Frank Reid has a lot on his plate right now. Firstly there's Reid's, the family printing firm founded in Moscow by his father that he now runs, with the associated admin headaches - managing the staff with all their personal foibles, managing the occasional state suspicion of a foreign-run printing operation with its inbuilt potential to print Unsuitable Material, the associated need to occasionally grease the wheels of officialdom with some judicious bribery - but Frank has lived in Moscow most of his life and views this as mundane day-to-day business, although the current febrile political situation in Europe (it's 1913) makes everything a bit more difficult. Of more specific and immediate concern is the letter he's just received from his wife Nellie telling him that she has left him, taking their three children with her. No hard feelings, look after yourself, yours etc., Nellie.
There's no immediate indication where Nellie has headed off to, although everyone's assumption is that she's caught a train heading westwards to head back to Europe and perhaps ultimately her family's home in the south London suburb of Norbury. This theory is proven to be correct in an unexpected way when the three children turn up back at the Moscow railway station, having been put on a train back at Mozhaisk. No sign of Nellie, who apparently had continued in the opposite direction, presumably heading for Berlin.
So Frank is reunited with his kids, Dolly, Ben and little Annushka, which is great but does now pose another problem: who's going to look after them? After a couple of meetings with his eccentric business associate Kuriatin and the wife of the local Anglican chaplain fail to yield anyone who Frank feels is suitable, he is persuaded by his accountant Selwyn Crane to take on Lisa, a young woman of his acquaintance currently unhappily employed at a local department store.
So Frank can return to work at Reid's, but even here is immediately beset by other problems: Selwyn has persuaded him to do a small run of a book of his own poems and is taking a minute interest in the details, the chief print-setter is a man of almost mystical skill, somewhat temperamental and sensitive to upcoming developments in automated print-setting technology which will likely make his job obsolete, and lastly while checking up on the printing premises late at night Frank is confronted by a young student, Volodya, who attempts to shoot him (and misses) and then describes some vague scheme to get Reid's to facilitate the printing of some political leaflets. Frank lets him go and uses some of his skill and influence to persuade the police not to investigate.
Further complication is provided by the arrival of Charlie, Nellie's brother, who Frank had accepted an offer of a visit from on the assumption that he would have some information regarding Nellie, or maybe even have seen her. No such luck, however, and Charlie, an engaging enough doofus, just bumbles around having a nice holiday and entertaining the kids.
The plot-thickening that happens comes from an unexpected direction and mainly involves Lisa - firstly Volodya reappears and confesses to Frank that the political leaflet thing was a red herring and he took a pot-shot at him because he is in love with Lisa, despite barely knowing her. This is vexing to Frank because he himself has decided that he is in love with Lisa. Finally Selwyn confesses to Frank that he, Selwyn, was in love with Nellie and that they had made tentative plans to run away together, plans which he, Selwyn, then scuppered by having an attack of conscience about betraying Frank. Nellie has apparently been staying at a Tolstoyan commune in England, at Selwyn's suggestion, but has found it not to her taste and left for an unknown destination.
Lisa, as it happens, is currently away at the Reids' ramshackle dacha with the children having a brief holiday, though one which includes a slightly bizarre late-night encounter in the forest between Lisa, Dolly and some mysterious wordless people who seem to emerge from the trees. Whatever that was all about, the eventual outcome is another call to Frank requesting that he collect his children from the railway station, Lisa having seemingly taken the opportunity to flee the country.
A lot for Frank to take in here, to be fair, and just to cap it off, while the house shutters are being opened for the springtime thaw, Nellie returns.
The first thing to say here is that there's a lot of slyly-observed interpersonal stuff that I've skipped over in the synopsis above, which seems remarkable in a book of only 188 pages. This is the trick that Penelope Fitzgerald regularly pulls, though; you'll recall I said something very similar about The Gate Of Angels which was even shorter. Frank Reid is a level-headed and unflappable sort of chap who provides a contrast with the more eccentric characters who revolve around him, particularly the two main female protagonists, Nellie and Lisa, both of whose motivation are somewhat opaque. Lisa in particular is a bit of a mystery; she exerts a strange hold over Selwyn, Volodya and Frank and seems to be in control of the weird encounter in the forest with Dolly. Is she some sort of revolutionary agitator? Probably, but who knows? And what are we to make of Nellie's return? A change of heart, or a pragmatic realisation that this is her best option after running away (with or without Selwyn) didn't work out? It seems likely that with the Reids' reputation tarnished by the Lisa situation and with both war and revolution in the offing that the Reids' best option is going to be to sell the printing business and move back to England, which is probably what Nellie really wants anyway.
I think this is the fourth Penelope Fitzgerald book I've read, and they really are unlike just about anything else: short, but rich and dense and slightly mysterious. They're all good but this one and The Gate Of Angels are probably the best two. The Russian setting features in a few other books on this list, most obviously Winter Garden by Fitzgerald's rough contemporary (and writer of superficially similar novels) Beryl Bainbridge, but also more tangentially in Pattern Recognition and Love Is Blind and quite possibly a few others. The eve-of-World-War-I setting is also familiar from Waiting For Sunrise and both of the Isabel Colegate books on this list, Statues In A Garden and The Shooting Party.
The Beginning Of Spring was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1988, just as The Gate Of Angels was two years later; she was nominated four times in total and won with Offshore in 1979. Peter Carey won in 1988 with Oscar and Lucinda, which I have read but, as I've said elsewhere, found a bit of a slog. Utz and Nice Work are the other two I've read from that year.
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