Family Album

HOW reliable are our memories of family life?

This is a subject which Penelope Lively explores in her 16th novel, the tale of a shabbily genteel upper-middle class family and the house that has played witness to their lives and stored their secrets. Now grown-up, one by one the emotionally distant children return, less than enthusiastically, to their former home and their almost fanatically-nurturing mother and distant writer father.

Lively is somewhat of a literary heavyweight but I initially found her mannered style hard to get used to and her tendency to jump between different tenses and first and third person narratives within a paragraph quite off-putting. However, after a while I hardly noticed the pages flying by, a testament to Lively’s ability to weave a quietly compelling tale from a slight enough plot.

When the deep, dark family secret comes to light, however, it is a bit of a damp squib. It turns out to have been fairly obviously signposted and doesn’t exactly cause shockwaves. Then again, it could be said that real life is less about such dramatic revelations and more about ignoring unpalatable truths for the sake of staying in our comfort zone. In this regard, Lively perfectly captures the ennui of domestic life and the distance that children often crave from the suffocating atmosphere of family life.

While Lively is incisive in her observations and almost cruelly sharp in her depiction of Alison, the delusional mother, I found her characterisation elsewhere to be quite slight. The father Charles is almost a caricature of the emotionally retarded upper-class male. Of the six children, the troublesome Paul and brittle Gina feature most, while the rest are only sketchily-drawn.

The book finishes with a terse exchange of emails between the siblings which is quite jarring. There is no doubt that Lively is an accomplished writer and but ultimately I found it to be quite an unsatisfying read.