Consequences

Penelope Lively

Key Porter

The dust jacket on Consequences, by Penelope Lively (Key Porter), bills the novel as “a sweep­ing saga of three gen­er­a­tions of women and the con­se­quences of love and life” — the sort of talk one expects to find on a good, thick bodice-ripper. But there the resem­blance ends. The story starts in 1935, on a bench in St. James’s Park, London, where Lorna “was cry­ing because she had had a vio­lent argu­ment with her mother; Matt was feed­ing the wild­fowl in order to draw them.” With pas­sion and pre­ci­sion, but none of the tedious “detail” that clogs so much con­tem­po­rary fic­tion, Lively draws the reader through the next sev­enty years of con­nec­tions and fallings-apart that flow from that chance meet­ing on a park bench. She gives us the irre­sistible, star-crossed lovers Lorna and Matt, then shifts the nar­ra­tive to their daugh­ter, Molly, who hap­pens to pick up a dis­carded copy of the Evening Standard in the tube, glances at Situations Vacant, sees that the Literary and Philosophical Institute ( “the Lit. and Phil.”) is look­ing for a library assis­tant and meets the man who will even­tu­ally father her daugh­ter, Ruth. Years later, at age forty-three, Molly pon­ders the fact that she is no longer young: “Youth had whisked by while she sold books and made books and changed nap­pies and wheeled Ruth in a pushchair on the last leg of an Aldermarston march and wore miniskirts and took the pill, which had arrived just too late to scup­per Ruth’s con­cep­tion, thank God.” The love of her life arrives by chance some­what later, and now the story changes hands again, to Ruth, who hooks up with Peter, and moves into a flat with him and buys fur­ni­ture. When she gets preg­nant, Peter is dis­mayed: “ ‘One was think­ing later rather than sooner, I sup­pose.’ For a brief and dis­qui­et­ing moment they stared at one another across some treach­er­ous divide. Then Peter gath­ered him­self and sug­gested a glass of cham­pagne to cel­e­brate. The cham­pagne made Ruth feel even more queasy than she already was; he drank too much and later that evening they had an argu­ment about the instal­la­tion of a shower unit.” Oh, dear. Ruth too has to grow up a bit more to com­pre­hend the pos­si­bil­i­ties of love. For her the tide changes when she hap­pens to drop into a small art gallery on her way to buy a take­out cof­fee. And so on. “Every con­cep­tion is for­tu­itous, every birth,” Lively writes. Both the con­tent of the book and the title — like her other titles (Making It Up, Passing On, Corruption, Heat Wave and others) — embrace all the mean­ing of the word con­se­quence, from result or effect, to social dis­tinc­tion, to sig­nif­i­cance or importance.