A FUTURE FLOATS IN HER HEAD.... - Rated 
Generation after generation of women in one family, beginning with Lorna who loves Matt and they go to live in a cottage in Somerset. They come from different backgrounds but this does not become a focal point in their lives 'But what she knew with Matt was a thing apart - it was like stepping into some other brighter world'.
It is an idyllic life which they spend in Somerset and of course, it's too good to be true. Tragedy strikes and it is here that the book really begins.
We are introduced to a plethora of new characters - Lucas, Matt's best friend, who plays an important role, Molly and Simon, James and Sam and eventually Jess.
With the childhood of Jess the book takes on a new character and having reached a pivotal point,it starts on its path to complete the circle which begins with Matt and Lorna.
As Ruth thinks 'To be grown-up is always to be then as well as now. Most disconcerting.'
This novel manages ' always to be then as well as now' - in its characters' lives and also at the point in Penelope Lively's writing career.
There are resonances of many of her books in this latest one of hers and most noticeably, resonances of 'Moon Tiger' her best book, in my opinion and the opinion of the Booker judges who awarded it the Booker Prize.
The awareness of time and the circular movement of time is very important in this book and also the different views of the same event through different eyes.
It's good to see Penelope Lively dealing with her favourite themes again and the result is a very pleasing book, well worth buying.
Consequences: Something Logical or Naturally That Follows - Rated 
4.5 stars
"Consequences: Something that logically or naturally follows from an action or condition.
The relation of a result to its cause.
A logical conclusion or inference." Dictonarly.com
"The women are buffeted by events but do not break. The consequences come from their refusal to conform; which generally leads to happiness." Ruaridh Nicoll.
Penelope Lively manages to tell a story of three generations of women, from the early 1930's to the present. The book is always emotionally full. There's nothing stingy in Lively's language. Each sentence gives the feel of conveying the story and emotions of the moment; it's describing without being fussed over. The combining of personal life and historical events is a familiar aspect of Penelope Lively's fiction In "Consequences," crucial encounters occur by sheer chance. This latest story begins in 1935, with an unhappy rich girl, Lorna, sitting weeping on a bench in St James's Park. Nearby, a young man, Matt, sketches the ducks. "Their accidental meeting will later be described as the opening of a game of consequences, from which flows a long, rich narrative." Lively's stories of the experience of love in the lives of three generations of women in one family enables her to explore the changing sceneries of English society and the role of women. Lorna and Matt and their child, Molly. Molly develops into a a beautiful young woman and has a child, at her wish, out of wedlock. Later on Molly mnarres and her life begins again. Ruth. the daughter carries on the tradition of independence and marries, has children and the natural consequences follow.
'Consequences' has a great feel and story lines. For me,it falls short of developing the characters in depth. The story jumps from one decade to the next with little preparation. The prose is elegant, the plotting meticulous but unobtrusive. Some of the male characters are sketchy but the three women - in many ways, one woman seen at different times - are sensitively portrayed. Her characters' memories "are stashed away now, like reels of film, to be replayed at will." And Penelope Lively not only replays those memories, but also shows the invisible connections between her characters. Consequences reminds me of novels I have loved by the likes of the American writer Jim Harrison, with their belief that people are, on the whole, good and their struggle, noble. Harrison's stories were of hardened men battling for existence on the plains of America, while Penelope Lively sets her scene in the literary festivals of the English lands.
"And "Consequences," despite its shadows, is also a joyous ever-widening dance. At its center shimmers the idea of resiliency, of the continuity of humankind as embodied in one family, shattered and reconstituted, fragile, stubborn, enduring." Nancy Kline
I often speak of a novel that affected me as a journey. Penelope Lively's 'Consequence' is a return for me of the storyline that brings me great satisfaction. Her prose and her style bring me to a new place each read. A traditional novel that equates great love to great happiness.
Highly Recommended. prisrob 07-11-07
Good but perhaps not her best. - Rated 
I've read a lot of Lively's novels and enjoyed them all. I enjoyed this, but somehow for me it doesn't have that edge that some of her other novels have. It's a cleverly woven novel, spanning three generations of women in the same family. However, I felt that Lively was almost trying too hard - we have the almost-obligatory gay man, the threat of AIDS, the parent who is single not through widowhood but from choice, and so on. I found most of it predictable - maybe that's what I didn't like-it was all too obvious what was coming next, whether that was death, sex or birth - the writing is on the wall- perhaps too plainly for us.
Not a family saga - Rated
Consequences is the story of three generations of women, beginning in the 1930s with Lorna, then focusing on Molly in the post-war years and finally rounding off the tale with up-to-date Ruth. But this is no `family saga' novel. The book is about the way time changes perceptions, and about memory and loss.
