The Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald

This has everything I want in a novel. It’s a good old-fashioned love story, there’s a trial with a shocking revelation, and it’s set in Cambridge in 1912 in a fictional college run by a blind master that’s never had anything female in apart from Starlings. There’s also an asylum run by an eccentric, although we never visit it. The London scenes are as vibrant as the Cambridge ones. The depictions of rain, cycle accidents, high table, London bridges, newspaper offices, rectories and hospital wards are all excellent. Penelope Fitzgerald has a genius for detail. She believed in ghosts (there’s a poltergeist in The Bookshop), but this novel is not definitive either way. It is a book about mystery and certainty; anyone who reads it as being in favour of science of the occult is not reading it closely enough. The discussion of physics reminds me of what someone…