I loved "The Bookshop", and both the book and the movie are equally wonderful. It’s a strange book and film: small, sad (without being tragic) and yet sweet without being syrupy. It doesn’t lend itself to an easy explication. Like all the best novels, its meaning is to be savoured, not summarised.
Based on a 1978 novel by Penelope Fitzgerald, the story is set in the mid-1950s in a small English town where most people don’t read. The movie itself is a wonderful pretext to watch three great actors do their thing: Mortimer, as the film’s mousy but surprisingly formidable heroine; Clarkson, as her smiling adversary, Violet Gamart; and Bill Nighy as Mr Brundish who is the town’s reclusive loner and only voracious reader.
Perhaps Brundish puts the paradox of this film best when Florence Green asks him to advise her on whether it’s really a wise idea to try to get her customers to buy "Lolita". "They won’t understand it," he warns her. "But that’s all for the best. Understanding makes the mind lazy."
Strangely, there is no mention in the book of Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" despite its prominent appearance in the movie. I had never heard of "Fahrenheit 451" - which somehow augurs the film’s climax in an unexpected way - and ordered it immediately. Thank you, "Bookshop"!
