Penelope Lively – Family Album

Penelope Lively is an author whose name has been familiar since my childhood.  She has been publishing novels for decades; Family Album, published on August 6th 2009, is her sixteenth novel.  She has won a clutch of prestigious prizes including The Booker for Moon Tiger, The Whitbread for A Stitch in Time, and The Carnegie Medal for A Ghost of Thomas Kempe.  Most of these major prizes were gathered a fair while ago -  the Booker winning Moon Tiger was published in 1987, for example. I’m often curious about these writers who find considerable success then continue to publish for many years afterwards to less acclaim. Has the quality of their work changed? Or has it become less acknowledged for reasons of fashion? More on that later.

Family Album is a novel based in Allermead,  a rambling Edwardian house in an undisclosed part of (probably Southern) England in 2008. The family that has lived here is as extensive and disparate as the contrasting rooms of the house itself. There is Alison, the earthmother and lover of children whose mission in life is to procreate and nurture her children. There is her husband, the taciturn Charles, given to disappearing into his study and making sarcastic comments when forced to attend noisy family gatherings. There is Ingrid, the clipped Scandinavian au pair who has continued to live at Allermead long after the children have grown up. And there are the children, all six of them.

Paul, the eldest, is 41 in 2008, and has led a peripatetic life in terms of jobs while his  personal life, centred around drink and drugs,  is equally itinerant. Gina is two years younger and has long been political, her left wing views leading to good natured sparring with her father. She has a career in TV news which takes her around the globe. A year younger than her is Sandra with whom Gina clashes – Sandra is elegant and fashion conscious and has graduated from being a fashion correspondent in the press through managing a trendy boutique in Rome to turning her talent in aesthetics to property development. Katie, a year younger than Sandra, is the kind, considerate sibling. After an English degree she moved to the US for postgrad studies and married an American. Roger, a year younger than Katie, is next, he has always been interested in biology and becomes a paediatrician in Toronto. And finally there is the baby of the family, Clare, a professional dancer.

The story progresses through flashbacks to various times and significant events in the family. On the sleeve notes and early on in the novel, the reader learns that there is a dark secret at the core of this ostensibly conventional family, and this leads to a sense of anticipation; almost a sense of foreboding. When the secret is outed it is strange and unusual but less black than the dark abuse I for one was expecting. But then, Lively is in her 70s – what would have been shocking and unspeakable when she was young is now merely a somewhat bizarre set-up, an oddity, an unusual and unconventional set of circumstances, marked not so much by the actions as by the lack of reactions.

And so, back to the question of why Lively has become relatively invisible in terms of prizes in the past two decades. Her novels still garner favourable reviews, and a person who can write well doesn’t lose that ability. My take on it is that  one reason may be because Lively’s style seems quaintly archaic in many ways.  While her mastery of language is faultless and her evocation of atmosphere convincing, the omniscient authorial voice prevails in a way that seems slightly old fashioned: within the same chapter, we are told how several different characters are feeling, so that unlike novels where different chapters express the thoughts of different characters (Sarah Hall’s wonderful How to Paint a Dead Man being a recent example), here we are aware of the presence of an all-seeing, all-knowing author.  But a more major flaw is that despite the characters in the novel having distinctly different personalities, they all speak the way one would imagine Lively speaks, a style pertaining to Lively’s history of boarding school and Oxford, of her respectable 76 years and the establishment literary circles she moves in. Despite Gina being educated at a poor state school,  being of my generation, going to York university and being left wing, she speaks as I imagine Lively might: ‘not until later when one puts two and two together’, ‘one hadn’t thought one was’, ‘does one recognize them?’ , ‘one thought that was just their style’. In fact, every member of the family and even the hard-boiled university lecturer family friend talks in this way. I counted more than thirty instances of this Queen-like use of ‘one’, from the Manchester uni educated Katie through Sandra who forgoes further education altogether to Paul who hangs about with drug dealers and alcoholics. It’s obvious that Allermead is a ramshackle mansion and the parents thus wealthy at one time, but children pick up language from their peers, and at state schools this majestic self reference in the third person would have been quickly bullied out.

Other examples of outdated language abound – Roger, supposedly younger than me, rejoices when finding marine creatures on the beach by crying  ‘O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!’ If he carried on like this during his medical training, some drunk in A&E would have punched him in the face. One character muses  ‘it’s always a challenge to see for how long it can go on’ which again sounds formal and stifled. This standard upper class way of speaking irons out the differences that are established between the characters. In fact, sometimes it seems that Lively’s characterisation is fairly superficial – for example, we are told early on that Sandra is fashion-obsessed and from then on, everything Sandra says or does is relentlessly style or make-up orientated, so that she comes across as a bit of a cardboard caricature. Similarly, whenever Katie appears she’s being caring, ditto Gina being gruffly socialist/careerist and Roger being doctorly, either fledgling or fully formed.

Yet Lively is not all twee cosiness and outmoded English gentility. She can be very insightful. The rivalry between Gina and Sandra is prickly and convincing, Ingrid is intriguingly inscrutable, and Paul’s grief at the demise of his first love affair is palpably sorrowful. And Lively excels in throwaway lines about families and their tensions, as here:

‘… the adults retain the intimacy of daily association but have lost sight of one another in other ways – like most people they know one another inside out and not at all.’

She is also perceptive about the way families collude to keep secrets stashed away, and expresses this luminously:

‘They know. They all know eventually. They know but the knowledge is tamped down, stowed away somewhere out of sight and out of mind. The house knows and is silent, locking away what has been done and said and thought. No one quite remembers how they know; it is as though the knowledge was not suppressed but arrived through some osmotic process, absorbed from Allermead daily life, an insidious understanding that seeped from person to person. Not that there were conversations, exchanges, comments.  No one has wished to discuss it; if ever the facts of the matter seemed to smoulder dangerously, there would be a concerted move to stamp out the embers, to move away, to find safe territory elsewhere.’

At one point, Lively describes Allermead as ‘a curious marriage of archaic and highly desirable’. This is not a bad metaphor for Lively’s writing itself. One the one hand she is bogged down in the language of the past, on the other she peers with wisdom and eloquence in through the impermeable shell families carve for themselves.