Some of Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels I do not understand at all. This is one of them. I could tell you about the characters and the setting. I could list scenes and events. But if there exists such a thing as a plot in this novel, I could not discern it.

The BBC exists. The characters work there. It’s World War II, during The Blitz. The characters are living life, recording sounds, broadcasting, taking in boarders, being dysfunctional, being brave, making ends meet, observing chaos, drinking tea and enjoying varying levels of understanding of one another’s psychological complexities and romantic entanglements.

But what is it about? Why did she write it? Who’s the protagonist? What do they want, and do they get it or not? Who or what, in the end, am I rooting for?

In Gate of Angels, she crafts a beautiful puzzle box with a single, exquisite key. When she gives you the key at last, on the final page, the whole mechanism falls into place. You see, with breathtaking clarity, what it’s been about this whole time.

Perhaps such a key exists for Human Voices. If so, I wasn’t perceptive enough to grasp it.

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What a novel! Set in a stern and disjointed college with odd and ancient roots, it follows a young professor and a working-class girl. He doesn’t know what to do with his life. Pursue academic greatness? How, in this dead-end place? Pursue love? With who, when the college forbids women to enter?

He meets the girl by accident. There’s a whiff of scandal. She is very right not to trust men. A professor tells a ghost story with symbolic resonance.

Will they or won’t they? And why has Fitzgerald been giving us all these other facts and stories? They have nothing to do with the main plot!

Except.

On the last page, she gives you one final key. One small, ghost-story element. Just a tiny thing like a filigreed toothpick. And it fits right into a little plot hole she’s left. You slide it in. Pieces shift, and click into place. The whole novel is a magnificent machine, assembling itself in a second out of a pile of scraps. Every part suddenly tight and square, the corners beveled and shining. It lifts a robot hand and pours you a cup of tea.

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