I read an enjoyed The Book Shop and Offshore. When I saw this one mentioned it reminded me to get hold of a copy.
Here’s the blurb …
From the Booker Prize-wining author of ‘Offshore’ and ‘the Blue Flower’ – this Booker Prize-shortlisted novel centres on Cambridge Fellow Fred Fairly’s search for a rational riposte to love.
In 1912 Fred Fairly is a Junior Fellow at the college of St Angelicus in Cambridge, where for centuries no female, not even a pussy cat, has been allowed to set foot (“though the starlings couldn’t altogether be regulated”). Fred lectures in physics and the questionable nature of matter and worries about the universal problem known in Cambridge at the time as ‘the absurdity of the Mind-Body Relationship’. To Fred this is tormenting rather than absurd. The young woman beside him when he wakes up one evening in the Wrayburns’ spare bedroom might help resolve it, but how can he tell if she is quite what she seems? Fred is a scientist. To him the truth should be everything, and indeed he thinks it is. But scientists make mistakes.
The Gate of Angels is a funny, touching and inspiring look at male-female relationships and the problems caused by thinking just a little too much.
This was great, so many good characters; Fred, Daisy, the various wardens, etc. For a novel first published in 1990 it really catches the time before the first world war. Daisy, working class, trying to make a life for herself, is judged very harshly (even by herself). Fred studies Physics and thinks everything should be measurable and observable, but theories can change over time.
