Penelope Lively

Until this week I had never read anything by Penelope Lively. How strange -- I'm not sure why I have allowed this celebrated and prolific author to pass me by. But now I've read two of her novels in the space of that many days, more or less. The first one was Spiderweb which I picked up in a charity shop last weekend. Not, perhaps, one of her best known, but I was caught at once. It is about Stella Brentwood, an anthropologist, who has reached retirement age without ever putting down roots and thinks perhaps it is time she did. Almost arbitrarily she decides to buy a cottage in a small hamlet in West Somerset and starts to try to be a conventional householder. She is aided and encouraged by a neighbour, Richard, the pleasant, conventional widower of her university friend Nadine, who takes her out for what she sees as needlessly expensive meals and mends her lawnmower. Down the road live the Hiscox family: silent, downtrodden father, cowed, confused grandmother, two lonely, angry, disturbed teenage sons, all of them deeply and permanently damaged by the terrifying, tyrannical, undoubtedly insane Mrs Hiscox.
What is fascinating about this book -- and no doubt is a characteristic of Penelope Lively's work -- is that though there is a plot (events happen, the narrative moves forward), a good deal of what the novel deals with is more nebulous, in the sense that it takes place in the memory of Stella. That is, Stella remembers the past and reflects on it constantly, in particular thinking about how it has constructed her into what she is today: "Not happenstance, she think, not happenstance at all, but the way the future is implicit in the present, did one but know. The signals are already there but we cannot read them." Juxtaposed against this is the narrative of the Hiscox boys, who have been denied a past by their mother's refusal, and their father's apparent inability, to answer questions about their early lives.
I read this very quickly as I found I couldn't put it down, and finished it on Friday afternoon. I then thought I could not possibly get through the weekend without reading another book by this fascinating writer, so I dashed off to the local library just before closing time and grabbed the only one on the shelves, which was City  of the Mind (1991), which I read yesterday in one gulp.  
Described in the blurb as 'her most ambitious novel so far' (but this was the 1991 edition!) this one also confronts the themes of past, present, memory, and time. The protagonist is an architect, Matthew Halland, who is struggling to come to terms with the emptiness of his life following the end of a marriage which has simply, as he says, gone dead. His eight-year-old daughter Jane spends weekends with him, but the rest of his week is taken up with various commissions -- a Docklands project, a Georgian office conversion -- and the occasional diversion of an empty, though not unenjoyable, sexual relationship. His life becomes marginally more eventful after an encounter with a terrifying Rachmann-esque property developer who singles him out for unpleasant and frightening bullying tactics, and a young woman who he briefly meets in a sandwich bar makes an impression on him, though he cannot see how this can possibly lead to anything.
As in Spiderweb, the plot is interesting but is also only part of what is going on here. Though confined in 'real time' to a relatively few months in Matthew's life, the novel ranges through not only Matthew's memories of his childhood, of his marriage, and his impressions of the London cityscape through which he travels every day, but also departs in places to the past. So sometimes we are in the London of the Blitz, at other times in the worlds of the Elizabethan explorer Martin Frobisher, or the Victorian paleontologist Richard Owen, or of an un-named pauper child in an un-named period of London's past. All these worlds collide from time to time, affecting each other, and affecting Matthew's sense of who he is and of the world in which he lives and of which his daughter Jane is now attempting to make sense. The effect is extraordinarily expansive and for me hugely enjoyable.
I see in the criticism attached to the front of Spiderweb that Penelope Lively has been compared to Elizabeth Taylor and Barbara Pym. I was more reminded, especially in City of the Mind, of Virginia Woolf -- there seemed to me to be a definite reminiscence of Woolf's methods, in Mrs Dalloway in particular. Woolf famously wrote: 'Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end'. That seems to be what Lively is demonstrating in these novels. I can't wait to read another.