The Bookshop

“No-one ever feels alone in a bookshop.” This film revives literature and the literary culture/business as an agent of community. That makes it a bracing alternative to our current world’s creeping tribalism.

When widow Florence Green revives an abandoned, decrepit heritage building to serve as her home and bookshop, she attempts to bring both the old and the current culture to the isolated East Anglian fishing village. As she is welcomed by even the non-readers, the community shows a general decency. 

But that is in effect outweighed by what Coleridge ascribed to Iago: “a motiveless malignity.”  The primary villain is social leader Violet Gamert (the Violet feeling displaced by the Green), the ineffectual lawyer and banker, the traitorous Londoner Milo North and the unseen nastiness that drove Edmund Brundish to become a recluse. We don’t know what drives all that malice; it’s just there, an ineluctable element in the social fabric in that village as in nations.   

Brundish and Florence are drawn together specifically by Ray Bradbury’s dystopian vision of a world that forbids books, Fahrenheit 451, and Nabokov’s controversial Lolita, which at that time fired up the book-banners. The first valorizes the old culture and the second heralds the new. Indeed, just the bookstore scenes recall the vanishing species of … bookstores!

  This film aspires to the condition of the novel. There is a voice-over narrator, unidentified until the end. At least one sequence revives specifically the epistolary novel, advancing the plot through an exchange of letters. 

Some scenes evoke literature, like the pseudo-Edwardian party that Florence enters ill-fitted in her — not red but “deep maroon” — dress. Marooned she feels. The school scene evokes Dickensian cruelty. There are even interludes of novel-like landscape shots, that establish the setting, their metaphors of natural beauty and strength left unverbalized: the trees, the ocean, the blowing tides of a wheat field.

Florence's emotional beach scene with Brundish seems straight out of the Bronte tradition he loathes. Here he comes out of his isolated self to try to help his new friend resist Mrs Gamert’s high-level political machinations.  

  The angry politics may win here, but our defeated bibliophile leaves an impressive legacy. Little Christine — the wild-haired precocious little schoolgirl — picks up her mentor’s mission. Her first action may be destructive. But she outgrows her impulsive violence to advance Florence’s legacy: a large, successful bookstore run by the wild-haired woman she converted to read. One last irony: Will this magnificent woman survive the Amazon attack on independent bookstores?

So Lolita works beyond recalling the prominent literary scandal of the day. The allusion establishes a contrast between the two girls. Christine may have Lolita’s precocity in understanding and appeal. But where Humbert leaves Lolita as a prosaic defeated housewife, all her allure lost, Christine emerges as a strong, self-assured, competent woman of the world, reviving her mentor’s empire of literature, continuing her campaign. 
     Our reflex assumption that this film is yet another of the Brits’ attempt to relive their lost glory takes another shock. This film is written and directed by the Spanish Isabell Coixet. But that’s what literature does: it bridges cultures as it could the classes.