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Summary
Summary
The Booker Prize-winning authors first novel since The Photograph is a powerful story of growth, death, and rebirth and a study of the previous century--its major and minor events, its shaping of public consciousness, and its changing of lives.
Author Notes
Penelope Lively has written over 18 books for children, and over 15 titles for adults, distinguishing herself on both levels. Among the awards she has received are the coveted Booker Prize for the adult novel "Moon Tiger" (1987) and the Carnegie Medal for the highly acclaimed juvenile work, "The Ghost of Thomas Kempe" (1973).
In Lively's writing, for both adults and children, the recurrent theme is interpreting the past through exploring the function of memory. "My particular preoccupation as a writer is with memory. Both with memory in the historical sense and memory in the personal sense."
Beginning her writing career in the early 1970's, Lively wrote exclusively for children for over a decade. Because children have limited memories, devices were used to explore their perceptions of the past, such as ghosts in "Uninvited Ghosts and Other Stories" (1985), and a sampler in "A Stitch in Time' (1976). Lively's first adult novel, "The Road to Lichfield" (1977) was the result of turning to an older audience when she felt inspiration running out. Her adult novels include "Passing On" (1995), the story of a mother's legacy to her children and 'Oleander, Jacarandi: A Childhood Perceived' (1994) which is a memoir of Lively's childhood.
Penelope (Low) Lively, born March 17, 1933 in Cairo, Egypt, had a most unusual childhood. She grew up in Cairo with no formal education until age 12, when her family put her in boarding school in England. After earning a B.A. in history at Oxford in 1955, she married Jack Lively, a university professor, whom she calls her most useful critic. They have a son and a daughter, Adam and Josephine.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Booker and Whitbread prize-winner Lively begins her 14th novel, a multigenerational love story, in a London park in 1935, ends it nearly 70 years later after covering several lifetimes of love and heartbreak. The story starts when Lorna Bradley and Matt Faraday meet in St. James Park; they are instantly drawn to one another despite her upper-crust upbringing and Matt's "tradesman" profession. After their marriage, they settle in the country where Matt works as an engraver and Lorna fulfills her domestic role as a wife and mother to their daughter, Molly. It is an idyllic situation until Matt is drafted and sent to Egypt, where he is killed in action. Lorna and young Molly relocate to London, and Lorna works with Matt's friend Lucas at his small printing press. Predictably, Lucas and Lorna marry, but she dies giving birth to Simon. The narrative diverges as grown-up Molly finds employment as a library assistant and has an affair with a wealthy man who fathers her child, Ruth. Grown and with children of her own, Ruth's curiosity about her ancestors sends her on a journey that brings the novel full circle. Lively (A Stitch in Time; Moon Tiger) has crafted a fine novel: intricate, heartbreaking and redemptive. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
British writer Lively is a superb stylist inspired by a curiosity about history that only empathy and the imagination can illuminate. The historical event around which this judiciously crafted family saga revolves is the chaotic Battle of Crete, in 1941, which resulted in an Allied defeat, and, in Lively's sensitive rendering, the death of her artist hero. Matt, of modest rural roots, happens upon Lorna, desperate to escape her smothering upper-class existence, in London's St. James Park. Like characters in a Greek myth, they are instantly transformed by love and find paradise in a Somerset cottage. But after Matt is killed, Lorna can't bear to stay there. Instead, she and her daughter find sanctuary in London with generous and bohemian Lucas. Lively neatly contrasts conventional and unconventional lives, considers the ironies of womanhood and the pitfalls of marriage, and celebrates creative endeavors. Her characters are beguiling, and her blend of romance and stinging social commentary is tonic. A more accurate title for Lively's astute episodic novel might be Accidents, of which there are many, both tragic and joyous, in recognition of just how fragile and capricious life is. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
PENELOPE LIVELY'S new novel begins as simply as the children's game from which it takes its title. Her name, his name, an action, the consequences: "They met on a bench in St. James's Park; it was the 6th of June 1935. Lorna was crying because she had had a violent argument with her mother; Matt was feeding the wildfowl. ... He looked sideways, and was done for." The novel ends two generations later, as their granddaughter falls in love. When Matt and Lorna meet, he is a struggling artist, recently escaped from his parochial small-town family, and she is a reluctant socialite, eager to escape the equally parochial upper-class world of Brunswick Gardens. Together, they will run away to Arcadia, in the form of a charming (when the weather's right) cottage in Somerset. There they will starve for art and live on love; they will have a baby daughter. Matt will make wood engravings, and Lorna will grow vegetables. Idyllic. Except that from Day 1, a third character, History, intrudes - sometimes taking center stage, more often speaking through the details of everyday life. Hitler first appears in a newspaper Lorna uses to wrap garbage; Matt and Lorna's daughter, Molly, is fired for suggesting that the stuffy library where she works should sponsor a debate on "Lady Chatterley's Lover"; Molly's daughter, Ruth, travels to Crete in the year 2000 to honor her grandfather's death at the hands of the Nazis, only to find herself surrounded by German sunbathers and Cretan waiters wishing her "Guten Abend!" This braiding of personal life and historical