As usual, Fitzgerald has an unexpected, oblique approach here: not only is this an English novel set in Florence in which all the main characters are Italian, thus making gentle fun of the great Henry James/E.M. Forster tradition, but it's also a book in which she redefines "innocence" to refer to a whole class of well-intentioned acts performed by naive people with uniformly disastrous consequences.

The story is set in Florence in 1955, with Italy still in the transition period between Bicycle thieves and Dolce vita, although we get strong hints (never followed up) that the unidentified narrator is looking at events from thirty years later. At its centre is the marriage of Chiara, daughter of the aristocratic but slightly down-at-heel Ridolfi family, who still own a farm and a renaissance villa as well as their Florence town house, with Salvatore Rossi, a young doctor with his roots in the working-class, communist South — he had a momentous childhood meeting with the dying Gramsci, which he has been trying to live down ever since. The momentum of the story comes from the way the cultivated, conservative, and slightly mad Ridolfi clan and the sensitive, prickly, scientific Rossi fail to understand each other, with various wildcards like the Monsignore and Chiara's English schoolfriend "Barney" (née Lavinia) thrown in to create extra chaos.

Lovely writing, with Fitzgerald's characteristic gentle wit and pared-down prose, and equally characteristic insistence on leaving us in doubt as to whether or not certain things really happened. ( )

"Innocence" is, more or less, the story of a marriage between a southern Italian neurologist and a young, beautiful, and, yes, innocent, half-Scottish Italian countess. It resembles a lot of nineteenth-century British novels in that it's a novel about both love and property: Chiara's family has at least three impressive living spaces, and the characters constantly ping-pong between all three. Her family's financial condition is discussed at length and in detail. The complex social machinations of Salvatore's perpetually impoverished southern Italian hometown are also examined at length. "Innocence" is also, in a sense, an expatriate novel, but Fitzgerald seems to know the territory so well that it doesn't really seem like it. It doesn't, like "A Room with a View," start out in a boarding house run by a Cockney landlady. There are a few trips made to England, and an old boarding school friend plays a role, but Italy and her Italian characters always seem to take center stage here. A family of expatriate Brits appear, but they're mostly to be gently mocked. Baggy in its plotting and leisurely in its pacing, "Innocence" might be said to be mostly about what it might have been like to live in Florence in the mid-twentieth century.

And I guess the book is about innocence, too, of all kinds: personal, romantic, political, and also the kinds that arise from wealth, or from inexperience, or from unearned self-assurance. Fitzgerald makes it clear from a doubtful but enchanting historical anecdote attached to the family's grandest house that innocence can certainly lead to barbarity, but, considering how insightful Fitzgerald can be about the general indifference and loneliness of human life, she treats most of this novel's characters remarkably gently. This might, perhaps, be a comment on their social or economic status: the rich can afford to be slightly eccentric and pleasant but ineffectual, after all. But I also think that the author might have been genuinely fond of the characters she created here and chose to treat them with a lenient hand. And I was genuinely surprised at how much I came to like them, too, even those personages that Fitzgerald drew with just a few strokes seem remarkably vivid and human. But maybe the old adage that God loves fools, drunks, and innocents holds true here, too. I get the distinct impression that the author just wanted to see these lucky people tumble gracefully and awkwardly through life. Recommended. I'm wondering why I waited so long to read Penelope Fitzgerald. ( )

My first introduction to Penelope Fitzgerald's work had come with 'The Bookshop', and with this second helping I feel like I'm on the road to becoming a big fan. Her writing never calls attention to herself, and yet it is some of the most penetrative, striking prose I've ever seen. In 'Innocence' this characteristic voice carries the reader through what is not the most incredible plot to have ever graced literature, and yet you don't mind the otherwise pedestrian story simply thanks to the joy of reading each sumptuous paragraph. I've got more Fitzgeralds on my bookshelf, and I'm eager to move on to the next. ( )

This did absolutely nothing for me. I started it and then it got put aside and it was hard to find good reasons to power through and finish it. The characters did nothing for me, the plot, such as it was, meandered hopelessly about and eventually, nothing ever really happened. This is the second Penelope Fitzgerald I've read and I didn't like the first any better. Perhaps time to let the other ones go to bookcrossing.

In mid-50s Florence, the Ridolfi family is both an historical sport of nature and precious stock that needs grafting to the deep roots of political consciousness that will herald the future. The count and his daughter are both of the world but also strangely absent. However, when the teenage Chiara falls head over heels for Dr Salvatore Rossi while standing in the rain during the intermission at a concert, she sets in train a sequence of events that will eventuate in romantic bliss or disaster. Meanwhile, Salvatore, who as a child met the dying marxist Antonio Gramsci, is as perplexed as he is smitten by both Chiara and her famous family. He is driven to distraction, which is not a comfortable state for a psychiatrist. How can he go on? How can he not? It is, as ever, the unanswerable question.

Fitzgerald’s prose here is both delicate, almost fastidious, and gaudy. The humour, when it arrives (and it comes often and in droves) is beyond farcical. Yet there is such a sweetness about Chiara, the disturbed Salvatore, and Chiara’s blundering English friend, Barney, that you can’t help falling in love with all of them. The fact that the novel doesn’t really go anywhere makes it hardly any different than life itself. And Fitzgerald clearly sees both the muddle and the majesty of life.

The wandering style and the Italian families might be confusing at first, but this is a novel with as much evidence of Penelope Fitzgerald’s mastery as any in her oeuvre. Recommended, as ever. ( )