Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
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Penelope Lively
Fig Tree 2009
This novel didn’t start well for me. It was clear that we were moving in rarefied circles from the off (“The house smelled of cooking. You could unravel the constituent ingredients: garlic, herbs, wine – some earthy casserole, a coq au vin perhaps, or a boeuf en daube”). This did not bode well. It was also clear that a family secret was to be revealed. As recent reading experience has taught me that such secrets are rarely as shocking as the author believes, (see The Rain Before It Falls and Tomorrow), I expected the worse. However …. this is actually an interesting, well-constructed family saga. The family in question is dominated by Alison, an earth mother type who has devoted herself to bringing up her many children, with varying degrees of success, and for whom “real old-fashioned family life” is central (“You can’t beat it”, she says, rather improbably). Her husband, Charles, a populist polymath, is much less committed. Lively explores the complex relationships between husband and wife and children (and au pair) through a series of deftly handled flashbacks, mostly centring on the huge but shabby family house, Allersmead, which comes to represent not just the changes which happen to this family, but the history of family life in general over the last century. I was concerned that at one point that the secret might be something that had happened in its cellar (and indeed what went on there does represent what was going on under the surface of this ideal family in rather a predictable manner). However, the actual secret was something else - and as usual, a bit of a letdown - but perhaps Lively wanted it that way in a novel striving for realism. As always, there were the usual nit-picking gripes (could even bad boy Paul have been sacked from a Starbucks in 1991?), and the resolution of the story through email seemed a bit of a cop-out, (or perhaps just a rather obvious way of pointing out that, as Cliff observed, we don’t talk anymore). However, overall this is an involving, intricately constructed novel by an accomplished writer who makes it all look deceptively effortless.
29th September 2009
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