In 1935, Noël Coward included in his series of playlets, Tonight at 8.30, a jaunty, song-filled exposé, in Victorian dress, of fam- ily relationships, Family Album. Penelope Lively’s novel of the same title, her 16th, covers similar territory — without the jauntiness or predisposition to burst into song.
It is an apt title. Lively’s novel is an extended meditation on the meaning of family, the nature of blood relationship and our interconnectedness based on the accident of birth. In place of conventional plot, it proceeds by snapshots and vignettes, a series of portraits and first-person narratives, not so much a story as a sequence of word pictures held together like beads on a string by the flexible thread of the subjects’ kinship.
It recounts the progress from infancy to wind-scattered adulthood of the six Harper children. Joining Paul, Sandra, Gina, Roger, Katie and Clare are their mismatched parents, Charles and Alison, and the family’s Scandinavian au pair of 40 years, Ingrid. Although the six grown-up children are spread across the globe, their reminiscences share a unity of place: all centre on the family home, a rambling, Edwardian suburban villa called Allersmead. Family Album explores in fictional form the central concern of Lively’s 2001 memoir, A House Unlocked — the manner in which houses absorb and retain aspects of the lives lived within them. Allersmead is this novel’s nearest approach to a hero: it is the one ‘character’ who inspires consensus in all nine family members.
The Harpers are the sort of family who have always peopled Penelope Lively’s novels: thinking, talking, agonising middle-class folk with a modicum of inherited wealth and a degree of anxiety concerning their own happiness and personal fulfilment. Interestingly, Family Album charts — unwittingly? — changes in British society since Lively’s first adult novels, written in the Seventies. Even Lively, who might once have offered us the Harpers straight, is forced now to highlight their eccentricities large and small. One such, concerning Clare’s parentage, provides the novel’s hidden secret. Gentle, unmeretricious Charles and Alison — each separately self-absorbed — are relics of that lost world of pre-Thatcherism and accordingly otherworldly and ‘odd’; their children, with the exception of the dropout Paul, are people of our own time. Lively, whose sibylline authorial voice eschews sentiment, endorses neither approach.
There is no arresting dénouement to Family Album, no startling revelations offered up at the end of the novel’s journey. Gina’s statement that ‘your family is at once utterly familiar and entirely unknown’ is both Lively’s starting-point and her ending. Her focus is the means we devise for acceptance of this conclusion: in Family Album, growing up is about arriving at a truce, reaching that point at which one can reiterate Gina’s formula with equanimity. At one level, this makes for an only moderately satisfying read. Happily, Lively’s mastery of her material, the sureness of her touch and her unique, consistently scintillating prose raise Family Album to a higher plane. This may not be her most successful novel but there is a great deal here to admire and delight.