Penelope Fitzgerald

The moment between the past and the future is brought home to Zhenya Usvatov, the prosperous First Deputy of the Theatre Workers’ Union, when he wakes in his well-appointed dacha and turns on his Japanese radio. Tchaikovsky’s Sixth at this time in the morning! On TV he sees a black-suited orchestra sawing away – but the first violinist has been dead for six months: he remembers signing the widow’s pension form. Presumably this was the only film they could lay hands on. The date is 10 November 1982. Brezhnev has died. Zhenya Usvatov groans. Usvatov’s new appointment has not been confirmed, ‘If only he could have hung on for another month.’ Five days later, at the state funeral, Andropov is observed to be the first to scatter a handful of earth. But nothing is certain. The future is still terrifyingly open to history.’

Samuel Pink is brought up in an English country rectory in the 1880s. He knows that the Pinks are not his real father and mother. He believes that he is the illegitimate son of Queen Victoria by her servant John Brown, who must have ‘lifted his kilt’ on some unrecorded occasion. Everywhere, on tea-caddies and biscuit-tins, he looks proudly at images of his mother’s face.

‘The Stone Diaries’ (though there are in fact no diaries, they are said to have been lost) because everyone raised in the Orphans’ Home in Stonewall Township, Manitoba is given the name of Stone, because Mercy Stone’s husband, Cuyler Goodwill, works in the limestone quarries, because her neighbour, the dour Magnus Flett, comes from the stony Orkneys, because Mrs Flett is killed when she falls against the sharp stone corner of the Bank, because for all of us the living cells will be replaced in death by ‘the insentience of mineral deposition’. A train of imagery, then, which recalls the mermaid metaphors, ‘giving off the fishy perfume of ambiguity’ in Shields’s last novel, The Republic of Love. The present book is just as readable, but more disconcerting.

The poet is not a poet in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s new novel, and the dancer is not a dancer. ‘Although her movements were always the same – she waved her arms above her head, she ran now to the right of the room, now to the left – her audience obligingly saw what she wanted them to see. She was pleased, she ran faster, she attempted to spin round; her tread was not light, and she was flustered and breathing hard.’ The dancer aims to impress, but she is also self-deluded. The poet is not. ‘When she came upstairs she sat at this table and tried to write poetry. It came very hard. When she was small, words had flown out of her like birds; now they fell back into her like stones. Their hardness seemed to lacerate her, and often she had to rest her head on the table to recover before she could go on.’’

Banana Yoshimoto contributes a respectful preface to her book, dedicating it to her publisher, and thanking the manager of the restaurant where she supported herself while she was writing it and the professors who voted her a prize – ‘it made me so very happy.’ This dutifulness sounds traditional. Traditional, too, when you get to the novellas themselves, are the violent emotions restrained within cramped but manageable limits and the compelling need for analogy between the human predicament and the natural world. ‘I understood it from the colour of the sky, the shape of the moon, the blackness of the night sky under which we passed.’ ‘The sky outside was a dull gray. Waves of clouds were being pushed around by the wind with amazing force. In this world there is no place for sadness.’ ‘The scratching of our pens mingled with the sound of raindrops beginning to fall in the transparent stillness of evening.’’