The Blue Flower, England and Other Stories and Fallout

After enjoying Penelope Fitzgerald's "Offshore" (a book club choice) and "The Bookshop", I was looking forward to reading her prizewinning novel "The Blue Flower". But what a disappointment. She had obviously done an enormous amount of research into the life of Fritz von Hardenberg (the future "great romantic poet and philosopher") at the end of the eighteenth century. But turning this into a novel fell into the trap where most of what happens is pretty mundane and repetitive. So we get lots of dates and what looks like verbatim conversations taken from various documents. At it's heart is his love for twelve year old Sophie von Kuhn, something that I found quite distasteful, even for those times. However there are occasions when the author's trademark wit and lightness of touch produce some wonderful sentences: "but now he was a married man, they said, he had someone else to do the thinking for him". And later "Everyone knows how best to move a piano, or rather, how it should be moved". But these are few I'm sorry to say.

I always prefer a traditional novel to a book of short stories, but as Graham Swift is one of my favourite writers, I could not resist "England and Other Stories", a collection of twenty five very short pieces. The problem now is that they are now very difficult to recall. I guess it is because it is the last one that sticks in the memory, a stranded car on a deserted road at 5.30am. But all the others were captivating at the time, always ingenious and poignant. Nearly every time you want to hear more of the story, but I guess that is the point of this particular format.

For anyone interested in the theatre (and that's me), this is a terrific read. I loved "The Outcast", the first novel from Sadie Jones and "Fallout" is equally good. Mainly set in London in 1972, her latest book is a well plotted story of friendships and affairs where the young characters try to make their various ways in the theatre. I felt the book pulled you in to their world and I could relate really well to their dingy flats and little money that reminded me of my days in Chiswick. This was an intoxicating novel with a stirring ending.