Penelope Fitzgerald Critical Essay | Critical Essay by A. S. Byatt

Critical Essay by A. S. Byatt

[Penelope] Fitzgerald's new book, Human Voices, is about the BBC in the early days of the war…. She attempts to be exact; she offers authorial summings-up and judgments; but she guarantees nothing, neither justice, happiness, nor even an end to all the stories she imparts to us….

Penelope Fitzgerald's precise prose and brief comic set-pieces have some relation to the more flamboyant and apparently merciless proceedings of both Muriel Spark and Fay Weldon, but she lacks both their acidity and their high-handed moral certainties—Catholic in Muriel Spark's case, feminist in Fay Weldon's…. Human Voices is comic, and sometimes extraordinarily sad….

The BBC atmosphere is there: technical perfectionism, moral rigour, administrative agitation mixed with monumental calm in the face of outside disasters. A closed world, talking to a very large invisible outside world. The novel is rarely visual…. It is all scrappy, voices rising and falling, moments focussed and their consequences...
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