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Human Voices, by Penelope Fitzgerald
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“A wonderful combination of deadpan English comedy and surreal farce.” — A. S. Byatt “A tribute to the unsung and quintessentially English heroism of imperfect people.” — New Criterion
When British listeners tuned in to the BBC's Nine O'Clock News in the middle of 1940, they had no idea what human dramas—and follies—were unfolding behind the scenes. Targeted by enemy bombers, the BBC had turned its concert hall into a dormitory for both sexes, and personal chaos rivaled the political. Amidst the bombs and broadcasts two program directors fight for power while their younger female assistants fall prey to affairs, abandonment, and unrequited love. Reading this intimate glimpse behind the scenes of the BBC in its heyday, “one is left with the sensation,” William Boyd wrote in London Magazine, “that this is what it was really like.”
This new edition features an introduction by Mark Damazer, along with new cover art.
- Sales Rank: #655010 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-03-18
- Released on: 2013-06-11
- Format: Kindle eBook
Amazon.com Review
In 1940, as World War II heats up, the BBC is doing its best to fulfill its singular mission: saving Britain from despondency and panic without resorting to lies. "Broadcasting House was in fact dedicated to the strangest project of the war, or of any war, that is, telling the truth." Surrounded by sandbags that are literally going to seed, this London landmark has come to resemble an ocean liner both inside and out. "With the best engineers in the world," Penelope Fitzgerald observes, "and a crew varying between the intensely respectable and the barely sane, it looked ready to scorn any disaster of less than Titanic scale." Though there are no icebergs in Human Voices, Fitzgerald's perfectly pitched 1980 novel, danger does loom on several decks.
For a start, the Department of Recorded Programmes (DRP) is in for a shakeup. Sam Brooks, its director (RPD), has long ruffled the Controllers' feathers owing to his need for several nubile assistants--no wonder his unit is sometimes labeled the Seraglio. This time, however, his penchant for young women isn't the issue. Instead, it's the fact that RPD takes his calling too seriously. For instance, in response to a directive that England's heritage not be lost, he and a crack team once spent two weeks recording a creaky church door in Heather Lickington. At this point, only Jeff Haggard, the Director of Programme Planning (DPP), can save Sam; but having done that for the past 10 years, DPP is suffering from severe BBC battle fatigue.
As Penelope Fitzgerald follows this pair--and several other employees--her novel melds tragedy, surrealism, and satire into one endlessly surprising whole. As ever, she captures the momentous in the smallest moment--the joys of an orange in wartime, the pleasures of piano tuning, and the painful twists of love. When the newest member of the Seraglio makes the mistake (or is it?) of falling for RPD, she does so absolutely, and hers must have been the last generation to fall in love without hope in such an unproductive way. After the war the species no longer found it biologically useful, and indeed it was not useful to Annie. Love without hope grows in its own atmosphere, and should encourage the imagination, but Annie's grew narrower. As is evident in this acute passage, and in virtually every other in Human Voices, Fitzgerald can pivot from sorrow to humor by way of pessimism and desire and then back again. If you so much as blink you'll miss one of the book's key turns or unexpected pleasures. No matter. Penelope Fitzgerald's human comedy always rewards rereading. --Kerry Fried
From Publishers Weekly
Now that Fitzgerald has widened her audience hereABlue Flower was published to rave reviews and the 1997 NBCC fiction awardAHoughton Mifflin is releasing her early novels in paperback. This gracefully controlled and neatly inlaid chronicle of Britain during WWII, published in England in 1980, reflects the author's wartime experiences with the BBC. The beleaguered broadcasters she portrays have chosen truth over consolation; nevertheless they must try to keep their listeners and themselves from despair as the threat of a German invasion mounts and parachute bombs pit the streets. Yet Sam Brooks, RPD (Recorded Programmes Director), lives in a fantasy world of wax discs and nubile women. When he is not trying desperately to capture the sounds of England (spending hundreds of hours and pounds recording the creak of a country church door), Brooks is crying on the