The Blue Flower (1995)
Why this one?
Fitzgerald stunned the establishment by winning the 1979 Booker with the slim and understated Offshore. A year before, she had been shortlisted for her second novel, The Bookshop. I enjoyed both of of these novels, which were early works and heavily influenced by her own personal history.
I was intrigued, though, by her later shift towards historical fiction, which let to two further Booker nominations with The Beginning of Spring (1988) and The Gate of Angels (1990). Neither took the Prize (both, somewhat ironically, losing out to other historically inclined works in the shape of Oscar and Lucinda and Possession respectively) but according to many, it was her final novel, 1995’s The Blue Flower, that was her masterwork, and that didn’t even make the Booker shortlist.
Thoughts, etc.
The Blue Flower is set in the Germany of the late Eighteenth century, as Romantic sensibilities ferment in the great universities and clash with the traditional ways found in the small towns where much of its action takes place. At the centre of the novel is Friedrich von Hardenberg, a student of philosophy, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Goethe and developing his own ideas and poetry with which he will later find fame as Novalis. The novel’s short chapters provide insights into his unusual and contradictory life (alongside his poetry, he’s also taking on the running of a salt mine…) as well as those of his family members and contemporaries. Most strikingly, it details his captivation by the twelve-year old Sophie von Kuhn, a ‘normal’ girl offering little in terms of the usual expectations of the time (she’s neither financially nor intellectually his equal).
It’s a book that seems at a glance to be a marked departure from those early books focused on provincial English life, and obviously some of what’s on display here is certainly as a result of a developed talent, a master in her later years bringing together many threads of her early work (which, even prior to those early novels, began with a Burne-Jones biography). But despite the expanded scope, there’s still much of what I enjoyed about the early Fitzgerald here. Once again, the writing is concise and to the point. Chapters are tiny, fragmentary, nodding to her sense that their interpretation is always provisional, always incomplete. There’s a knack for a sense of place that is rendered even more impressive by its distance from the author’s own world - although even within this distance she retains her typical fascination with the mundane aspects of life (the action is set largely in the laundry-rooms and kitchens of the grand houses, and rarely ventures into the more widely explored world of the great universities, despite their obvious proximity for key characters). There’s also a quiet, sad humour in here that I remember especially from The Bookshop - often finding its best expression in younger characters, here including Hardenberg’s highly memorable younger brother ‘The Bernhard’ and on a rather sadder note, the painfully sparse and dull diary entries from Sophie herself.
Like ‘the Blue Flower’ alluded to in the title (an early work of Hardenberg’s and a general Romantic trope that resists conclusive interpretation) Fitzgerald’s final novel leaves the reader with no clear conclusions. It explores a bright light of the early Romantic period, but focuses not on his years of fame but on a period that shows him rubbing up against convention with apparent contradictions - or at least contradictions to others at least. To Hardenberg, the finances of running a salt mine (like most other things in life) are best suited to ‘the poetic mind’, and unlike everyone else in the novel he sees no issue with his match with Sophie. It both gently mocks the half-formed Romantic sensibilities of its subject while also finding wonder in them, and in the power of strong convictions, however mad they may seem, in the fight for meaning in what at the time was an invariably brief life.
Score
9
It’s one of those novels that I’m really pleased my Booker journey has led me to, even if in a roundabout way. It’s not something I’d ever have randomly picked up and read, but it’s an intriguing, oddly entertaining, and oddly sad, gem of a book.
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