Dancing Fish and Ammonites by Penelope Lively

Today I want to talk to you about an amazing writer who has been as important to me as any I can think of. Her name is Penelope Lively, and I’m going to be talking about her brand new book, Dancing Fish and Ammonites, which she says “is not quite a memoir. Rather, it is the view from old age.” Lively is now eighty years old, and judging from this not quite memoir, she is still going very strong indeed. Lively won the Booker Prize for Moon Tiger, published in 1997, and she has written many other novels, collections of short stories, children’s books and scholarly essays. Her latest book, like all or almost all of her earlier work, is focused on memory and time.

Lively’s first intellectual interest was in archaeology, an interest she never lost. She read history at Oxford, married an academic, and has continued to read history, fiction, science, and pretty much whatever she could lay her hands on. She was born in Cairo in 1933 and remained there until she went to England on a troop ship in 1945. Perhaps because I, too, am at what Lively would call the portal of old age, I find her essays on aging and memory fascinating. A lot of the reading I have done lately by or about growing old has been quite depressing, focusing primarily on what is lost as we age. Lively is well aware of the diminishment that aging can (and inevitably will) bring, but she manages to focus on what is left rather than what is lost. She has certainly had her share of the infirmities that come with age.

[I] avoid, occasionally, I fear: that hazard light worn by the old—slow, potentially boring, hard going. Now that I wear the light myself, I am nicely aware of the status. This is a different place. And since I am there, along with plenty of my friends, the expedient thing seems to be to examine it. And report. 

We are many today, in the Western world: the new demographic. I want to look at the implications of that, at the condition, at how it has been perceived. And then at the compelling matter of memory—the vapor trail without which we are undone.

Lively sees herself primarily as a reader. Although she realizes that not all readers are, or become, writers. For her, reading became writing. This almost memoir would be worth reading to a devoted reader simply for the long list of books she mentions while describing her own journey as a reader. 

I decided long ago, near the beginning of my teaching career, that what I needed most (both for myself and for my students) was to read, and to do so in what Lively calls a “mostly undirected, unstructured reading.” Reading only philosophy and directing all my writing energy to writing esoteric journal articles seemed to me to short change both myself and my students. 

[I]…must read. For me, reading is the essential palliative, the daily fix. Old reading, revisiting, but new reading too, lots of it, reading in all directions, plenty of fiction, history, and archaeology always, reading to satisfy perennial tastes, reading sideways too—try her, try him, try that. 

Reading in old age is doing for me what it has always done—it frees me from the closet of my own mind … The one entirely benign mind-altering drug … My point here is to do with the needs of old age; there is what you can’t do, there is what you no longer want to do, and there is what has become of central importance … I have reading.

In this little collection of essays on memory, gardening, writing, and history Lively takes her readers on a historical journey of the past eighty or so years: the Suez canal crisis, the Cuban missile crisis, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the new wave of feminism.

For me, interest in the past segued into an interest in the operation of memory, which turned into subject matter for fiction. I wanted to write novels that would explore the ways in which memory works and what it can do to people….

And she certainly does just this. From the aging scholar heroine, Claudia, living out her last days in a nursing home in Moon Tiger, to a landscape archaeologist and a gardener in The Photograph to the World War II veteran who becomes an architect in City of the Mind and her earlier memoir of her own childhood in Cairo Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived, Lively pursues her interest in the operations of memory. Her own scholarly research into psychological tracts on memory shows up in so much of her writing. As she has her characters say again and again in her stories, “it’s all happening at once,” as past, present and projected future fuse into one for the lived life of each person.

Many years ago, Moon Tiger was the first of her novels that I picked up. A brother and a sister at the sea shore fighting over an ammonite that both claim to have discovered launched me into her world of ruminating about time and memory. 

That is why history should be taught in school, to all children, as much of it as possible. If you have no sense of the past, no access to the historical narrative, you are afloat, untethered; you cannot see yourself as a part of the narrative, you cannot place yourself within a context. You will not have an understanding of time, and a respect for memory and its subtle victory over the remorselessness of time. 

It would be easy to write pages and pages simply of quotes from this remarkable little book. It is a testament to a reader’s life well lived. Hopefully, those who read it will be driven to read some of her novels, or simply to copy out the long list of books she mentions as part of her own vast reading past.

What we have read makes us what we are—quite as much as what we have experienced and where we have been and who we have known. To read is to experience. 

I can measure out my life in books. They stand along the way like signposts… 

My old-age fear is not being able to read—the worst deprivation. Or no longer having my books around me: the familiar, eclectic, explanatory assemblage that hitches me to the wide world, that has freed me from the prison of myself, that has helped me to think and to write.

Bravo and carry on.

How It All Began by Penelpe Lively

What is it like for a being to live in time and to be consciously, even obsessively, aware of living in time? This question has captured the attention of so many philosophers in the past hundred years or so, but it is novelists who actually describe the threefold process of living simultaneously in the past, constantly anticipating a future, and so in the grip of memory and anticipation that the present is barely noticed as it tumbles into the past. Penelope Lively, in all of her works, takes on this description of lived time and the tricks and vagaries of memory. In her latest novel, How It All Began, she focuses in on how one seemingly insignificant event triggers huge changes in the lives of so many. A retired high school English teacher, Charlotte, is knocked down and mugged on a London street, sending her to hospital, one consequence of which is that her daughter, Rose, is unable to accompany her employer, Henry, to an academic convention. This in turn leads to a summons to Henry’s niece, Marion, to stand in for Rose, which in turns leads to Marion’s sending a last minute text to her lover, Jeremy, canceling an assignation. “I can’t make it on Friday. Have to escort Uncle Henry to Manchester—his PA out of action. Bother, bother. I’m so sorry. Love you.” Her lover, Jeremy, who is usually so assiduous about deleting text messages, has this time left his mobile phone at home, which again due to circumstance, leads to his wife, Stella discovering the text-message and she almost at once instigates divorce proceedings, immediately impacting the lives of their two teenage daughters. And these are only a few of the people affected in large and small ways by the impulsive, chance actions of the young mugger. