The Bookshop

"In general, Fitzgerald’s study of the human psyche is quite outstanding. Her people are so real. And what she’s truly brilliant at is the depiction of everyday failure; she’s absolutely anti-heroic in every sense of the word. Yes, and she has a very fine sense of what she calls ‘the tribes of torturers’—there’s a passage in one of her books where she says of a terrible woman, ‘She belonged to the tribe of torturers; why pretend they don’t exist?’ The reason I chose the novel—because it’s not my favourite: my favourite is probably The Gate of Angels , or The Beginning of Spring —is because of Brexit . It gives us a picture of the mean-spiritedness and the small-mindedness of certain communities which perceive in people who are other or strange a target on which to place their own dissatisfaction. And that is what happens to Florence Green, a middle-aged widow, who decides to open a bookshop in this little East Anglian community, and is defeated by the sadism and malice of one of the principal characters there who contrives to spread ill will among the rest of the community. “I’m not only interested in the psychology of the individual, I’m interested in the psychology of society” I think that happened over Brexit. So I’m not only interested in the psychology of the individual, I’m interested in the psychology of the society: the ways in which society can pick up a mood which does not stand up to any kind of rational analysis. All this woman is trying to do is to run a bookshop in the village. She runs up against another woman, Mrs Gamart, who dabbles with the idea of running the shop as an arts centre—although she’s never done anything about it until now and didn’t really seem interested until Florence moved in. Mrs Gamart is much more powerful than Florence; she has ‘contacts,’ among them ‘parliamentary contacts’, and much more money—she lives in the ‘big house’—and by stealth and by spreading rumour and gossip and implying that when the other shopkeepers’ businesses are deteriorating it is somehow the fault of the bookshop, even though you could not possibly make any rational connection between the two things, she turns the whole community against Florence. This woman engineers a feeling of hostility so strong that Florence is driven out. Yes, and they call her Mrs Green—that’s one of the ways in which they alienate her. And Mrs Gamart’s campaign is supported not just by her money and influence but also by the law [she finally brings a case against Florence for stocking Lolita ]. Fitzgerald is a great novelist on ordinary people and the courage of ordinary people but also on the ways that the powerful can exert their collective influence in ways that can do such harm. And that’s how I relate it to the psychology of Brexit: people were told lies which fed into their own feelings of dissatisfaction. There’s nothing like our own feelings of dissatisfaction for making us seek targets to account for it that are outside ourselves—Carl Jung had a great term for it, he called it the ’shadow’. Although this woman has done nothing to any of the other people in the community, because they themselves are suffering, it’s very easy, because she’s a bit strange and doing something unusual, to make her, like the foreigners in our midst, the source of their own dissatisfactions. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter She’s also got a sense of the mystical and of another dimension. Just before she died, she wrote very beautifully about my novel Miss Garnet’s Angel —she described it as ‘strange, unexpected and haunting.’ She has a real sense of the intangible. And sometimes the intangible is a public mood, as it is in The Bookshop , but sometimes it’s something more mysterious that erupts or invades everyday life bringing a different dimension."