This was published in 1990 (and was shortlisted for that year's Booker Prize).

Having discovered its author, Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000), last year, and having LOVED The Blue Flower, The Bookshop, and Human Voices, I was surprised to find myself struggling a bit with this one.

It's a love story. Kind of. But it's Britain. It's 1912. And he and she are from different classes, so you're not confident it's going to end well, even though the last paragraph is a door that's left ajar.

It's a historical novel. Kind of. Because this is Fitzgerald, it's all very understated, but you do learn quite a bit about British society in these years when Europe teetered on the brink of World War I.

To elaborate:

Part One is about Fred Fairly, and we find ourselves in the rather remote and rarified atmosphere of St Angelicus, the smallest of the Cambridge colleges, where he's a Junior Fellow. "Angels" is a male-only preserve: "As on Mount Athos, no female animals capable of reproduction were allowed on the college premises, though the starlings couldn't altogether be regulated." If you stay there, you can't marry. This is the first obstacle to a relationship with the as yet mysterious Miss Saunders.

Fred's job is all-encompassing. He has to teach, lend a hand with the library and other administrative tasks, act as assistant organist, and help to look after the collection of 15th-century musical instruments. But the hallowed halls are all a little fusty. There are formal dinners; there are debating groups like the Disobligers' Society, which talks about things like the existence of the soul. It's also the era of Ernest Rutherford and Ernst Mach, and free-thinking is in the air. (At one point Fred has to tell his father, a clergyman, that he's no longer a Christian. His father takes it in pretty good part.)

But we haven't totally sucumbed to rationalism. The Provost does a good line in ghost stories, and Dr Matthews, a medievalist, is sceptical about the effects of too much science: "[He] was amused by the Angels. Science, he thought, was leading them nowhere, and quite conceivably backwards."

The final section in this part tells us more about Daisy. Fred met her three weeks before. There was a road accident, involving the two of them, another cyclist, and a horse and cart. He and Daisy are sent spinning off their bikes, knocked unconscious, and (as Daisy is sporting a wedding ring) put in the same bed by their rescuers, Mr and Mrs Wrayburn. As soon as they're awake, Daisy puts this mistake to rest, and disappears. But Fred has been smitten.


A "real" book, this came from Ithaca Books, the lovely secondhand bookshop that nestles in the corner of Think & Tink


And one of the joys of secondhand books is the surprise bookmarks you unearth... French adult cookies, huh...?

Part Two shifts the focus to Daisy, and the novel really goes up a gear at this point.

Daisy grew up poor. Her father having disappeared, she grows up with her mother, and they regularly flit to keep ahead of the rent-collector. In the spring of 1909, the Selfridge Department Store opens in Oxford Street, offering an ideal opportunity for a bit of shoplifting (that bit reminded me of Kairos). Mrs Saunders dies soon after this West End outing, which Daisy worries had turned out to be all too exciting.

Anyway, Daisy applies to be a nurse. Admittance to this profession is not easy, she hears from another applicant, who's debarred because she's a single mother. Throughout, we see Daisy battling everyday sexism. She explains to one potential referee, for example, that she wants to learn how the body works. He replies: "You're quite wrong there, quite wrong, that's for doctors. Nurses, surely, shouldn't know how anything works."

And, indeed, when her references are accepted, she soon learns that the first duty of the nurse is absolute obedience...

The old/new pivot is apparent in the hospital too. Dr Sage, for example, is trusted "because he had set his face against new methods". Instead, he believes in "draughts": "Down in the dispensary, the engine room of the hospital, ranged in alphabetical order, were preparations of aceta (or vinegars), aquae (or waters), balsams, confections, conserves, decoctions, enemata, essences, glycerines, infustions, hypodermic liquors, oils, pepsins, resins, spirits, succi or juices, syrups, thyroid extracts, trochisii or lozenges, unguents, vapores, vina (or wines)."

Daisy's career doesn't last long, however. An attempt to help a man who is despairing because his suicide bid went wrong results in her dismissal. And, into the bargain, she picks up a pest. Journalist Thomas Kelly.

She decides to go to Cambridge, where Dr Sage has another clinic. But Kelly attaches himself, limpet-like, and her choices are limited: "'You need... [he tells her] a man of some kind. That's what I am, dearie, a man of some kind. I'll look after you, Daisy Saunders. I won't marry you, that's not my style, apart from being married already, but I'll look after you...' 'You mean you'll pay for one night at a hotel that don't ask no questions,' said Daisy, whose eyes were full of tears. 'Two nights, Daisy, three nights. You want to get used to it. What else can you do? I can't see there's anyone else wants you...' ... 'You'd better come, I suppose,' she said... He put his arm round her waist, fingering her. What a pair we make, she thought. He doesn't deserve any better, no more do I."


Lincoln Cathedral. Fitzgerald, who wrote this book when she was 74, may well have grown up with a sense of the era she's describing: She was born at the Old Bishop's Palace in Lincoln; her grandfather was Bishop of Lincoln; her mother was one of the first women students at Oxford; and her father was later the editor of Punch

Part Three takes us back to Fred, who is now clear he wants to marry Daisy, Angels' rules or no. First, he has to find her again, but he has a stroke of luck when she turns up back at the Wrayburns.

Their courtship is very mild. But even this is enough to put cats among pigeons. Mr Wrayburn starts to hint that Daisy may be threatening Fred's career; his family turn up, and don't know quite what to make of her.

