Wicked thrills fuel a very English battle in the Counties
paper to be brought by a delivery boy, but clearly likes Florence’s spirit.
When it comes to it, however, books versus arts hardly seems like much of a conflict. Shouldn’t these people be on the same side?
‘‘I think that’s what’s so wonderful, actually,’’ says Mortimer. ‘‘That’s why I think Penelope Fitzgerald is so brilliant: that the paradox or irony is that these people kind of want the same thing. It’s just that one person is a Isabel Coixet
bully and she has decided she doesn’t want the other person to get her way.’’
It is also a reminder, she adds, that our similarities are much greater than our differences.
That may be true as a general rule; it is even more likely to be true of fiction readers and lovers of chamber music, but that is not what the fight is about. The most cogent criticisms of the film have pointed to Coixet’s failure to plumb the social and political differences that existed in 1959, that still exist and that cut very deeply into British life.
‘‘Fitzgerald’s story ruefully pits conservative, heritage-fixated nostalgia against liberal progressiveness,’’ wrote Variety’s UK critic, ‘‘but that subtext runs hot and cold on screen.’’
That battle is represented, however, by Lolita. Vladimir Nabokov’s scintillating novel about a paedophile was published in France by the largely pornographic Olympia Press in 1955 and was a banned import until 1958.
When the ban was lifted, partly because of support from such unimpeachable literary sources as Graham Greene, Lolita became an immediate best-seller. Conservative critics were enraged; the Sunday Express editor described it as ‘‘the filthiest book I’ve ever read’’.
Coixet doesn’t feel the need to explain this to the back of the class; our knowledge is presumed, the mere sight of the book’s title signalling the new and startling things destined to stir up this green and pleasant land in the decade to come.
‘‘I read Lolita when I was 16 with a dictionary beside me, because I didn’t understand all the words.’’
Books are pathways, she says, to other ways of being, to dangerous ideas; a life spent reading is not a sheltered life.
‘‘For me, Lolita was an opening to the world. Maybe I was naive at the time – maybe I still am – but to me it is a masterpiece. When you think Nabokov wrote that book when he was learning English at 23! If he can do that, I can direct The Bookshop.’’
Mortimer had also seen how dangerous books could be. ‘‘My dad was a great proponent of free speech and defended a lot of pornography,’’ she says. ‘‘Florence Green was selling Lolita in her bookshop which was a very radical act in the 1950s, particularly in a small, sleepy English town.
‘‘But, you know, I wonder whether it would even be published today: a book about a middle-aged man in a physical relationship with a very underage girl.
‘‘And I think it is important to talk about the fact that books can sometimes be morally ambiguous and threatening and transgressive. That’s an important part of what literature offers and I think that’s kind of an interesting question for today.’’
Films can be those things too, of course, but is it a different kind of experience? ‘‘I think so,’’ Mortimer says. ‘‘When it is just you and the written word, you are in a kind of dialogue with the writer. It’s just you two and you are using all your imagination, endowing the written word with your imaginative faculties in a way that is not required of you when you are watching a movie.
‘‘And that’s empowering, in that it gives you a feeling of empathy. There’s something about experiencing other people’s pain, other people’s craziness, other people’s passions, other people’s weird sexual impulses through the written word that is powerful.’’ The Bookshop (PG) is in cinemas now.