event is a familiar aspect of Lively's fiction, as is the related theme of contingency. In "Consequences," crucial encounters occur by sheer chance, by a hair's breadth. And just as familiar is the way Lively embeds physical objects in her narrative to suggest its larger structure. The novel for which she won the 1987 Booker Prize took its shape and title from a mosquito repellent called Moon Tiger, "a green coil that slowly burns all night ... dropping away into lengths of gray ash, its glowing red eye a companion of the hot, insect-rasping darkness." Spirals appear throughout "Consequences" too, but this novel takes its shape from the fresco Matt paints in his and Lorna's bedroom: "The walls were dancing, figures spun across them, holding hands, man and woman, naked, vibrant, joyous. They whirled from corner to corner, arms outstretched to one another - this pair, that pair, these, those, the same all around the room, dipping down, flinging up toward the roof. ... the curves of breasts, of buttocks, graceful heads that had no features. Man and woman. Woman and man." This joyous ever-widening dance is painted in early 1936, to celebrate Lorna's pregnancy. Just months later, the Spanish Civil War begins. The irony is palpable, yet so is the joy. And "Consequences," despite its shadows, is also a joyous ever-widening dance. At its center shimmers the idea of resiliency, of the continuity of humankind as embodied in one family, shattered and reconstituted, fragile, stubborn, enduring. Nancy Kline's most recent book is a translation of Paul Eluard's "Capital of Pain."
Guardian Review
After so many novels, books for children and top-drawer awards, there's no question that Penelope Lively knows what she's doing. The risk is of course that, to the delight of your fans and your publisher, you go on doing it. Consequences , her 18th novel, is not self-repetitive, but its blandness of style and content initially led me to see it as going through the motions without much emotional investment - smoothly told, well made, perfunctory. I now believe I was wrong about this, but I had to get almost to the end to discover my mistake. It is 1935. Penniless young artist from the Welsh borders and young woman of Kensington meet in St James's Park, fall in love and, to the undying horror of her completely soulless parents, are married at Finsbury Town Hall. They run off to Somerset, where they live blissfully in a four-room cottage with absolutely no cons, mod or otherwise. They have a daughter. Matt paints wonderful murals on the walls. But it is 1939 . . . You know what will happen. You know he will go off and be killed in the war, and he is, and you know she will soldier bravely on with her baby, and she does, and when a friend reappears you know they'll marry, and they do. Such predictability is endearing and may be valuable: novelty is not everything, we need our tales retold, the known found new in unknown words. But this retelling rang a little hollow to me. The Somerset idyll could be a rehash of a sentimental movie from the 40s. The characters are dutifully present - the Brilliant Young Artist, the Loving Young Wife, the Kindly Bohemian, and, later, figures from the Mixed-Up 60s and 90s, unenthusiastic, uncomplaining. The stiffness of their upper lips is such that they seem complacent. Their behaviour may shock their parents or the conventions, but they themselves never seem surprised or even much concerned. They just have a baby but refuse to marry the father, or find a totally unexpected job or a new spouse, calmly, as if they knew what was going to happen. It's a pity that the pre-war romance that sets all the consequences going is prettified, for the author's observation can be keenly accurate. "People talked of the war as though it were a condition: a chronic condition . . . The word . . . had infiltrated the language of children. 'Is it because of the war?' asked Molly, when the hens got fowl pest." How well that catches the way the second world war, unlike all the wars since, dyed every mind the same dirty khaki colour, even in places far from bombs and battles. When the young widow leaves the cottage, there is a little passage about the house surviving through the years, reminiscent of the wondrous "Time Passes" in To the Lighthouse . More such lyricism might have better carried the book through to its long, fine denouement. For it does all come together when the granddaughter, Ruth, goes to Crete to find the soldier's grave. These scenes, collapsing a 1940s battle into ancient Minoa into 21st-century Crete, are brilliant. This highly charged temporal overload justifies the long build-up, and Ruth can weep at last "for him. For all of it." A predictably random sexual encounter drains off the emotion. Later, Ruth's return to the cottage in Somerset - now furnished with inside toilet, electronics and attractive tenant - rounds out the three-generation tale satisfactorily. Did I expect her to find love waiting for her there? Well, yes. Ursula K Le Guin's Changing Planes is published by Gollancz. To order Consequences for pounds 15.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Caption: article-leguinlively.1 When the young widow leaves the cottage, there is a little passage about the house surviving through the years, reminiscent of the wondrous "Time Passes" in To the Lighthouse . More such lyricism might have better carried the book through to its long, fine denouement. For it does all come together when the granddaughter, Ruth, goes to Crete to find the soldier's grave. These scenes, collapsing a 1940s battle into ancient Minoa into 21st-century Crete, are brilliant. This highly charged temporal overload justifies the long build-up, and Ruth can weep at last "for him. For all of it." A predictably random sexual encounter drains off the emotion. Later, Ruth's return to the cottage in Somerset - now furnished with inside toilet, electronics and attractive tenant - rounds out the three-generation tale satisfactorily. Did I expect her to find love waiting for her there? Well, yes. - Ursula K Le Guin.
