Mixed motives and memories
Mary Keen
THE PHOTOGRAPH by Penelope Lively Penguin/Viking, £14.99, pp. 235, ISBN 0670913928 Here is Glyn, charismatic telly don, searching the landing cupboard for an offprint to illustrate an article he is now writing and a photograph of Kath falls out of a folder marked, 'Don't open — Destroy.' Not quite the author's words, but a similar, jerky present tense runs all through Penelope Lively's latest book, which is about death and memory and how we get people wrong, how we sec people after they die. This is familiar Lively territory. She is, after all, a historian. Like Glyn the landscape archaeologist, time is her most essential tool. Organising perceptions of people and events is her trade. Glyn is less good at it. The Photograph is his quest for the real Kath, who was his wife. Until she died.
The new Lively novel is upmarket gossip. It is fodder for those of us who like to sit around the kitchen table for hours, talking about what he or she is really like. Is gossip character analysis, or assassination? Like the dead, the one discussed is not around to contradict. We never meet Kath, but everyone we do meet in the book was transformed by this woman. She haunts them. She stares, she smiles across a table at a pub. She comes down the steps with confetti in her hair 'laughing for ever and always'. She buys crazy dresses and extrava
gant lunches. She arrives with a cornucopia of lilies, smiling. 'Surprise.' But this irresistible being is a puzzle. 'That,' says Glyn 'is the whole point about the dead ... They are beyond reach. The rest of us are still flailing around trying to make sense of things.' We flail anyway. Dying just makes it worse.
All the characters who knew Kath were intimately connected with her. They reminisce alone, or sometimes in pairs, and by the end of the hook you feel you know them pretty well. Or perhaps you do. The intriguing thing about this novel is the way it makes you realise how little anyone knows about anyone. Identity, what we assume about people, is another of this writer's preoccupations. In her excellent autobiography, A House Unlocked, Penelope Lively appears wearing a green badge which says she is 'Lively Mrs, Politics'. She is officially the wife of the Lecturer in Politics at Swansea University. True, but labels are only the start. Her characters wear expanded labels. How do we know who else they are? Here is Nick, the feckless failure, 'thinking of writing something on Brunel' and finding it hard to get down to it, married to Elaine, 'a highly esteemed doyenne garden designer, with major projects to her credit'. Is he such a loser as he seems? Do we believe in her success? (I was a little worried by her grasp of the flowering time of Astrantia). Kath, the beauty in the photograph, was Elaine's sister. Nick and Elaine's daughter, Polly, adored her. 'She was so attractive. I mean basically she was just such an amazingly nice person.' Oliver, Nick's ex-business partner found his spirits 'lifted a notch, just because she was there', All of them remember her clearly.
One of the things that I find hard to accept in Mrs Lively's novels is that everyone sees such vivid ghosts. In Passing On, the perfectly frightful mother Dorothy regularly appears to browbeat her middleaged children, as she did in life. Hairpins jutting from her bun, 'she turns, red-faced from her brew', or walks beside her daughter, 'criticising loudly and attracting glances'. Most people find it hard to conjure up a precise image of anyone, but in this author's books, everyone has the gift of memory. Such total recall is unusual, but it makes for compulsive reading.
It is only at the end when we meet Kath's best friend that we begin to understand what she was really like. But this is the only character whose voice is quieter than that of the author. Now, as the story winds to its conclusion, the reader is told what to think about Mary Packard, rather than being expected to sift through evidence from the character herself. The denouement is neat. The quest is over. But do we believe it? By the end of the story we have been trained to doubt everything, to question motives and memories. Perhaps there is another side to Kath, another person who could explain what she was really like.
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