 Cover to 1980 first edition | |
| Author | Penelope Fitzgerald |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Published | 1980 [1] |
| Publisher | Collins |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 176 [1] |
Human Voices is a 1980 novel by the British author Penelope Fitzgerald. It relates the fictionalised experiences of a group of BBC employees at Broadcasting House, London, in 1940 when the city was under nightly attack from the Luftwaffe's high explosive, incendiary, and parachute bombs.
Seymour ‘Sam’ Brooks is the BBC's Recorded Programme Director (RPD), a technically brilliant though needy man. Self-centred, obsessed with his work, and oblivious to much of what goes on around him, he deals with his colleagues’ lack of understanding and sympathy by surrounding himself with young female Recorded Programme Assistants (RPAs) with whom he shares his complaints and worries. He faces constant fights to maintain his department’s status within Broadcasting House. His manager, the Director of Programme Planning (DPP) Jeff Haggard, helps to protect Sam from the day-to-day annoyances of working for the Corporation.
After one of Sam's new RPAs, Lise Bernard, leaves unexpectedly very soon after being appointed in order to seek her French soldier boyfriend, Jeff and senior management decide that Sam should no longer be permitted to recruit. Without Sam's input they select as his new RPA Annie Asra, the 17-year-old orphaned daughter of a piano tuner from Birmingham. She astonishes Sam the first time they meet when she steadfastly maintains that the singer on one of Sam's cherished recordings is slightly flat. To celebrate the successful completion of his design for a new microphone windshield, Sam takes his RPAs out to dinner at an expensive French restaurant. Annie realises that she has fallen in love with him.
Lise, who has not been seen for months, unexpectedly contacts one of her ex-colleagues and persuades her to provide a ticket allowing her to sleep for a few nights in the BBC's bunk room, intended for employees who are not able to get home after their shift. It transpires that Lise is pregnant, and on arriving at the bunk room she goes into labour. Jeff arranges for Lise to be transferred to a nearby hospital.
Bombs rain down on broadcasting house, and Annie rushes to Sam's office. She acknowledges her love for him, and the two leave the building together to talk at a local cafe. Sam telephones Jeff to ask him to come over immediately, to discuss his intended resignation. Unknown to Sam, Jeff has also decided to resign from the BBC. He hesitates, and then tells Sam that he cannot come. Leaving Broadcasting House in the dark, Jeff mistakes an unexploded parachute bomb resting against the kerb for his taxi. It explodes, and he is killed.
Fitzgerald worked for the wartime Ministry of Food from June to November 1940, after which she worked as a features producer for the BBC. [2] [3]
Writing in the Library Journal in 1999, Starr E. Smith said that 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". [4]
In his Understanding Penelope Fitzgerald (2004) Peter Wolfe called the book "fluent without wordiness and poetic without being showy", and the author's "ability to make it look easy" a marvel. Wolfe noted that the book delivered what readers had come to expect: “a well-crafted plot with sensitive emotional understanding, prose graced by shining moments, intimacy and immediacy, and engaging people who are trying to sort out their lives in the teeth of disaster”. [5]
Hermione Lee, Fitzgerald's biographer, noted that although the novel at first appears to be a light, funny, brilliantly accurate recreation of the BBC in wartime, there is also danger and anguish, a strong idea about truth, and a sad affectionate remembering of the author's younger self. [6]
In his introduction to the 2014 paperback edition of the novel, Mark Damazer noted that while Fitzgerald may only have been in her mid-20s when she worked for the BBC, she palpably understood its “profound, fussy, and sometimes vain but largely heroic and invaluable commitment to the truth – and expressed it in the form of a concise, witty and beautiful novel". [7]
Penelope Mary Fitzgerald was a Booker Prize-winning novelist, poet, essayist and biographer from Lincoln, England. In 2008 The Times listed her among "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945". The Observer in 2012 placed her final novel, The Blue Flower, among "the ten best historical novels". A.S. Byatt called her, "Jane Austen’s nearest heir for precision and invention."
Moira Clare Ruby Stuart, is a British presenter and broadcaster. She was the first female newsreader of Caribbean heritage to appear on British national television, having worked on BBC News since 1981.
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Annie Avril Nightingale is an English radio and television broadcaster. She was the first female presenter on BBC Radio 1 in 1970, and is its longest-serving presenter.
