Book review: Family Album

Published on Friday 24 July 2009 13:58

By Penelope Lively Penguin/Fig Tree, 261pp, £16.99

"THE KITCHEN WAS THE HEARTland of Allersmead. Of course. That is so in any well-adjusted family home, and Allersmead was a shrine to family." It is the word "shrine" – a place hallowed by associations, or "a casket for relics" – that at once gives an ironic tone to this observation on the sixth page of the novel. Later the reader will detect more irony in the word "well-adjusted". This is indeed a family story, but well-adjusted is not the word to describe the family who live there.

Allersmead itself is an Edwardian suburban villa set in a large garden. The keeper of the shrine is the mother, Alison. Being a mother and a homemaker is her role in life, all she has ever wanted. Her husband, Charles, writer of popular books on sociology and history, is detached from her enthusiasm. There are six children, two boys and four girls, and Charles is remote from them too. The other member of the household is Ingrid, who came as an au pair from Norway and has never left. This may be unusual, but there are good reasons for her continued presence.

The novel opens with a weekend visit from a grown-up daughter, Gina, and her lover, Philip. Gina has got well away. She is a moderately well-known television reporter, covering distant wars. Philip, an only child, is fascinated by the dynamics of a large family. But there is only one of Gina's siblings still at home: the eldest, Paul, who has made a mess of things or, as Alison might put it, never found his niche in life. The others are far-flung, and visit only rarely. So we realise that things are not what they were meant to be, or rather not what Alison intended they should be. She has devoted her life to making a nest, and the birds have flown. Is her insistence that they all enjoyed a perfect childhood self-deception?

The novel then tracks back over various episodes in the children's upbringing: birthday parties, anniversary dinners, a holiday in Cornwall. Some are seen from one child's point of view, some from another's, and we become aware of their dissatisfaction and discontent. Alison's determination that they must be a close-knit group, happy to do everything together, begins to look desperate. Meanwhile, Charles declines to participate, his relations with his children cold, his manner sarcastic. Much of the novel is written in the present tense – often an irritating device; but Penelope Lively is one novelist who can use it effectively, freezing the action in a moment of time.

There is a secret in the family which can never be discussed or brought to light. It concerns the youngest child, Clare, and it would be a dull reader who does not quickly make the connection with Ingrid and her continued presence in the household.

As usual in a Lively novel, the characterisation is admirable. We come to know and, to an extent, understand all the nine principal players in the story. The depiction of Alison is particularly good. She is tiresome and yet, in her determination that life should be what she says it is, oddly touching. We see what she can never understand: why the children need to get away, but also why Paul finds a reluctant refuge in Allersmead. In short, the complexities and silences of family life are intelligently and subtly explored.

And perhaps in the end, Alison is not so mistaken in her conviction that she has given the children what all children should have, for in the climax of the novel they find that the ties which bind them to Allersmead have only slackened, not been severed. When trouble comes they rally round and we come to see that, though they live far apart from each other and rarely meet, they have a strong and, perhaps to them, surprising sense of solidarity and of a common responsibility.

This is a very engaging novel, continuously interesting and often moving because Lively has so thoroughly imagined her characters and writes of them with wise sympathy. It reads so easily that you might suppose it was easy to write. But this kind of novel is much harder to bring off than one packed with striking incidents. It is also, happily, more rewarding to read.