What Book to Read?

The Blue Flower is one of those novels that everyone praises but I’ve never got round to reading. Then I saw that A.S. Byatt admires it, and I really enjoy her books (think Possession, The Children’s Book, and The Whistling Woman). Furthermore, Fitzgerald has been compared to Jane Austen, my all time favourite. So it seemed time to do something about it.

The Blue Flower (1995) is the last of Fitzgerald’s novels; she died in 2000. She didn’t begin publishing fiction until she was 60, and her early books were mostly related to her life experience. Of these, The Bookshop (1978) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, (she worked in a bookshop) and she won the Booker with Offshore (1979), a novel that takes place among the Battersea houseboat community, (she lived on a houseboat). She was equally successful when she began writing historical novels. The Beginning of Spring (1988) which takes place in Moscow in 1913, was short-listed for the Booker, as was The Gate of Angels (1990), about a young Cambridge University physicist, set in 1912. She missed out on a Booker nomination in 1995, but many critics (including A.S. Byatt) named The Blue Flower as the best book of the year, and it is regarded as her masterpiece.

This is the only one of her novels to deal with the life of a real person – Friedrich (or Fritz) von Hardenberg (1772-1801), the Romantic poet and philosopher known as Novalis. It concerns the time, before he became famous, when he fell in love with Sophie von Kuhn, who was then 12 years old. Fitzgerald has used Hardenberg’s letters, diaries and published works – and her imagination – to write about how it might have been.

So did it live up to the hype? Yes and no. At first I found it a very strange book, but then it grew on me. Fitzgerald’s prose is minimalist and dry. It seems at first only to touch the surface of things, and to present a distant and gently ironic view of the world. But when necessary, it can express deep emotions – mostly loss and disappointment. The content of the story also seems slight; small incidents in the daily life of an ancient but impoverished noble family in central Germany in the late eighteenth century. These are interesting in themselves, but also carry greater weight than at first glance, though without the deeper meaning ever being spelt out. The book begins, for example, with washing day – the only washing day of the whole year, implying a family of sufficient standing to have enough linen to last for the year. The structure of the story is as idiosyncratic as the style and content. Some incidents are described in detail, yet there are gaps in time and place. The whole cast of characters seem to flit in and out of the story at random, though each never loses his or her individuality. ‘How does she do it?’ asks Byatt. At least as much by what she leaves unsaid as by what she does say.

‘The Blue Flower’ is the title of an unfinished story by Hardenberg which Fitzgerald shows him reading aloud twice in the novel. I fail to grasp its significance, both as a fragment of narrative, and in terms of its place in the novel. It isn’t clear to me how much of the story reflects the letters and the diaries. Nor can I always understand why some incidents deserve the weight given to them. Why, for example, is there a chapter in which one of Fritz’s brothers nearly drowns? Is it because, as we are told at the end, he later died by drowning? Or because the near drowning really happened? Or for some other reason? Idiosyncrasy can be charming, but it can be annoying as well.

The comparison with Jane Austen is two fold. There is the dry wit, and the capacity to catch the essence of a society on a small canvass. But for me, there needs to be something more by way of plot before I’d seriously put it side by side it with Austen, or call it a masterpiece. And yet it does linger in the mind.

You can find out more about Friedrich von Hardenberg here.