[In the following review, Raban lauds Fitzgerald’s ability to write as if from first-hand memory instead of historical research, especially in her Human Voices.]

If Penelope Fitzgerald has ever fossicked in the stacks of the London Library in order to research the background for her novels, there is no trace of her labors in the books themselves. She always writes as if from first-hand memory. She cannot actually have lived in Germany in 1792, in Cambridge in 1912, in Moscow in 1913. Born in 1916, Fitzgerald still appears too young to have acquired the abundant, cosmopolitan knowledge of the world that irradiates her best work. She may well have been in Florence in 1955, and she probably worked for the BBC in 1940; but whether she is treating the recent past or the distant past, in England or elsewhere, she seems able to recollect it, effortlessly, with all the random, off-center details that memory alone can usually supply.

It is instructive to see what she admires in other writers. In the current issue of the new British quarterly Books and Company. Fitzgerald is to be found singing the praises of The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett:

In a few pages Jewett establishes forever the substantial reality of Dunnett’s landing. We know it, we have been there, we have walked up the steep streets, we know the sea air. … Jewett knew all about fishing and small-holding and cooking haddock chowder, about birds, weather, tides and clouds. She had a wonderful ear for the Maine voice, breaking the immense silences. She quotes, more than once, what her father said to her: “Don’t write about things and people. Tell them just as they are,” and she understood the natural history of small communities.

These are all Fitzgeraldian virtues, especially the last one. Her own understanding of “the natural history of small communities” as if the communities were tide-pools, to be investigated with shrimp-net and magnifying glass—lies at the heart of her fiction.

She conducts her novels like scientific experiments involving a precise historical moment, a lavishly remembered physical habitat, and an ill-assorted bunch of human beings—accidental inhabitants of their place and their time. Though the outcome of each experiment is complex and often contradictory, the initial question that sets it in motion is simple. In The Bookshop it is: can the widowed Florence Green make a success of running a bookstore in the sour townlet of Hardborough on the East Anglian coast in 1959? In Offshore, it is: will the tatterdemalion community of Londoners, living aboard their Thames barges on Battersea Reach in the early 1960s, sink or float? In The Blue Flower, the question seems to have been resolved before the book starts: Fritz von Hardenberg will become the poet Novalis. But one of the great pleasures of the novel is one’s discovery of how very easy it would have been for Fritz not to have become Novalis.

In Fitzgerald’s bracingly stoic view of the world, things could always have been otherwise. Contingency rules. The last two sentences of The Gate of Angels make the point:

She must have spent five minutes in there, not much more. The slight delay, however, meant that she met Fred Fairly walking slowly back to St. Angelicus.

Those five minutes may or may not reverse the apparent outcome of the novel, which finds chaos theory in its infancy in the Cavendish Laboratory.

The tone of the novels is of a piece with their cool, experimental structure. More than any novelist I can think of, Fitzgerald aspires to a scrupulous disinterestedness as she observes the goings-on inside her books. She cherishes hard data, in the form of dialogue and facts about weather, architecture, domestic routines, professional expertise, clothing, voices. Figurative language is a rare and highly significant luxury for her. She carries spareness of description to an extreme. A paragraph by her often reads as if every other sentence had been omitted: the reader hops, oddly, from recorded fact to recorded fact, and has to work quite hard to intuit the connections between them. It is like being at a dinner party full of strangers, all of whom know each other well; you find your way by hunch and guesswork. The effect is disquietingly lifelike.

At a time when nearly all contemporary fiction assumes a comfortable solipsism as a natural condition of existence, with every novelist busy creating his or her “own” world, Fitzgerald insists, unfashionably, that the world is the place to write about, and that the lives of her characters continue independently of the novelist’s capacity to observe or create them. This is not a modest philosophical position to occupy. It turns Fitzgerald into a radical dissenter from the literary mainstream.

In her watchful detachment from the events in her books, she is a classic ironist, in H. W. Fowler’s happy definition of irony as “a form of utterance that postulates a double audience, consisting of one party that hearing shall hear and shall not understand, and another party that, when more is meant than meets the ear, is aware both of that more and of the outsiders’ incomprehension.” She is always requiring her readers to be that second audience; and, for those who make the exacting grade, Fitzgerald is the funniest writer in English now alive.

