[In the following review, Eder praises Fitzgerald’s deft use of details to evoke a sense of possibilities in her Gate of Angels.]

High wind and drenching rain lash the flat fenlands [in Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Gate of Angels]. Branches blow down; leaves tangle in the horns of grazing cows; partly blinded, they stumble. “Two or three of them were wallowing on their backs, idiotically, exhibiting vast pale bellies intended by nature to be always hidden. They were still munching.”

Along the road, a covey of Cambridge University dons on heavy iron bicycles—it is 1912—struggles against the wind, black gowns flapping. Nature may be in an uproar, but each academic teeters forward in his own abstraction and at his own rate of speed. When one pedals ahead or drops behind, it is not his legs but a burst of speculation or a mental impasse that is responsible.

Fred Fairly overtakes a Lecturer in the Physiology of the Senses who lags because he is trying to recall whether it is cows that can’t get up once they fall over. A moment later, the Lecturer surges past. It’s sheep, he whoops. “The relief of it!” Fred whoops back.

Fred, who lectures in physics, is the hero of Penelope Fitzgerald’s powerfully bewitching new novel. He is also the hinge, as that obliging but faintly disenchanted whoop may hint. The novel itself is a series of hinges, gleaming and disconcerting ones that keep opening out unexpectedly.

The Gate of Angels encompasses Fred’s liberation by passion from a careful, kindly bachelorhood. It touches on the breaching of the manners and assumptions of the stuffy Edwardian world—in this case, the university world. It suggests the windstorm of scientific thought that was upsetting the tenets of the Newtonian era as if they were so many cows.

It does these things with a lightness whipped up in unequal parts of comedy, irony and the fantastic. It attaches the lightness to the stoical gravity of time’s wheel. The mix is uniquely Fitzgerald, though it has a connection in one sense to Evelyn Waugh; in another to Iris Murdoch.

The Gate of Angels is about the crossing of two lives: that of Fred, the Cambridge scholar, and that of Daisy, a nurse who has struggled from a background of poverty and social oppression to become a woman who is not only independent but a sunburst as well. It is a prodigious encounter, like atomic bombardment with its terrific release of energy. In this case, the release takes the form of a miracle that come at the end and puts a tangled story right. To reveal nothing, it consists of the opening of the gate in the title.

“Angels” is the nickname for St. Angelicus, the fictional Cambridge college in which Fred is lodged. It is the tiniest of the colleges, and the purest exemplar of 600 years of eccentric institutional inbreeding. Like Oxford’s All Souls, it has no resident students; its tradition is even more sublimely dreamy, and it is smaller. Its wine cellars, in fact, are larger than its buildings.

It consists of a Master who is blind and dispatches a perpetual stream of notes; the purpose of each is to refine even more precisely the nuances of the previous one. It consists of six Fellows. And it consists of Fred. As Junior Fellow, he is also Assistant Bursar, Assistant Steward, Assistant Organist and custodian of the Medieval instruments which the Fellows play in excruciating dissonance after their lavishly irrigated evening meal.

Planted in this dream world, Fred carries out its rituals. He lectures, attends the meetings of the Disobligers Society—where you argue against whatever position you believe in, and interrupt continually—and makes gingerly visits to his clergyman father and suffragette mother. The visits are gingerly because he has lost his faith.

He is, in fact, torn, and ripe for change. He thinks of working under Ernest Rutherford and other physics pioneers; instead, he chooses Flowerdew, a redoubtable mystic who believes the new age of quanta and subatomics is a delusion and will collapse. Fitzgerald is lucid about science, but her heart, ultimately, seems to be with the mystics. Flowerdew’s witty and melancholy warning about the revolution in physics is one of the book’s most arresting and engaging passages.

Fred’s collision with Daisy is literal. Both are cycling at night, both are hit by a drunken carter. They come to, undressed and in the same bed. The accident takes place in front of the house of Wrayburn, another Cambridge don; thinking deductively, he assumes that since they seem to be together, they must be married; hence the joint bedding.

Daisy is unembarrassed; she gets up and goes back to London. Fred is horribly embarrassed and totally smitten, and devotes himself to finding her. It doesn’t take long; she was in Cambridge to apply for a job at a local clinic. Not only does she get the job, she also takes up lodging with the Wrayburns. Mrs. Wrayburn has intellectual aspirations; she is crushed by the demands of an Edwardian household and an Edwardian husband—Fitzgerald takes us wonderfully into these demands by listing all the items of tableware a husband of the time requires for his lunch. Daisy can give her a hand.

If the book’s first part brings out Fred and his world, its second part brings out Daisy and hers. As a child, she and her mother regularly had to move at night to avoid paying rent. She grows up to take business courses, and to have her employers regularly offer her a choice between sex and discharge. She is too alive to give in; instead, she convinces the matron of Blackfriars Hospital to train her as a student nurse. An act of irregular charity toward a patient gets her fired; hence her presence in Cambridge.

Daisy is utterly determined and utterly open. Her courage, her independence, her absolute readiness to be delighted makes a shining and complex portrait. The matron warns her—again, the author reminds us of the abusive conditions for women at the time—that “A grown woman must expect to spend one-quarter of her life in actual pain”—and cautions her against “a weekly habit of constant complaint.” Daisy, whose health and beauty grow out of her resistant spirit, “felt her physical self-respect extend and stretch itself like a cat in the sun.”

The book’s ending has its complications but no true surprises. Even the miracle is no true surprise; it is as much a matter of course as everything else. Fitzgerald is both the most down-to-earth and magical of writers, as well as one of the funniest. She is an animist; there are ghosts of possibility in each concrete fact: in the upside-down cows; the crowded arrangement of bicycles at St. Angelicus; the horse that once, but no longer, pulled the cart that ferried passengers from the village railroad station, and that still backs away in its paddock every time a train comes in.

The story of Fred and Daisy in a time of revolutions is told largely in particular details and with a deceptive matter-of-factness. It can take us a moment to realize how oddly and suggestively the details are wielded. They do not fill a picture in; they open up windows through which we see a world of possibilities. They are not always easy possibilities; many are very sad and one or two, terrifying. But having these windows is so beguiling, so like flying, that while we are not deluded, neither are we oppressed. We are freed.