Lively paints with quick, broad brushstrokes, then suddenly paints in a detail that brings her characters and their emotions to life on the page. The history of seventy years is sketched out in less than 300 pages, and yet you feel you know the principal characters intimately. Lively is a master at telling the reader more by writing less.
A novel to savour.
"Before, I had never in my life done anything useful, now there's a point to everything." - Rated
Moving between the bucolic surrounds of regional Somerset and the dizzyingly busy metropolis of London, Penelope's Lively's stylishly written Consequences follows the path of one family through three different generations as they are forced to come to terms with love and heartbreak as English society changes and transforms around them.
The novel begins with a chance meeting in St. James Park, on the sixth of June 1935 when the twenty-something Lorna Bradley, a well-bred girl somewhat at odds with her circumstances, meets the working class artist Matt Faraday. Lorna has been crying because he had had a violence argument with her mother, whilst Matt was feeding the wildfowl in order to draw them.
Some time later they go to a teashop, where Lorna learns that Matt is an artist, primarily a wood engraver, but at the moment is in service of commission to illustrate a book on estuaries and waterways. Lorna is Convinced that love cannot be found in drawing rooms and at country house parties she decides to marry Matt, spurning the set of rigid and age-old requirements of her family dictating how you should dress, how to speak, breathe and live.
"They're not the sort of people you want marrying your daughter," says Matt jokingly after their first visit to Lorna's parents. Their instant attraction and easy familiarity is a perfect fit as they flee the hustle and bustle of London for a ramshackle cottage in Somerset, far from the rarified world of the wealthy Brunswick Gardens.
Lorna, in particular, thrives on the primitive and Spartan conditions that cottage offers and even when she gives birth to their daughter Molly, nothing can assuage her love of her new life. She sees herself as a new person so totally committed Matt, and also to their best friend Lucas who has commissioned Matt's work through his small London-based publishing house, The Heron Press. Indeed, Lucas thinks that Lorna the most appealing and attractive girl he has ever met.
When War strikes, at first Lorna and Matt happily take refuge, both seeking consolation in the isolated beauty of the Somerset surroundings and life undeniably goes on as the primroses come and the spring sunshine flows across the hills. But soon enough, tragedy strikes, Lorna's world is turned into an awful reality, her certainties of the world aside.
From here Lively moves her narrative back to London and to 1943 where London is battered, and bloody, and has been brought to its knees. Molly steadily grows older in this disheveled post-war world, with the rubble, darkness and an exhausted populace, "a landscape of bomb sites and houses with flapping tarpaulin roofs and boarded windows; households depleted by war, minus their men. "
Lively beautifully traces Molly's life and that of her daughter, Ruth throughout the sixties and into the seventies, and eighties as Molly finds work at a Library and confronts "the bunch of old stick in the muds," when she tries, without success, to promote change. Later, after Molly realizes that her marriage is not what she envisioned, she discovers a talent for entrepreneurial activity and flings herself into the world of arts administration, working tirelessly as she sets up poetry conferences around the country.
Ruth also becomes a mother, but succumbs to the demands of a distracted husband, ultimately weighed down by the requirements of marriage and the issues that it brings with its bigger mortgages and larger bills, the quietness of the marriage bed, and the squabbles that quickly ensue. Perhaps Ruth's journey is one of recognizing the ability for change and the fact that nothing is forever, or even should be forever.
As the world turns and time moves on, Matt, Lorna, Molly, Ruth, and even Lucas stumble along in certain directions, each of them impelled by some confusion of instinct, will and even blind faith, their lives defined by choices that are sometimes almost subliminal, Like reality itself, change for them is often a slippery consent where their children grow up, becoming different people, their friendships slacken or intensify.
Lucas becomes "a quaint old fossil," a survivor of the early part of the century, where "different folk once lived;" Molly, in turn, becomes synonymous with the changing social movement of the sixties; and Ruth, who looks to the past and to Matt's short life, sees her own existence as peculiarly accidental, spun from the odd conjunction of her grandparents, two people whose unlikely meeting on a park bench begins an impervious chain of events that eventually lead to her birth.
Lively's prose shines as she seamlessly weaves each generation into the next, the events of the twentieth century both serving a backdrop and as a moving screen to the lives and loves and tragedies of these people. An unfettered Anglophile's delight, Consequences is infused with great beauty as well as the blank slate of possibilities, and also of great hardship as the author brings the journey of her characters full circle, forever standing on the brink, alive to the world of possibility. Mike Leonard May 07.
|