Her first book, published when she was fifty-nine, was a biography of the painter and designer Sir Edward Burne-Jones. Her second book, The Knox Brothers (1977), was in effect the natural history of Penelope Fitzgerald, an engrossing study of the family tide-pool in which she grew up. Her father E. V. Knox, and his brothers Dillwyn, Wilfred, and Ronald, were a daunting quartet, and (one would guess) a hard act to follow. Both of Penelope Fitzgerald’s grandfathers were Anglican bishops—solid pillars of the educated English upper middle class. Her father, who wrote under the name “Evoe,” was a famous humorist who became editor of Punch at a time when the magazine was still a British institution, the Church of England in mirthful mood. Her uncle Ronald caused a family scandal by converting to Romanism (“Poping,” as it was called), and metamorphosing himself into the gorgeous figure of Monsignor Knox, who, like his close friend Evelyn Waugh, sang wittily for his supper at the great Catholic houses of the land. Her uncle Wilfred remained within the C. of E. as an Anglo-Catholic “Socialist Christian,” taking vows of poverty and celibacy, and trying to reform “the church of the rich.” Her uncle Dillwyn, a classicist and mathematician, became a cipher expert, a key figure in the Enigma project at Bletchley during World War II.

Between them, the brothers wrote theological books, detective stories, translations of Greek poetry and the Bible, autobiographies, mathematical papers, pamphlets, feuilletons, satires, newspaper columns, comic sketches, and manuals of devotion. It was four years after the death of her father in 1971 that Penelope Fitzgerald published her Burne-Jones biography—a very late and tentative beginning to what has become a spectacular literary career.

Being born a Knox must have been a complex fate, at once deterrent and liberating. Fitzgerald’s childhood and youth brought her into contact with a huge cast of English notables. Through the pages of The Knox Brothers passes almost everyone who was anyone: Waugh, of course, along with such disparate figures as Alan Turing and William Temple the Archbishop of Canterbury, Maynard Keynes and Ivor Novello, Lytton Strachey. Hilaire Belloc, Harold Macmillan.

She is a novelist for whom a broad knowledge of the world and its workings is as essential as it was to Thackeray or George Eliot. Her own native habitat—the London haute-bourgeoisie of the 1920s and '30s (a period, interestingly, in which she has so far not set a novel)—must have afforded extraordinary opportunities for the apprentice observer. More than that, it helps to explain the sturdy intellectual framework of her books. with their easygoing grasp of the language of philosophy and science.

Fitzgerald is the least academic of writers—far less so than, say. Iris Murdoch, whose novels can sometimes read like diverting illustrations to a knotty article in Mind. Fitzgerald’s work is alive with the play of ideas, wielded with confident lightness, as if they were the stuff of ordinary civilized conversation. She has written engagingly of how the young Ronald and Wilfred Knox used to wrangle with their friends and brothers over cocoa in the smoking room of the bishop’s palace in Manchester, “snapping at the gaiters in a cloud of dust,” as Ronald later put it. In her novels, one is always in the smoking-room, never in the lecture hall.

It has taken nineteen years for Human Voices her fourth novel, and one of her best and funniest—to get published in the United States. The habitat is Broadcasting House on Great Portland Street, headquarters of the BBC, a temple of the arts and sciences, personally dedicated by Sir John Reith to Almighty God. (I am translating from memory Reith’s grandiose Latin inscription, which runs in a frieze around the cathedral-high lobby.) The historical moment is 1940—in Britain, the darkest year of the war, when the German invasion was hourly expected. The central characters are a job-lot of PAs—program assistants, mostly young women in their teens and early twenties, drawn from all over England to work as dogsbodies for their distracted male bosses.

The animating question of the book is drawn from Fitzgerald’s version of the BBC’s own wartime mission statement:

Broadcasting House was … dedicated to the strangest project of the war, or of any war, that is, telling the truth. Without prompting, the BBC had decided that truth was more important than consolation, and, in the long run, would be more effective. And yet there was no guarantee of this. Truth ensures trust, but not victory, or even happiness.

Can an organization such as the BBC, described here as “a cross between a civil service, a powerful moral force, and an amateur theatrical company that wasn’t too sure where next week’s money was coming from,” tell the truth? Can its individual members tell the truth to themselves or to each other? And with what consequences? So Fitzgerald sets her experiment in motion.

For the natural historian of small communities, the Byzantine corporate structure of the BBC proves a glorious field of study. Somewhere on an upper floor of the building lives God Himself, the Director General, or DG, a figure so remote that he is never seen in person by the characters in the book, though one of his lieutenants, ADDG, does make a fleeting appearance BH (Broadcasting House), a drab honeycomb of offices and studios, is divided into a multitude of independent fiefdoms, under the command of jealous departmental heads like DPP and RPD. Truth, as conceived in one chamber of the honey-comb, emerges as brazen falsehood when expounded in another chamber.

