The Photograph
Penelope Lively Viking, 236pp, £14.99
ISBN 0670913928
A primary characteristic of bereavement is anger towards the person who has died. If they loved you how dare they make you feel so bad? Wasn't there always something wrong about them, and your relationship? How could you have loved them, and why do they keep haunting you? For a novelist, and particularly one preoccupied by the intrusion of the past upon the present, this is rich but uncomfortable territory. Bereavement forces real people with a monocular, solipsistic view of others into the more complex apprehensions of character familiar to readers of fiction. It forces us to one side of our own lives, and confronts us with the mystery of the other. The Photograph is Penelope Lively's 16th novel, and has elements of a detective story. Sixty-year-old Glyn, sorting through old papers in a cupboard, finds a photograph of his dead wife, Kath, in an envelope marked "DON'T OPEN - DESTROY". She is holding hands with her brother- in-law, and from this he surmises - correctly - that she had an affair with her sister's husband, Nick. Shock and rage give way to a sense of purpose, to discover the person he never knew beneath the charming, attractive exterior.
The subsequent narrative is told through the minds and memories of those who also knew Kath well. These range from her sister Elaine (a magnificently even-handed portrait in sibling jealousy), her feckless husband Nick, their daughter Polly, Nick's former business partner in publishing, and other friends or colleagues. All feel undimmed love for her, an emotion generated, it must be said, largely by pleasure in her appearance and spontaneous personality. As Kath appears to have little else to recommend her, the effect on the reader is one of deepening impatience. You can care about somebody pretty on film, where the charms of an actress are plainly visible, but a novel needs more, and despite many descriptions of Kath's liveliness, she fails to live on the page. To be fascinated by someone dead in a novel, you have to be made to care about their effect on the living - as in Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, or Alison Lurie's The Truth About Lorin Jones. Glyn fails to engage our interest or affections, and his ultimate discovery about his wife is not dramatic enough to validate the process of arriving at it.
Lively has always been masterly at creating the unease of a perspective through time, whether in her excellent children's novels, such as The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, or in more recent works, including City of the Mind. Glyn's job as a historian (like that of the central character in the Booker-winning Moon Tiger) is the cue for a meditation on the nature of the past that lifts the narrative from a psychodrama about adultery into something more interesting. If Lively's characters are maddeningly middle class in their preoccupations, expectations and perceptions, the intelligence that creates them is more subtle than they perhaps have a right to. She writes with deceptive simplicity, but every word is exact, and when tackling traditional novelistic subjects, such as why we marry the person we do, shafted with quiet wit. You cannot help wishing she were less restrained and as savage as Jane Austen, because she quite clearly could be. She is at her best, in fact, when showing her characters bursting with the irritation she conveys all too accurately, rather than in contemplating lacrimae rerum, the pity of things. The Photograph could only have been written by someone who has experienced the scars of bereavement, but its ultimate effect is to remind us that there are others who deserve our pity more deeply.
Amanda Craig's most recent novel is In a Dark Wood (Fourth Estate)
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