Kirkus Review
Three generations of independent women in a single family are fortunate enough to meet the loves of their lives. Applying her gift for seamless and addictive prose to matters of the heart, the Booker Prize-winning British writer's 17th novel (Making It Up, 2005, etc.) is a well-crafted, soft-centered object lesson in the random yet unique business of meeting Mr. Right. Well-bred Lorna Bradley bumps into gifted wood-engraver Matt Faraday in London's St. James's Park in 1935 and marries him against her snobby parents' wishes. A few brief years of idyllic happiness--including the birth of daughter Molly--ensue, in a picturesque but unmodernized cottage in Somerset before World War II intervenes, eventually claiming the life of Matt in Crete. Heartbroken, Lorna turns to printer and family friend Lucas, later marries him but dies giving birth to their son. Molly grows up self-reliant and refuses to marry her wealthy publisher lover, even after becoming pregnant by him. She doesn't meet her own romantic destiny--poet Sam--until many years later, at a literary festival. Her daughter Ruth, a journalist, makes a conventional marriage to Peter but falls out of love with him as the years go by and eventually ends up with academic and writer Brian, back in the idyllic country cottage (now modernized) where her grandfather's mural of the dance of life still graces the bedroom wall. Moving at a cracking pace, Lively never strays too far from her themes of love and literature, words and pictures, lighting up the narrative with flashes of historical detail. Intelligent escapism: Although grounded by social history, this novel has its head in the fairy-tale clouds, where good things always await. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This new novel by award-winning British author Lively (Moon Tiger) begins in the 1930s as Londoners Lorna and Matt meet, marry, and move into a rural English cottage, where daughter Molly is born. When Matt dies in battle during World War II, the shattered Lorna moves back to London to live with Lucas, Matt's business partner and friend. When subsequent loss occurs, the narrative shifts to Molly, now a smart, independent young woman looking out for her younger brother and stepfather while making her way in the working world. Later, as Molly negotiates midlife, the narrative shifts again, settling on Molly's daughter, Ruth, a journalist who is married with two children and yet yearns for happiness. Both in linear progression and through the resonance of past and present, this story pulls the reader along with captivating characters whose lives seem achingly familiar. Additionally, the story has a subtle thread about how family legacy can deepen one's perception and appreciation of life. Recommended for both public and academic libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/07.]--Maureen Neville, Trenton P.L. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
[Lively's] characters are beguiling, and her blend of romance and stinging social commentary is tonic. --Booklist ReviewLondon, 1935: A chance meeting on a park bench on the eve of World War II sets in motion a love affair that reverberates through three generations. Matt and Lorna are deeply, defiantly, in love; they marry, and Lorna is pregnant when Matt is called for duty. But the war means Matt's death in action; it cuts short his artist's career and changes the course of Lorna's life. The war means that Lorna will marry again and that Molly, their daughter, will grow up in a blasted landscape of bomb sites and boarded windows, of households reconfigured by loss. But a chance look at a forgotten newspaper on the London tube leads Molly into her first job--and into the life of James Portland, a wealthy man she cannot love; and the postwar period gives way to a new era. Thirty years later, Ruth, Molly's own daughter, leaves her marriage for a journey that takes her back to 1941, to a new resolution of her own history and that of her family.Told in Penelope Lively's incomparable prose, Consequences is a powerful story of growth, death, and renewal, and a study of the previous century--its major and minor events, the shaping of consciousness and lives, and a reaffirmation of the force of connection between generations.Lively has crafted a fine novel: intricate, heartbreaking and redemptive. --Publishers Weekly Excerpted from Consequences by Penelope Lively All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