Dame Hermione Lee is a British biographer, literary critic and academic. She is a former President of Wolfson College, Oxford, and a former Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature in the University of Oxford and professorial fellow of New College. She is a fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature.
Annie MacManus, is an Irish DJ, broadcaster and writer. She hosted a variety of shows on BBC Radio 1, including BBC Switch and Future Sounds. She also DJed in various locations, including hosting her AMP Lost and Found venues in places like Ibiza.
Lee Smith is an American fiction author who typically incorporates much of her background from the Southeastern United States in her works. She has received writing awards, such as the O. Henry Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Fiction, the North Carolina Award for Literature, and, in April 2013, was the first recipient of Mercer University's Sidney Lanier Prize for Southern Literature. Her novel The Last Girls was listed on the New York Times bestseller's list and won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. Mrs Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger, a collection of new and selected stories, was published in 2010.
The World's Desire is a fantasy novel first published in 1890 and written by H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang. It was published in paperback by Ballantine Books as the fortieth volume of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series in January 1972.
Galahad at Blandings is a novel by P. G. Wodehouse, first published in the United States on 31 December 1964 by Simon & Schuster, Inc., New York under the title The Brinkmanship of Galahad Threepwood, and in the United Kingdom on 26 August 1965 by Herbert Jenkins, London.
The Blue Flower is a 1995 novel by the British author Penelope Fitzgerald. It is a fictional treatment of the early life of Friedrich von Hardenberg who, under the pseudonym Novalis, later became a practitioner of German Romanticism.
The Shell Seekers is a 1987 novel by Rosamunde Pilcher. It became one of her most famous best-sellers. It was nominated by the British public in 2003 as one of the top 100 novels in the BBC's Big Read. In Germany the novel is called Die Muschelsucher and was also in the top 100 novels. The novel sold more than five million copies worldwide, and was adapted for the stage and as a film for television twice.
Offshore is a 1979 novel by Penelope Fitzgerald. Her third novel, it won the Booker Prize in the same year. The book explores the emotional restlessness of houseboat dwellers who live neither fully on the water nor fully on the land. It was inspired by the most difficult years of Fitzgerald's own life, years during which she lived on an old Thames sailing barge moored at Battersea Reach.
The Bookshop is a 1978 novel by the British author Penelope Fitzgerald. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The novel was made into a film by Isabel Coixet in 2017.
The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read is a short story collection by British writer Susan Hill published in 2003 by Chatto & Windus (hardback) and the following year in paperback by Vintage Books. It "received long and favourable reviews in The Guardian, The Spectator, The Sunday Times and The Times Literary Supplement.
The Golden Child is a 1977 mystery novel by the British author Penelope Fitzgerald, her first published work of fiction. Written while her husband was terminally ill, and partly for his benefit, the novel offers a satirical version of the 1972 Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum, and pokes fun at museum politics, academic scholars, and Cold War spying.
The Gate of Angels is a 1990 historical novel by the British author Penelope Fitzgerald. It is set in 1912 at a fictional Cambridge college, St Angelicus. The novel was shortlisted for the Booker prize.
At Freddie's is a 1982 novel by the British author Penelope Fitzgerald. The last of her novels drawing directly on her personal experiences, it focuses on an august but shabby London stage school for children, TheTemple. Fitzgerald had herself been a general studies teacher at the Italia Conti stage school. The school in the novel is known as Freddie's after its elderly principal Freddie Wentworth, a character partly based on that of the impresario Lilian Baylis. The book received mixed reviews on its first UK publication, and on its 1985 appearance in the US.
Innocence is a 1986 novel by the British author Penelope Fitzgerald. Set in Italy, it is a comedy of manners concerning the marriage of the young daughter of an old but impoverished aristocratic family, and a young neurologist who has tried to cut himself off from emotion. "Innocence" is the first of a group of four historical novels written by Fitzgerald at the end of her career. It was her first book to be published in the USA.
The Beginning of Spring is a 1988 novel by the British author Penelope Fitzgerald. Set in Moscow in 1913, it tells the story of a Moscow-born English-educated print shop owner whose English wife has suddenly abandoned him and their three children. The novel was shortlisted for the 1988 Booker Prize.
The Means of Escape is a 2000 short story collection by Penelope Fitzgerald, published shortly after her death. It was first issued as a series of eight stories, most of which were first published between 1975 and 1998.