The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 6 March 2020
by Penelope Lively
Life is short and life is long. As we get older, it goes by ever faster. We look back upon events that feel like just yesterday, and discover they are years, decades already, in our past. Where did the time go? How can we recapture time? Do we even want to? Time slips away, and our mistakes and our regrets grow less sharp. The joys dim with the passage of years and the recycled memories become ever less reliable. In many of the selections in this collection of stories, we walk through the later years of characters reflecting on the paths their lives have taken, many of them through marriages whose basic inequality colored how entire lives would be remembered. These stories are quiet and compellingly intimate, familiar and told through honesty and acceptance. Lively writes in a humane manner, which brings life to life and imbued with a sense of timelessness. We understand that, after some point, the dramas that scarred our memories no longer carry much destructive power. Still, there are events to be hashed out, final discussions to be had, the stakes residing in an honesty about what happened and how it has molded us over the years. This reader found himself reflecting on similarly honest work by such writers as Iris Murdoch and John Updike.
A couple of the stories have a lighter feel (though none are particularly heavy). The title story revisits a doomed garden in the city of Pompeii, just before its volcanic destruction. In another, we consider the waning years of a spy in retirement. Or is it just the story she chooses to tell? In any case, this is a moving, witty, reflective collection of stories from a Booker-Prize-winning author. Very much worth a reader's time.