The Bookshop: A Sort of, Kind of, Love Story

“She told me once, when we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of a book are like a roof and four walls – a house. More than anything else in the world, she loved the moment when she finished a book and the story kept playing in her head, like a most vivid dream.” --

Voiceover by Julie Christie as the mature woman who decades before worked in Florence Green’s ill-fated bookshop.

The film is a rarity: In genuinely inhabiting Penelope Fitzgerald’s well-received 1978 novel of the same title, the movie’s opening and closing tell a better – fully-framed, clarifying, much more satisfying – story.

Furthermore, the screenplay (by Isabel Coixet, who is also the film’s director) delivers clashes of priorities and temperament which (along with camera moments) offer messages about respect, chivalry, jealousy and rivalry, deceit and duplicity – and, inferentially, about book-banning.

Some pre-release reviews find fault with the film’s pace, which is gauged as too slow. Yet, the pace allows for lingering over the evocative scenery; allows for film frames of the covers and spines of actual books that actually caused controversy and even some outrage. The books singled out by camera work play on the movie-goer’s memory and conscience.

Award worthy

The adaptation was filmed in Spain and Northern Ireland. Whoever scouted the locations and buildings should get an award.

As to Oscars and Golden Globes, these are probably longshots: The film might receive nominations for best cinematography, maybe even best production design – though odds may be against a film without explosions and supercharged weaponry, without supernatural encounters and creatures, and lacking requisite mass mayhem.

The background string-instrument score seems apt, punctuating scenes to allow for quiet reflection on what has just transpired.

I would not be surprised if the film received notable nominations in the category Best Adapted Screenplay. The screenwriter made a rather dreary, cruel and depressing story explicable and satisfying.

I would not be surprised if Bill Nighy received a nomination as Best Supporting Actor, for his role as Edmund Brundish; a role that is greatly expanded from that of the book – to good purpose and great effect.

Most appropriately, his Brundish does not have the physical bounce that made Nighy’s portrayal of the past-his-prime rocker in Love Actually so entertaining and sympathetic. We can sympathize and may even empathize with the abandoned husband he portrayed in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel movies.

Nighy’s portrayal of Edmund Brundish may have moviegoers recall the reserved and lonely civil servant he played in The Girl in the Café – in which a young woman brings out a life force that had been submerged deep, if it had existed at all.

In The Bookshop, Nighy’s Brundish is brought out of his seclusion by a young woman who dares to open a bookshop in an unbookish town. Resistance from the town’s authority figure fosters a friendship between Brundish and the young woman; treachery heightens it.

The Bookshop – the novel

While the plot, the storyline, is ho-hum sad, Penelope Fitzgerald did reward the reader with descriptions of the town, several of its inhabitants, and the Old House which is the new owner’s vehicle for sharing a kind of pleasure and escape not available in that community. The shop would also be a personal statement of independence.

Florence Green, the new owner, is a young widow who is determined to survive, financially and psychologically, in tribute to the loving memory of her husband. She had come to think of survival as her “duty to make it clear to herself, and possibly to others, that she existed in her own right.”

The bookshop was to be the flagship of her independence. From a banker’s skepticism and patronizing, the film has her burst from that resentment to a rocky windswept beach, where, the voiceover tells us, Mrs. Green feels “angry, proud, impatient, and terribly alive. When it comes to pursuing her dream, she is not a woman who frightens easily.”

We are also told, “Her courage was her determination to survive.”

However, the novel tells us that her character flaw was that she had “a kind heart” which she will come to realize “is not of much use when it comes to the matter of self-preservation.”

The year: 1959

The locale: Suffolk County, England. The town, with its harbor and windswept marshland coast along the North Sea, is aptly named (in Charles Dickens fashion) Hardborough.

The task: to make habitable the damp and drafty Old House which had been vacant for seven years (with half its tiles off, with jackdaws nesting in its rafters and nooks, amid “the stank of rats”).

The enterprise: to convert the 500-year-old place built of “earth, straw, sticks, and oak beams” into a sanctuary of a sort, as a bookshop whose presence might be received like “a breath of sea air far inland.”

Florence Green’s widows garb: “a winter coat that might just be made to last another year.”

Her rival, her nemesis

Mrs. Violet Gamart – a Cruella de Vil incarnate – rules Hardborough with a genteel behind-the-scenes ruthlessness.

The great hall of her mansion (“The Stead”), which overlooks and “overbears” the working-class community below, is “boarded with polished elm” and “breathed the deep warmth of a house that has never been cold.”

But Mrs. Gamart, “patroness of all that was of public value in Harborough,” is cold to Florence Green’s plans for salvaging the Old House. She is a treacherous opponent. In her mansion, “silver photograph frames on the piano and on small tables permitted a glimpse of the network of family relations which gave Violet Gamart an access to power far beyond Hardborough.” These provide a foreboding: The reader hopes that Florence Green, the underdog, will somehow triumph, even as forces will be lined up to thwart her at every turn.

