Customer Reviews

Offshore, Human Voices, The Beginning of Spring (Everyman's Library)

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Offshore, based on ten years spent living on a Thames houseboat that sank twice, did not work for me and I bailed by page 20. Its opening is chaotic and unfocused and the author fails to intimate that there is a story here worth following. The other two novels in this edition, however, are completely successful. We discern in her work the long shadow of Ivy Compton-Burnett, famous for acidic, bizarrely pointed dialogue, an inheritance Fitzgerald tempered with a tender respect for people on their own terms.

Human Voices, about working at the BBC during the war, is a fascinating and intricate series of interlocking stories, each serving to illuminate the others from a different angle. Fitzgerald is at her greatest here: she does not have the burden of artificially creating some past era, and her use of everyday trivia provides a richly textured tapestry of life and attitudes readers can connect with. The ending is perfect and perfectly Fitzgerald: tart, apt, sad, darkly comical, and more than slightly surreal.

The Beginning of Spring, concerning a British merchant family living in Moscow just before the Revolution, is simply marvelous. So much vivid detail, by turns minute or sweeping, put us right in the picture, yet, unlike Offshore, those details are firmly subsumed under a strong, affecting, and well-focused story. Satisfying, first-rate Fitzgerald.

Those who have not yet sampled this writer should start with the two Everyman's Library volumes, each offering three novels. The books are beautifully produced and comforting to hold, with good introductions and a chronology of the author's life.