Penelope Lively is one of those writers whom I associate indelibly with my childhood; not so much from my own reading, though I dimly recall The Ghost of Thomas Kempe passing through my hands, but because I remember my mother reading her. A copy of Moon Tiger took up residence by the parental bed in, presumably, 1987, when it won the Booker Prize, making its author a minor celebrity in Islington, where she was living and I was growing up. I didn't start reading Lively myself until recently, when it emerged that Gregory had, perhaps unusually for a man of his generation, a great enthusiasm for her writing. One of his teachers had managed to persuade a class of 14-year old boys to read The Road to Litchfield, and in one of them at least he planted the seed of an enduring interest.
The Road to Litchfield (1977), Lively's first novel, is a quietly impressive piece of work, and nothing else I'd read by her had equalled it until I read Moon Tiger. Gregory's copy must be the very same one that I remember my mother having: the distinctly 1980s cover design is sharply familiar. It's an intricately crafted novel which wears its craft lightly, covering a lot of historical and emotional ground deftly and, ultimately, very movingly. The central character is Claudia Hampton, whom we first meet during her final days in hospital. Her life, rich in adventure and touched with tragedy, is ending, and as the novel shuttles backwards and forwards in time we gradually piece together the events which have shaped it and the people who have charted its course. The core of the novel takes place in wartime Egypt, where Claudia is working as a journalist. She is resilient in the face of discomfort, danger and sexism, laying the foundations for a distinguished career as a writer and historian, but she has much worse to face in the form of a devastating bereavement. As she struggles to make sense of her life in its aftermath, we see her becoming not just tough but toughened, and the results become clear in the relationships which she goes on to form. Moon Tiger is a serious and subtle novel, offering at the same time the pleasure of encountering a whole spectrum of characters at different stages of their lives from a variety of perspectives. It's like a multi-faceted ornament, reflecting light from each surface as you turn it in your hand. At only 200 pages long, it seems to contain vastly more than many much longer novels.
How It All Began is Lively's latest novel. I bought a copy after a talk she gave as part of the Manchester Literary Festival this year, a wonderful event in which she was unfalteringly interesting and entertaining for a whole hour - no small achievement. Her topic was her life not as a writer, but as a reader: a very refreshing approach and an unusual one in the context of a book festival, where writers are mainly concerned to promote their latest book. Unfortunately I hadn't read any of the three novels which she recommended as essential reading for anyone interested in how novels are written - Henry James's What Maisie Knew, Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier and William Golding's The Inheritors - but who knows, maybe one of them will show up on this blog in due course.
How It All Began has a likeable if unastonishing premise: how an event in one person's life can trigger a ripple effect, quickly having repercussions in the lives of complete strangers. The novel opens with a series of such events: Charlotte, an elderly woman living in London, is mugged in the street, leaving her in hospital with a broken hip; her daughter Rose cannot therefore accompany her employer, an aging historian, to his lecture engagement; his niece Marion is obliged to go instead, causing her to cancel a meeting with her lover; the text message conveying this news is read by his wife, precipitating the end of their marriage.... and so on. We might expect that by the end of the novel things will never be the same for any of them ever again, but in fact this is not really the case: most of the characters are in pretty much the same place as they began, having weathered a year of unforeseen and potentially life-changing events. Perhaps Lively is suggesting that life is more cyclical than linear, or perhaps that we rarely learn from experience, contriving instead to dodge opportunities to change our lives. I read How It All Began in a couple of days and found it very entertaining, but it doesn't compare to Moon Tiger for depth or complexity. I recommend them both, for two rather different reading experiences.