shoulder of one or another of his RPAs (Recorded Programmes Assistants), whose "firmness, and roundness, and readiness to be pleased" give him strength. His seraglio comprises Vi Simmons, cheery, practical, with a man at sea who means to marry her; part-French, pregnant, Lise Bernard, abandoned by her beau; Della, tarty, velvet-voiced, bound for defection to the drama department; and the latecomer, Annie Asra, whose uncompromising candor and fragile susceptibility to emotion reverberates as the real voice of Fitzgerald's book. Annie's fate is to fall in love with Brooks, whom she sees clearly as "a middle-aged man who said the same thing to all the girls" and who is, above all, self-centered, obsessed with his work and oblivious to what goes on around him. Fitzgerald conveys the peculiar intimacy and secrecy of wartime: people disappear from this strange little world very easily and almost without comment, yet, besieged as they are by the fear that England will soon go the way of occupied France, they cling to each other fiercely. Hopelessness is in the air, but, as the BBC employees stay up all night on the late shift, so are strains of Debussy, blunt confessions, murmured condolences and the wails of a baby born in the makeshift bunk room. Fitzgerald's clipped, unsentimental and yet sympathetic irony perfectly describes the moment when the British stiff upper lip begins to tremble in the face of overwhelming historical and emotional events.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Fitzgerald follows The Blue Flower (LJ 3/1/97; 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award winner) with another entertaining short novel. This time her setting is 1940 at BBC headquarters in London, where the beleaguered Department of Recorded Programmes attempts to get news and music on the air amid German bombing attacks and internal chaos. War has transformed the BBC's famed London concert hall into a dorm, Red Cross training interrupts programming schedules, mix-ups are rife, and tempers are short. Particularly stressed are the teenage Junior Temporary Assistants, responsible for more than 5000 recordings weekly and struggling with personal problems inflamed by the war. Their should-be mentors, two self-absorbed departmental directors, are preoccupied with their own eccentricities and can scarcely deal with office glitches, much less the tragicomic complications arising when Annie, an intern of 16, falls in love with one of them. Fitzgerald, drawing on her own youthful employment at the BBC, brings time, place, and characters to life in a book remarkable for its dexterous and appealing prose. Recommended.AStarr E. Smith, Marymount Univ. Lib., Arlington, VA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
A splendid novel, like almost all of Fitzgerald's work
By A Customer
I wrote this review for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Penelope Fitzgerald won the Booker Prize in England for her 1978 novel "Offshore," but her reputation was slower to develop in this country. Over the past dozen years, her elegant, understated novels have won enthusiastic reviews and a small but appreciative audience, which has sufficed to keep them tenaciously in print. When "The Blue Flower" won the National Book Critics Circle Award last year, however, Fitzgerald suddenly became a popular success. Heartened by this, Houghton Mifflin has been reissuing several of her earlier novels (in paperback only, unfortunately), and "Human Voices," originally published in 1980, now appears in this country for the first time.
Set in the summer of 1940, when England was undergoing daily bombardment and German invasion seemed imminent, the novel focuses on the BBC's Broadcasting House, which produced the Home News six times a day even as bombs fell over London. While civilians cope with adversity through self-denial and recycling ("The nation defended itself by counting large numbers of small things into separate containers"), the workers at BH deal with anxiety, depression, and worry over loved ones as they fulfill their schedule of news and features.
This sounds like a recipe for a conventional novel about British determination and pluck, but Fitzgerald is in fact doing something more interesting. She notes that Broadcasting House followed a policy of offering truth rather than propaganda -- "Without prompting, the BBC had decided that truth was more important than consolation, and, in the long run, would be more effective" -- but then adds: "Truth ensures trust, but not victory, or even happiness." The major theme of Fitzgerald's fiction, the inadvisability of trying to avoid hurtful truths, can be glimpsed in these two sentences.