The book has many of the amusing little exchanges that Fitzgerald excels at. This is one:

"Fred punted slowly upstream. In telling them that Daisy was a nurse and came from London, he had told them pretty well all that he knew. Mrs Fairly tried again.
"'Do you go much on the river in London, Miss Saunders?'
"'Yes, I love the water,' said Daisy. 'You can have a good time on the Gravesend Ferry.'"


Alfred, Lord Tennyson, another Lincolnshire literary figure

The business of the accident just won't go away, however. And Part Four brings us the court case. Which is where it emerges that Daisy has had some sort of liaison with Kelly (the mysterious "other cyclist"), and an assignation at Pett's Hotel. Fred is furious, not with Daisy, but with Kelly. In an uncharacteristically indecorous move, he knocks him out, and leaves him to recover in the Botanic Garden...

But Fred has learnt that you can't rely on life to be entirely rational. He tells his students: "Whatever you do, gentlemen, don't, as scientists, believe you are anything extraordinary. Don't allow yourself for a moment to feel anything like contempt for those whose minds work differently from your own. Their minds in fact don't work differently from your own. Don't tell yourself that their ideas are commonplace... You must face the fact that if another human being, whose welfare means considerably more to you than your own, behaves in a very different way from anything you had expected, then your efficiency may be impaired."

The final bit of Daisy's veneer is torn away when Fred goes to Dr Sage's hospital, and finds out that she's not a nurse (having left before finishing her qualification), but rather a ward-maid, whose job it is to do the ironing. And here's another tersely explanatory exchange:

"'But, Daisy --'
"'Well, what?'
"'It's all horrible. Pett's Hotel is horrible. You can take rooms there by the hour.'
"'Well, that's handy for some, said Daisy...
"'Kelly is horrible.'
"'Perhaps he wouldn't do for Cambridge, but it takes all sorts... I didn't count on meeting Kelly at Liverpool Street... But when he was there, even though he was dressed flash and I didn't like him, still he was better than no-one... His job's nothing to be proud of, but then he didn't have your advantages...'
"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."

Anyway, Daisy feels that her Cambridge sojourn is over, even though her prospects elsewhere are not good: "She had thrown away everything. She was deadly frightened that when she got to London Kelly would find her. But she was crying not from fear, but on account of the hurt she had done to Fred."

But we're left with one little glimmer of hope. Making her way through Cambridge, she happens on St Angelicus just in time to aid an ailing academic, whose cry of pain she happens to hear. And it just happens that this slight delay means she bumps into Fred, who is on his way home...

And after that? Well, Fitzgerald leaves it to you. Personally, I'm not hopeful. Cross-class relationships were (are?) awfully difficult (think The Return of the Soldier, or even Atonement...)

The book opens with a description of unusual winds in Cambridge. Winds that tripped the cows up, and left them contentedly lying on their backs, munching: "A scene of disorder, tree-tops on the earth, legs in the air, in a university city devoted to logic and reason." Logic and reason, we're told, can never stand in the way of love (or, as our characters will find out a couple of years later, of war). (This blogger, by the way, comments that we're rarely so sanguine about high winds these days -- a sign of the times.)



***

One of the things The Gate of Angels is good at is women. Aside from the day-to-day struggles of working-class Daisy (who's a great character, when all is said and done), we have the following mosaic pieces:

-- The women in Fred's family are supporters of the Women's Suffrage movement.

-- A rather nasty colleague of Fred's, Holcombe, makes it very clear that women like Daisy are regarded as fair game.

-- "In 1911 the Aerated Bread Company provided a Ladies' Room on the first floor of their tea-shops. It was one of London's first acknowledgements of the fact that there were now a multitude of women workers who wanted to sit down in peace and spend the money which they had earned, if only on a piece of toast."

-- Mrs Wrayburn is overwhelmed by food preparation duties: "Like most of her friends, she had prayed not to marry a clergyman, a general practitioner, or a university lecturer without a fellowship. All these (unlike the Army or the Bar) were professions that meant luncheon at home." Mrs Wrayburn studied for four years at Newnham, but women came out with nothing in those days. Now she deals with sinks full of dishes. At the court case on the bicycle incident, they insist on describing Mrs Wrayburn as a housewife: "'I should be a graduate,' she said, 'if the university allowed women to take degrees.'"

In general, it's a good picture of its time. Fitzgerald's uncle, who was later a codebreaker at Bletchley, was at Cambridge in the period she describes, "and she knew that its atmosphere, as he had conveyed it to her, would be juicy enough for a novel".

Peter Campbell is much more knowledgeable than I am about the scientific parallels the era holds: "Fred (who is a physicist) might accept the analogy that he and Daisy are like particles, usually kept apart by the gravitational pull of the social masses to which they belong (he is of the middle class, she of the working class) who are suddenly drawn together by a strong force -- the sort of force which only comes into operation when members of those classes are obliged to be very close to each other."



***

So... This was enjoyable enough. It has Fitzgerald's trademark humour. It makes a point.

But it came across as somehow abbreviated. Compressed, as is Fitzgerald's way, but less successfully so than her other novels.

Others are warmer in their praise. For Penny Dolan, it's "a delight of a novel", "a wonderfully brisk and compact piece of writing".

I'm more with M.A. Orthofer, who finds its leaps "disorienting", and with Anthony Campbell, who finds the general effect "muted".

I read somewhere, by the way, that this book is Cambridge's answer to Zuleika Dobson, but I'm blessed if I can find the origin of that quote (and, in any case, it's hardly a plausible claim).

All in all, I'll mark this as my least favourite Fitzgerald so far. But that absolutely won't stop my looking out for more of her titles.