A world in a grain of sand

Penelope Lively has selected these 26 stories from the last 40 years of her brilliant writing career, concluding with the finest of all written in 2019, the novella-length Songs of Praise.

Her characters are recognisable. More detailed than the men who tend to be seen through the women’s eyes, the women themselves are cultured, highly articulate, well educated and financially comfortably off; they travel abroad to Egypt or Eastern Europe to learn; they have expensive London houses and perhaps a pied à terre in the country. They are archaeologists. book editors, artists, writers, poets, scientists – some striving, some successful. They have rich interior lives and enquiring minds. They are mature and have lived – Lively is startlingly good on old age.

I expect Penelope Lively has had the insult of being elitist thrown at her , but what these characters have above all is humanity with all its minutiae of disappointments, thwarted ambitions, class-imposed frustrations, the pains of fractured relationships, betrayals, the bonds and lack of bonds between parent and young child and grown up child, regret, loneliness, realities of old age and, perhaps above all, of love and the grief of losing love. As one widow says, “Grief is as all-consuming as love”.

Lively’s insights are piercing and expressed in few words. As much is understood by what is left unsaid than said. How much is packed behind brief comments such as the beautifully phrased “All marriages carry freight” ! Her deep companionship with history gives range and depth enabling us to follow a character through a whole life from long-ago childhood to the present time. Some of the stories are period pieces – a little girl’s ‘unsuitable’ friendship with a local boy who takes her rabbit shooting whilst she’s staying with her aunt in the country. The child had been sent ‘home’ to an unknown England from India , re-creating Lively’s own terrible childhood expulsion from her Eden of Cairo. Questions are explored in these stories. How reliable is memory? Can there ever be a single truth about a person? This is spun out in the superb Songs of Praise where the real Martha is interspersed with the Martha of the praises sung at her wake.

There’s plenty of humour too, some of it sly, and even a playfulness in the form of the stories themselves – as in the one narrated by the splendid purple bird in Pompeii who can see clearly the gods’ punishment meted out to deserving human beings; or in the sudden twists at the very end, such as the little girl who finds a playmate in the garden of her parents’ childless hosts.

Dialogue is one of Penelope Lively’s strengths: absolutely real, devastatingly revealing. The narrator Alix Dunmore is extremely good at delivering all this varied dialogue and creating the host of emotions and feelings dwelling within the words.

Not to be missed.

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