For Sam Brooks, the Recorded Programmes Director, truth resides in perfect aural fidelity. His master project, which goes under the provisional title of Lest We Forget Our Englishry, is to record the authentic noises of life in England before the anticipated invasion. In the company of Dr. Vogel, a German refugee and “the greatest expert in Europe on recorded atmosphere.” RPD roams the countryside in the department’s official black Wolseley, capturing for posterity such sounds as wheezing English lungs in the first chill of autumn, on aluminum discs, “all 78s … coated on one side with acetate whose pungent rankness was the true smell of the BBC’s war.” One particular national treasure is the creaking of an ancient church door:

“What we have been listening to—patiently, always in the hope of something else coming up—amounts to more than six hundred bands of creaking. To be accurate, some are a mixture of squeaking and creaking.”

“They’re all from the parish church of Hither Lickington.” Sam explained eagerly. “It was recommended to us by Religious Broadcasting as the top place in the Home Counties What you’re hearing is the hinges of the door and the door itself opening and shutting as the old women come in one by one with the stuff for the Harvest Festival. The quality’s superb particularly on the last fifty-three hands or so. Some of them have got more to carry, so the door has to open wider. That’s when you get the squeak.”

“Hark, the vegetable marrow comes!” cried Dr. Vogel, his head on one side, well contented.

An American reader might suspect that Fitzgerald has gone over the top here. Having spent a good portion of the 1970s in the company of sound-fetishists from BH’s radiophonic workshop, I declare the passage to be a nugget of masterly realism. Sam Brooks—childish and fanatical in his pursuit of true sound, insulated from the larger world by his “seraglio” of Junior Temporary Assistants—was and is a form of life that flourishes extravagantly in the many-chambered labyrinth of the Corporation.

His whole existence, though, is threatened by a directive that drifts down through the building from a higher authority, to the effect that truth is Live and not Recorded. The news is broken to him by DPP:

“The object of the meeting was to cut down the number of recordings in news transmissions—in the interests of truth, as they said. The direct human voice must be used whenever we can manage it—if not, the public must be clearly told what they’ve been listening to—the programme must be announced as recorded, that is, Not Quite Fresh.”

The conflict between live and recorded truth comes to the boiling-point when General Pinard visits BH to speak to England after the fall of France. Pinard, an Anglophile, and a familiar figure in horseracing circles at Newmarket, Ascot, and Epsom, is the government’s preferred alternative to the spiky and egotistical Charles de Gaulle. Talking without notes, on air not on disc, Pinard delivers a speech that is one of the triumphs of the novel—a paragon of comic pace and timing, beautifully judged in its effect on the reader as Pinard moves rapidly from warm patriotic sorrow to the demand that England surrender forthwith to the Germans:

“When the Germans arrive, and at best it will be in a few weeks, don’t think of resistance, don’t think of history. Nothing is so ungrateful as history. Think of your selves, your homes and gardens which you tend so carefully, the sums of money you have saved, the children who will live to see all this pass and who will know that all governments are bad, and Hitler’s perhaps not worse than any other. I tell you out of affection what France has learnt at the cost of terrible sacrifice. Give in When you hear the tanks rolling up the streets of your quarter, be ready to give in, no matter how hard the terms. Give in when the Boche comes Give in.”

A terrible fit of coughing overwhelmed the microphone.

“He’s overloading,” said the programme engineer, in agony.

It is typical of Fitzgerald’s sureness of touch that one recognizes with pleasure the small, unflagged details of the general’s French-inflected English, like “quarter” for “town” or “neighborhood.”

But the wireless sets of England have been silent for the duration of Pinard’s broadcast, because Jeff Haggard, DPP, has pulled the plug on him, warned in advance of the drift of the speech by two words, spoken by the general on his arrival at the studio: “Soyons réalistes.” The truth, DPP judges, will not be served by the general’s brand of realism: in 1940, England’s only hope lies in the grandiose unrealism of Churchill—“the courageous drunkard whom you have made your Prime Minister,” as Pinard dubs him. Silence, Fitzgerald more than once reminds us, is often truer than human voices.

The corporate debate (or, rather, the collision of prejudices) about truth-telling is conducted far over the heads of the young women in RPD’s seraglio whose lives occupy the foreground of the novel. It is part of Fitzgerald’s experimental bent that she has always been interested in adolescents, in personalities not fully formed, such as the students in The Blue Flower, the young actors in At Freddie’s, the girls Chiara and Barney in Innocence. Observing teenagers harden, uncertainly, into the shapes that they will assume as adults is one of the driving preoccupations of her work. So here Fitzgerald holds her magnifying glass to Lise, Vi, Della, and Annie, the pliant Junior Temporary Assistants, whose characters are in the process of being permanently molded by the BBC’s peculiar war.

