full of little else, since my life out of bed is cyclicly as empty, self-indulgent and deplorable as my recent habits in it. At any rate, last evening i picked up The Gate of Angels - which i had acquired shortly after reading Fitzgerald's Booker Prize-winning Offshore during my vacation in September. It is safe to say that for the duration of my engagement with what is so often referred to as a "slim little volume" that i am not really allowed to use the phrase but because i want to i will, i will be both distracted from and rewarded for my eschewing of both late night eating and television in bed.This woman's prose and thought - the combination and shape of each - are so delightful that i don't really care what happens. Well of course that is not entirely true, it is simply that i already know i like what she does with a story and with characters and with place and with time and with setting, etc. I know i am guaranteed to have a good time and never feel that amusement is being had at the expense of profundity. I don't know enough about books or writing to say this without apologizing in case i'm foolish for doing so, but the only other writer whose every sentence is so laden with tone and revelation is Austen. Well - all that and humor - only Fitzgerald's is not the irony of distance and delight at hypocrisy, it is a compassionate and affectionate embrace. It is unblinking tenderness.So we have here - or i do - joys more than equal to the addictions i so carelessly let steal my time and compromise my health. She has written 9 books and this is my second. I may make all the way through til spring.
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.
The Gate of Angels follows the lives of Fred Fairly, Junior Fellow at a fictional Cambridge college, and Daisy Saunders, by turns nurse probationer, house maid, and ward maid. Predictably the lives of Fred and Daisy intersect by accident during a bike accident on a country road. The novel centers around the cause and effect of the accident.Although one of the more skeptical members of my Women Fiction Writers class likened it to a Harlequin doctor-nurse romance (and she's right,in a practical sense), if this sounds like a conventional romance, rest assured that it is not... This is what I love about Fitzgerald; she takes the ordinary and makes it profound. Makes it mystical. According to some makes it damn near perfect. If Fred is to win Daisy's love, he must make an appropriately melodramatic sacrifice-leaving the academic sanctum of school, a college where all females, even un-assuming kitties, are banished ("though the starlings couldn't altogether be regulated"). The intersection of Fred and Daisy is not a simply a boy meets girl by accident story. Literature is full of those and quite frankly they bore me. Cotton candy for the mind. It is rather a collision of the science and religion with ample mystery, romance, and history thrown in. Atoms and ghosts, angels and villains, certainty and chance, love and jealousy, reason and imagination, all figure prominently in Fitzgerald’s world. And a collision between any two of them can change the course of a life, or of life itself. While a bit more romantic then my tastes tend to run, I highly recommend this book.
—Marissa
I didn't get this book at all. I even had to have the ending explained to me because it seemed like the book I had was a misprint and I thought the book got cut off before the story was finished!Fred Fairly and Daisy Saunders are the main characters in this love affair/novel....Fred is a Cambridge student questioning faith and in search of science and "truths". Daisy is a nurse who seems to have lots of bad luck but is apparently very attractive because men are always falling for her. Fred is one of them, although I never understood why he fell in love with her. They meet in a funny bicycle accident when they wake up naked in bed together after their resucers mistakenly took the unconscious couple to be married. (The book does have lots of English humor and is enjoyable to read for the author's description of England during 1912's, the suffrage movement, religious ambiguousness) But the ending, the ending.......
—Gail
The title gave me pause.But there were no supernatural chicks, so it was okay. This was my favorite of my Fitzgerald binge. Really good. Funny. Forster-ish.Here's a quote:"When the whole of the men's ward had been persuaded to face the morning, the patients washed, wounds dressed, the windows facing the world open an inch and a half, those away from the wind open six inches, all of them two inches less than in the night, when the gas jets were burning, the abdominal cases on their backs, the apoplepctics on their face, the fractured skulls on their sides, the broken limbs raised on blocks (or at the end of the ward, where the blocks had run out, on tin bowls), the coughs hushed, the morbid curiosity about the screen cases quelled, the steak-and-kidney pudding smuggled in by No. 23 (to keep up his strength before his operation) quietly removed, and the bed-covers all smooth, all white, all blameless, all blank, all clean, there was a moment of balance and harmony, scarcely real, when nurses and probationers knew themselves as artists."(Okay, so maybe there are some angels, but Fitzgerald doesn't push this line too hard.)I always love a catalogue, but it's particularly apt here where one of the characters has just gone into nursing, and even without the bit about artists at the end of the sentence, you know that she is good at her job. She is calm and efficient; she is proud of this body of knowledge she has absorbed; she knows the rules, but also how to improvise (tin bowls); she sees her patients as a group, but also as individuals (No. 23). You can tell she loves her job, and also that she isn't burnt out, disillusioned, or disappointed yet. Genius.
—Rose Gowen
