Gate of Angels (Flamingo) [Paperback]

Penelope Fitzgerald (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 3, 1998 | Series: Flamingo

Beautiful reissue of this wonderful Fitzgerald backlist title, shortlisted for the 1991 Booker Prize In 1912 Fred Fairly is a Junior Fellow at the college of St Angelicus in Cambridge, where for centuries no female, not even a pussy cat, has been allowed to set foot ("though the starlings couldn't altogether be regulated"). Fred lectures in physics and the questionable nature of matter and worries about the universal problem known in Cambridge at the time as 'the absurdity of the Mind-Body Relationship'. To Fred this is tormenting rather than absurd. The young woman beside him when he wakes up one evening in the Wrayburns' spare bedroom might help resolve it, but how can he tell if she is quite what she seems? Fred is a scientist. To him the truth should be everything, and indeed he thinks it is. But scientists make mistakes. The Gate of Angels is a funny, touching and inspiring look at male-female relationships and the problems caused by thinking just a little too much.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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 --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

English writer Fitzgerald ( The Beginning of Spring ; Innocence ) displays a grace and wit that put her on equal footing with such better-known peers as Muriel Spark. Her own novel, shortlisted for the 1990 Booker prize, is set in the mannered quaintness of pre-WW I Cambridge, yet it goes far beyond the usual Wodehousean scenario of brittle dialogue and eccentric dons in flapping robes. The eccentric dons are by no means absent, but Fitzgerald's writing has a depth, resonance and delicacy that create a sense of genuine comedy rather than of farce. Fred Fairly, a junior fellow at St. Angelicus College, wakes from a bicycle accident to discover that, owing to the misjudgment of a good Samaritan, he has been put in a sickroom bed next to the young woman with whom he has collided. Having made the acquaintance of mysterious Daisy Saunders in this unlikely way, Fairly promptly falls in love with her, though as a St. Angelicus fellow he has pledged himself to a life of celibacy. One can count on Fitzgerald to resolve his dilemma in an unexpected fashion, and she is true to form as the novel swerves toward its satisfying conclusion.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Flamingo; First edition & printing in this form edition (January 3, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 000654360X
• ISBN-13: 978-0006543602
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,196,732 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars I dont say I wont Fred, October 11, 2000

By 

taking a rest - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Gate of Angels (Paperback)

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.

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A small miracle, May 5, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Gate of Angels (Paperback)

Penelope Fitzgerald is truly amazing. This novel is short, easy to read, and often very funny; at the end, you think "How charming!" and put it down. But it keeps echoing in your mind: no detail in the book is insignificant, and everything is subtly linked together to support its central themes. (Compare Pope Benedict's grace, the inscription on Aunt Effie's ring, and the angels on the college gate; or consider Fred's mother and sisters against Professor Matthews' seemingly irrelevant ghost story. And note Professor Flowerdew's qualms about the new atomic theory, which relies on the "unobservable" ... ) The book is far more moving than most novels five times its length, and leaves an indelible impression on the reader.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars There are more things in heaven and earth..., July 24, 2000

By 

Wayne Symes (Doha, Qatar) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Gate of Angels (Paperback)

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.