A lesson in how to ruin a classic novel

The Bookshop

PG cert, 113 min Dir Isabel Coixet Starring Emily Mortimer, Bill Nighy, Patricia Clarkson, James Lance, Frances Barber

Published in 1978, The Bookshop is a slim, beguiling novel by the underrated Penelope Fitzgerald. It concerns a tussle in a Suffolk coastal village in 1959 over the property rights to a long-abandoned house, which the recently widowed, middle-aged Florence Green, a new arrival, wishes to turn into a local bookshop.

Emily Mortimer is well-cast and thoroughly intelligible as Florence, in all the ways that the rest of the film, a Spanish-british-german co-production adapted and directed by the Catalan Isabel Coixet, is not. Part of the issue is the intense specificity of English village life: if you don’t get it right, clangers in accents, performance and even costumes stick out a mile. This film gives us an English village with the distinct feel of being, well, a Spanishbritish-german co-production.

Local influencer Mrs Gamart wants to turn the property into an arts centre and most of the townsfolk become complicit in forcing Florence out, apart from Mr Brundish (Bill Nighy). Nighy and Mortimer are the best thing in this film, but for every minute of screen time they share, there are five where someone wildly inappropriate pitches up and mangles all sense. James Lance, as an oily toff about town, comes off quite well, but Clarkson sounds unignorably wonky, thanks to a wavering upper-class accent that Coixet lets slide all over the shop.

Bibliophiles have plenty of time to notice every discordant detail: I spotted some lovely cloth-bound Penguin editions on Florence’s shelves, which would be great, if they hadn’t been issued in 2012. Does that kind of thing matter, even slightly? Let’s just say that if the late Fitzgerald had wandered on set, her eyes would widen in horror.