Gamart has her lawyer lodge formal complaints about the gawkers who crowd at the bookshop’s large street-side window to study the display of an “unduly sensational novel by V. Nabokov.” The display attracts “undesirable attention… is an obstruction unreasonable in quantum and duration to the use of the highway.” The film astutely captures the correspondence between Mrs. Green and her disloyal lawyer by having them narrate their point-counterpoint.

The next undermining of the bookshop is done through the auspices of the Education Authority whose investigator has been tipped to the fact that Mrs. Green’s employment of a precocious eleven-year-old girl may technically violate the British child-labor law (The Shops Act).

The Old House Bookshop, “like a patient whose crisis is over, but who cannot regain strength, showed less encouraging returns.” The infusion of capital Mrs. Green expected on the sale of a complementary property is delayed and delayed by the inexplicable work-stoppages of laborers, who may well be commercially beholden to the Violet Gamart.

A competing bookshop opens in a nearby town. It’s an investment by a well-to-do who has no remote connection to or interest in literature. But the moneyed fellow does happen to be under the sway of Violet Gamart.

A never-before-thought-of public lending library finds a home in Hardborough, in a dwelling that Violet Gamart generously purchases for that very purpose.

The nemesis exercises her eminent domain

The fatal blow to Mrs. Green’s hopes and dreams is delivered by Violet Gamart’s nephew, a legislator who (with the complicity of a Parliamentary draftsman) manages to sneak through a private bill that empowers local councils to “purchase compulsorily” certain kinds of property. The Old House just happens to be that kind of property, and Violet Gamart just happens to fund Hardborough’s local council.

As for just compensation to Mrs. Green, a double-crossing dandy (a Trojan Horse, in a way) provides access to building inspectors who, on a particular day, just happen to find water in the basement of the Old House. That finding renders the Old House uninhabitable, and thus makes it and Mrs. Green ineligible for compensation.

Her courage and endurance are tested again and again, until despair yields to resignation; eviction to defeat.

Promise and Opportunity dashed

Mrs. Green represents positive thinking and light. She brought hope, inexperience and innocence, to the community whose economy and spirits had been flagging. “Opening the shop gave her, every morning, the same feeling of promise and opportunity.”

The virtuous and trusting Mrs. Green will not be able to forever blind herself to the perfidy that Violet Gamart will line up against her. The screenplay and voiceover pick up on a most significant “tell” from the novel:

“Florence had managed to live her life, thus far, by pretending that human beings are not divided into exterminators and exterminatees, with the former, at any given moment, predominating.”

In one of its psychological turns, the novel observes, “Will-power is useless without a sense of direction. Hers was stuck at such a low ebb that it no longer gave her the instruction for survival.”

Her knight in well-worn dark-gray three-piece tweed armor

The reclusive Edmund Brundish is a descendant of an ancient and landed Suffolk family. In his stately but musty house, he “lives as closely as a badger in its sett.” He makes it a point of not going out.

The vines and weeds that overgrow the gates, grounds, and steps to his once-grand house have us think of Satis House where Miss Havisham had long mired herself in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations.

Until the arrival of Florence Green, Brundish had no kindly expectations. “He defied the world by refusing to admit it to his earth.” He tells Mrs. Green, “People like Violet Gamart have made me who I am.”

He “adored books with the same passion with which he detested his fellow man.” He writes Mrs. Green a letter of congratulation and encouragement: “No one has been courageous enough to sell books in Hardborough. You are doing us an honour.”

Their correspondence continues through the book’s pages, and is effectively and convincingly delivered by Brundish (Bill Nighy) in a subdued but affecting voice, from behind stacks of books piled on a dining-room table that hasn’t hosted a dining in four decades.

From behind those piles of books, the pale, dignified hermit asks Mrs. Green to send him, from time to time, what she judges to be “a worthy literary novelty.” He has his distinct, well-set preferences which he recites in an uninflected, briefly hesitating manner: “In the case of biographies, it is better [a pause] I find, if they’re about good people. Whereas novels are much more interesting if they’re about nasty people.” Thus an endorsement of Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel.

The novel’s message well transferred

The screenplay makes subtle but especially significant commentary in the first batch of books that Mrs. Green has delivered to Brundish – neatly wrapped in paper, with the parcel neatly tied in string. There’s Ray Bradbury’s 1953 dystopian novel about suppression via book-burning, Fahrenheit 451, and Kingsley Amis’ 1955 novel about a librarian in a small seaside town, That Uncertain Feeling. The filming of very particular books, clearly showing certain titles, provides a kind of Lit quiz for those inclined to connect the depictions with the messages presumably intended by the filmmaker.

In response to the first batch of delivered books, Brundish writes (with Nighy narration), “Dear Madam, please spare yourself the trouble of sending more books of poetry and spuriously-complicated novels. Please, at your earliest convenience, send more books by Ray Bradbury.” In happy compliance, there follows The Martian Chronicles, and, eventually, but too late, Dandelion Wine.

