Consequences
penelope lively
Fig Tree, Rs 390

Penelope lively’s new novel, her fourteenth in a celebrated writing career, is the story of three generations of feisty, independent women and their lives across seventy years of the twentieth century. The novel begins in June 1935 on a bench in St James’s Park in London. Lorna and Matt, the most affectionately drawn characters in Consequences, meet here for the first time. Matt is an artist, a wood engraver, and his family lives in a small town near the Welsh border; he is considered completely unsuitable by Lorna’s wealthy parents. But Lorna, who has always found her own life a little claustrophobic, is determined: she goes ahead and marries him.

In this first and sweetest section of the novel we are told about the rustic idyll that the young couple create for themselves, notwithstanding the oil lamps, candles and absence of running water, in a tiny country cottage from where they can see the distant shore of Wales. But the idyllic hideaway is soon overrun with the effects of the war in Europe “People talked of the war as though it were a condition: a chronic condition” and eventually Matt is also called to action.

After Matt’s death, Lorna and her little daughter Molly move back to London where Matt’s publisher and friend, Lucas, gives Lorna a job. Lorna and Lucas later get married, but death and loss are never far away. Molly, growing up in a greatly changed country, works in a library and gets into a relationship with an older and wealthy married man. But she is a child not only of the nineteen-sixties, but of a strong-willed mother. And so, when she discovers that she is pregnant, she decides not to marry her wealthy lover but to go ahead and have the baby on her own.

Ruth, the result of this union, finds that she doesn’t have many “official” relatives — but then she decides that she doesn’t mind having “a peculiar family”. A middle-aged Molly, now an arts administrator who sometimes falls asleep at poetry readings, meets a poet and decides to get married for the first time in her life. Ruth herself, working as a journalist, marries an ambitious colleague only to find herself pushing a double buggy and grappling with the many demands of motherhood. The marriage doesn’t last, but the motherhood does; although the children spend time with their father, they live with their mother in terms of the divorce, and their parents negotiate dates and times by e-mail. It is now the year 2000.

Consequences is a warm, engaging story about relationships and generations, about memory, loss and endurance. And the first part of the novel, about the early married life of Lorna and Matt, is lovely enough to return to it many times. Yet, this is not one among the best of Lively’s work. There has always been something about her imperfect and all-too-human characters, but one problem with Consequences is that everyone is so very nice about everything — so much so that the nastiest character is Ruth’s careerist husband. And he’s nasty mainly because he thinks art can be written about as a commodity, and because he steals toys from his children for story ideas about the market for children’s stuff. Other than this new-age brute, it is only the circumstances that are evil — war, death, AIDS, cuts in arts funding… Another weakness is that the novel moves too fast, with three generations telling their stories within three hundred pages. Decisions are made so quickly that we get little sense of conflicts — or, indeed, their difficult consequences.