Chiara Ridolfi

C.K. Stead

• Innocence by Penelope Fitzgerald
  Collins, 224 pp, £9.95, September 1986, ISBN 0 00 223105 0
• The Dresden Gate by Michael Schmidt
  Hutchinson, 152 pp, £9.95, September 1986, ISBN 0 09 165510 2
• First Fictions: Introduction 9 by Deborah Moffat, Kristien Hemmerechts, Douglas Glover, Dorothy Nimmo and Jaci Stephen
  Faber, 255 pp, £3.95, August 1986, ISBN 0 571 13607 9
• Continent by Jim Crace
  Heinemann, 154 pp, £4.95, September 1986, ISBN 0 434 14824 5

Penelope Fitzgerald’s Innocence is set in Florence, the principal characters are Italian, and I kept asking myself: how is it done? She knows quite a lot about Italian society: but more important, she has somehow got inside her Italian characters, so that when a young Englishwoman appears on the scene she really seems a foreigner and not, as one might expect, the focus of the novel’s consciousness. Imagination is part of the mystery; the other part is pace. This novel seems to impose its own slow pace on the reader. Probably that means one has a sense that nothing we are told is insignificant. It has, not opacity, but density. It is a book that never seems to settle back, as so much currently admired fiction does, into a conventional exercise, fiction as a pastiche of itself.