The film, like the novel, uses Nabokov’s Lolita as the wedge, the vehicle for the shop’s demise.

The film is dedicated to the late novelist and art critic John Berger. We are given to wonder if the books he championed informed many of the film’s particular selections, or if he ever encountered Violet Gamart-like discord.

Friendship and Affection – Loneliness speaking to Loneliness

The novel describes Brundish as “Shabby, hardly presentable, he was not the sort of figure who could ever lose his dignity.” Bill Nighy’s creased face, tall stiff stature, and controlled voice inhabit the role – giving it all the shyness, regret, and sincerity that the character was surely meant to have. Yes, maybe a nomination for Best Supporting Actor?

The screenplay and the direction are faithful to the novel’s characterization of the tea at which Brundish stiffly, awkwardly, hosts Mrs. Green: “Loneliness was speaking to loneliness.” The novel’s description of the table and its servings are worth the read.

The novel’s moments well captured

The novel captures certain people’s footprints and voices:

Even though he never reads books, Mr. Raven, the fishing boat helmsman, helps Mrs. Green set up the shop and offers tips as to its workings. “The wet footprints of his waders looked like the track of some friendly amphibian across the floorboards polished more than once for the next-day’s opening.”

In the novel, we are told that Gamart’s dull, stiff, unformidable, husband “followed his thoughts, which indeed, were transparent in their dogged progress from one difficulty to another.”

The correspondence between Brundish and Mrs. Green is enacted, as is the correspondence between Mrs. Green and her less-than-loyal solicitor.

Still another reason to see the movie is the very brief seashore scene between Mrs. Green and Kattie, the cad’s BBC girlfriend. Her doubts about his feelings for her and her doubts about his feeling for anyone are kindly juxtaposed to Mrs. Green’s loving feelings for her husband who died fifteen years before, in the War.

And still other reasons to see the movie are scenes of the eleven-year-old helper, whose observations and suspicions are delivered with even more appeal than what I sensed from the novel.

Treachery, Entrapment, heighten Friendship

The film shows us how degenerate and diabolical someone can be. Milo North is a ne’er-do-well lay-about, who supposedly has some BBC fame. He’s a cad, a Judas, who intentionally undermines the unsuspecting Mrs. Green’s goodwill and her shop’s success by recommending that she offer Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita to her quite parochial constituency. Working in consort with Violet Gamart, he is so dastardly and she is so vengeful that we dread the bookshop’s undoing. We foresee the downfall even as “hidden behind the front-window shutters, stacks of Lolita's are being arranged in pyramids like tins in a grocery.”

In a last-ditch effort to put Violet Gamart off her treachery, the elderly but chastely-smitten Edmund Brundish takes a heroic walk to The Stead. (At the very end of this quest, moviegoers will want to watch for what he has carried with him in the pocket of his overcoat.) As he goes into battle for his lady fair, the rigor has his face take on “a curious slatey pallor, as though he had been bleached by the sea.”

So stricken, Mrs. Green’s champion still manages to bring up the compulsory purchase bill that was surely engineered on Gamart’s behalf. He challenges Gamart’s thinking that the Old House should be put to historic and cultural purposes befitting its heritage. In the film, as in the novel, Brundish declares, “Old age is not the same thing as historical interest. Otherwise we should both of us be more interesting than we are.”

In this face-to-face, Brundish was “conducting a conversation according to rules she was not at all familiar with.” Taken aback, Violet Gamart does not yield.

For all her power and influence (bought and paid for) one wonders if any of those tuxedo-ed men and 1950s high-fashioned ladies who cocktailed at The Stead ever felt truly at home and welcomed. Used, exploited, parlayed, yes. Perhaps that was precisely what they were there for. We recall that Nighy’s Brundish prefers novels about “nasty people.”

A memory of dignity

In a scene that might well be excerpted for showing at awards ceremonies, Mrs. Green (Emily Mortimer, with a searing vehemence) discharges Violet Gamart’s dolt of a husband who has been dispatched by Mrs. Gamart to dishonor the memory of Brundish. Emily Mortimer’s facial expressions and her rebuke are just what he deserved. Sad, but surely audience-pleasing.

Violet Gamart’s vindictiveness is unrelenting. The film shows a final insult added to the heaped-upon-and-heaped-upon injuries orchestrated by Violet Gamart, through minions, lackeys, henchmen, and supplicants.

But then there is a circling back, and forward. With narrator Julie Christie continuing the voiceover, the film delivers a retrospective and a perspective: “Florence Green had fulfilled a dream, and they had snatched it away from her. But what she passed down was something no one could ever take away from her – her courage. It was that courage and her passion for books that she bequeathed to me.”

The concluding moments of the film reward with a most heartening, gratifying, visual update, which restocks our personal shelves with hope, and vindication.

The concluding voiceover kindly affirms the simple pleasure and companionability that Florence Green felt and hoped to share:

“How right she was when she said, ‘No one ever feels alone in a bookshop.’”