THE HOUSE IN NORHAM GARDENS by Penelope Lively Reviewed by Ann Turnbull

 

   I love Penelope Lively's books, and this one is a particular favourite. First published in the 1970s, it's a compelling story with a subtle undercurrent of magic.

   The story is set in a big old house in Oxford during a week or so of snow. In the house live fourteen-year-old Clare Mayfield and her two aunts, Anne and Susan, aged seventy-eight and eighty. The aunts, though loving and erudite, are not capable of running a home, and the household finances are managed by Clare and Mrs Hedges, the domestic help. Unlike the aunts, these two are aware of the shortage of money and unpaid bills, and have found a lodger, Maureen.

   Away from such grown-up concerns, Clare spends time in the attic, unearthing old clothes and other reminders of her ancestors. She notices a strange and unsettling object: a tamburan - a kind of shield with an image painted on it that suggests a face. She begins to have dreams in which she meets tribal people who seem to be missing the tamburan and want it back. These dreams become increasingly urgent and frightening.

   Clare, at fourteen, is on the cusp of adult life. Although the action takes place only over a week or so, for her it's a time of growth and change. The snow persists throughout the story, an enclosing and  confining presence that keeps Clare focused on her disturbing dreams. She visits the Pitt Rivers museum, where she sees another tamburan similar to the one in the attic, and meets Nigerian student John Sempebwa. John helps her in her search for answers and also becomes a second lodger at the aunts' house.

   This is not an eventful story. It's about relationships, growing up, and contacts between people across both space and time. There is a subtle undercurrent of magic. Clare is in the limbo of  adolescence, waiting for her adult life to begin, while the tribal people are losing their ancestral links and also moving towards a new life. In the short time span of this story, deep changes and understandings take place. 

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How It All Began, by Penelope Lively, reviewed by Pippa Goodhart

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. 

          

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