Consequences
penelope lively
Fig Tree, Rs 390

Penelope lively’s new novel, her fourteenth in a celebrated writing career, is the story of three generations of feisty, independent women and their lives across seventy years of the twentieth century. The novel begins in June 1935 on a bench in St James’s Park in London. Lorna and Matt, the most affectionately drawn characters in Consequences, meet here for the first time. Matt is an artist, a wood engraver, and his family lives in a small town near the Welsh border; he is considered completely unsuitable by Lorna’s wealthy parents. But Lorna, who has always found her own life a little claustrophobic, is determined: she goes ahead and marries him.

In this first and sweetest section of the novel we are told about the rustic idyll that the young couple create for themselves, notwithstanding the oil lamps, candles and absence of running water, in a tiny country cottage from where they can see the distant shore of Wales. But the idyllic hideaway is soon overrun with the effects of the war in Europe (“People talked of the war as though it were a condition: a chronic condition”) and eventually Matt is also called to action.

After Matt’s death, Lorna and her little daughter Molly move back to London where Matt’s publisher and friend, Lucas, gives Lorna a job. Lorna and Lucas later get married, but death and loss are never far away. Molly, growing up in a greatly changed country, works in a library and gets into a relationship with an older and wealthy married man. But she is a child not only of the nineteen-sixties, but of a strong-willed mother. And so, when she discovers that she is pregnant, she decides not to marry her wealthy lover but to go ahead and have the baby on her own.

... contd.