One girl in the seraglio, Annie Asra, the daughter of a widowed Birmingham piano-tuner, emerges as the single most important voice in this novel of voices. She is a born truth-teller. She has perfect pitch—a gift both useful and dangerous, in an institution dedicated to sound-broadcasting—and speaks in the flat adenoidal accent of Selly Oak, a Birmingham suburb. To the dialect of self-protective irony, worn like a camouflage uniform by the middle-aged men of the BBC, Annie brings a puncturing literalism. On her first assignment to a producer, she remarks amiably to him that “you talk so daft.” But daft talk is the lifeblood of Fitzgerald’s BBC. The whole crankish, high-minded, admirable, and absurd enterprise is kept going by a language as rich in euphemisms and evasions as Mandarin Chinese. Broadcasting House is almost next door to Looking-Glass House, and Annie Asra is a close cousin to Lewis Carroll’s Alice.

She turns out to be an adroit philosopher. When Eddie Waterlow, the daft-talking producer, complains that he is undervalued and underused by the corporation, she tries to cheer him up.

“Surely the BBC can find something for you?” she asked gently. He looked forlorn.

“The BBC is doing gits bit [he is mimicking her accent]. We put out the truth, but only the contingent truth. Annie! The opposite could also be true! We are told that German pilots have been brought down in Croydon and turned out to know the way to the post-office, that Hitler has declared that he only needs three fine days to defeat Great Britain, and that there is an excellent blackberry crop and therefore it is our patriotic duty to make jam. But all this need not have been true, Annie! If the summer had not been fine, there might have been no blackberries.”

“Of course there mightn’t,” said Annie. “You’re just making worries for yourself, Mr. Waterlow. There isn’t anything at all that mightn’t be otherwise. After all, I mightn’t have … what I mean is, how can they find anything to broadcast that’s got to be true, and couldn’t be anything else?”

He gestured towards the piano.

“We couldn’t put out music all day!”

“Music and silence.”

Annie’s precocious grasp of the contingent nature of things, and her willingness to live in the world on the world’s terms, mark her out as an alien in the BBC, where the idea of the necessary, and of everyone’s personal necessity within the organization, are articles of superstitious faith.

When RPD throws a dinner party for his assistants at Prunier’s. Annie falls suddenly and unexpectedly in love with him, for the excellent Fitzgeraldian reason that she is wearing a white dress, and so is seated by the waiter on Sam Brooks’s right. Nothing is more contingent than love. Like Fritz von Hardenberg’s passion for Sophie in The Blue Flower, Annie’s ungovernable hunger for RPD is, as one might say, supremely unnecessary. Yet even in her bewitchment. Annie remains an unillusioned realist

Vi wanted to be of help, but it was difficult to find facts which Annie had not already faced.

“He’s old, Annie,” she ventured at last

“He is,” Annie replied calmly, “he’s forty-six: I looked him up in the BBC Handbook, and it’s my opinion that he’s putting on weight. I daresay he wouldn’t look much in bed.”

“But what do you expect to come of it?”

“Nothing.”

But Sam Brooks—self-engrossed, absent-minded, capable of tender feeling only for aluminum discs—is too weak to offer any real resistance to the force majeure of Annie’s love for him. She sweeps him away. His most nearly positive response to her is to resign, with feeble gentlemanliness, from the BBC, because “I’ve always prided myself on this one thing, I mean that I’ve got a proper attitude towards my staff.”

The immediate consequence of Annie’s compulsive telling of the truth is the death of DPP, Jeff Haggard, the cleverest, most ironically detached character in the book Leaving BH to rescue Sam Brooks from the avalanche of Annie Asra’s passion, he is killed, contingently of course, by an unexploded parachute-bomb that he mistakes for his taxi.

There is no boiling-down of a Fitzgerald novel to its driving theme or themes. She makes life hard for critics because she works every inch of her canvas. Her minor characters are as fully realized as her major ones. She is a writer who watches over the fall of each sparrow, and she bestows on all her sparrows the gift of free will, to exercise as waywardly as they may choose. She is always reminding the reader of the ability of her characters to pursue independent lives behind the scenes, and their offstage activities are as important as the activities that are performed in public view. This gives her books an extraordinary three-dimensionality: they are virtual realities, brought into being by a novelist who combines a rational skepticism about human affairs with a view of the world more commonly held by theologians than philosophers.

In Human Voices, Fitzgerald has built a perfect replica of the genteel labyrinthine bureaucracy of the BBC, but this inspired freehand realist is impatient with realism for its own sake. Like Eden, her BBC is a testing ground for individual volition and its chaotic consequences. Sharing her wonder, her pity, and her high humor at the goings-on in her created world, one finds oneself adopting the point of view of an amused, highly intelligent, and supremely charitable god. Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree, are Fitzgerald’s true subjects, but she handles them so deftly, and with such dry wit, that the Miltonic grandeur of the enterprise is kept artfully hidden beneath the eventful, talky surface of her fiction. The experienced reader of Fitzgerald grows used to being taken suddenly aback by her underlying depth and seriousness. No wonder that a fast-growing cult is forming around her writing.