This sounds pretty earnest, but "Human Voices" is in fact a deft and very funny novel, astute and sharply observed -- even rather consoling. The beleaguered BBC, operating like "a cross between a civil service, a powerful moral force, and an amateur theatrical company that wasn't too sure where next week's money was coming from," converts its concert-hall into a dormitory for the day when London is invaded and employees seal themselves into the building. As things turn out, the most action the space sees happens the evening when a young assistant crawls into a dark cubicle and goes into labor.
The cast revolves around two middle-aged and unhappy men: Sam Brooks, the Director of Recorded Programmes, and Jeff Haggard, the Director of Programme Planning. (As though to convey the institution's sometimes irritating fussiness, the author usually refers to them simply as RPD and DPP.) With the assistance of a staff of surprisingly understanding teenaged assistants (one of them, finding a letter from her boyfriend largely blacked-out by the censor, thinks: "What a job having to go through other people's personal letters . . . they must feel uncomfortable, you had to pity them"), they stoically confront the various crises that beset the Corporation, such as a French general who has just escaped his collapsing country, and whose request to broadcast an urgent message for the British people the BBC unwisely grants.
Although much of the novel deals with the technical problems involved in recording "human voices," the title is an obvious allusion to Eliot's Prufrock, whom both RPD and DPP resemble. One of them is finally wakened by Eliot's "human voices," but does not (like Prufrock) drown; the other's case is more equivocal.
At times Fitzgerald shows a slightly unsure hand, and readers of her later novels (especially "The Gate of Angels," which shares some features with her present novel) will see where she has elsewhere handled matters a bit more adroitly. This is the only real criticism one can make of the novel, and it is hard to fault a writer for having improved with time. Compact and concise, "Human Voices" is a small gem, and should please new readers almost as much those already familiar with her work.
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
SATIRICAL LOOK AT BRITISH BROADCASTING UNDER SIEGE
By A Customer
GIST: Staffers at British Broadcasting try to cope with each other in wartime conditions. HAMMOCK-TIME: Again, a delightfully slim book by Ms. Fitzgerald, concise and absorbing. Requires perhaps one lazy weekend in your hammock or beach chair to finish. SKIMMING QUOTIENT: Her characterizations and subtle humor are so delightful, there's no need or desire for most readers to skim through any part. STYLE: Some parts are sluggish, but generally the story is fast-paced, and humorous. SUBSTANCE: I really appreciate this author. Ms. Fitzgerald focuses on adult themes with sophistication, without tedious explicit sexual passages; and profanity is practically non-existent. It's difficult to find comparable American authors who display similar tendencies and skills. QUIBBLES: The occasional interjection of British jargon and references to British locales or history was jarring to me, a foreign reader, but in general, the storyline is easy to understand. COMPLEMENTARY BOOKS: I enjoy all her books, and you might, too. This book above has turned out to be my favorite, although another Fitzgerald work, The Bookshop, is a close second. # # #
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
A small, wonderful book
By Tim of the sand
If you love language, quirky and vividly drawn characters, delicious irony, and above all, if you want to spend some time with the creative work of someone possessing an exquisite gift for writing, read this book.
But if to you, any good novel must have "character development" or a gripping plot, perhaps you should go elsewhere. (Hey, come to think of it, the character development in this novel is wonderful, especially given how short it is. Oh and the plot, though full of low human foibles and often trivial struggle does take place against the backdrop of the last century's supreme struggle between good and evil. And the funny folks depicted apparently bear some resemblance to those who were actually in charge of getting this story out to the world.
While reading, I started to laugh whenever an official of any sort was introduced, because they were almost instantly reduced to an absurd abbreviated title (RPD, DPP, and the truly absurd ADDG). Friends, I believe this is a joke. At some point, these people's identities have been subsumed by their occupational roles. They are more RPD and DPP than they are "Sam" and "Jeffrey".
One measure of a book for me is how preoccupied by it was I (or not) in the days after I finished it. This one ran on and on in my head. for days and days. I can't wait to read more Fitzgerald.
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