This books makes a delightfully refreshing read.
‘How It All Began’ depicts upheavals
of very individual and personal sorts, in a contemporary world that this particular middle
class English reader recognises with great amusement.
This book cleverly, lightly, conveys the stories of half a dozen or so
interesting and flawed characters whose life changes are set in motion by the
random mugging of an elderly lady.
That elderly
lady, Charlotte, is, I imagine, rather like Penelope Lively herself. She’s a bookish independent lady, frustrated
by being rendered temporarily helpless. But it is
the people around her whose stories tangle and untangle more than her own does as a result of her injury. There’s Rose, the dutiful daughter who
surprises herself by discovering an (impossible) love. There’s Rose’s enjoyably pompous old
academic employer, and his interior designer niece, who is the temporary
mistress of dreadful Jeremy, who is married to neurotic Stella, who is advised
by her bully of a sister Gill. And then
there is Anton with the wonderful eyes….
We are given all of these people’s viewpoints, juggled with such
dexterity that there is never any doubt whose viewpoint we are experiencing,
and no feeling of being wrenched from something that we don’t want to leave
just then.
This is storytelling with such a lightness of touch that one is hardly aware of how it is done, and that, I think, is a mark of brilliance.
This is storytelling with such a lightness of touch that one is hardly aware of how it is done, and that, I think, is a mark of brilliance.
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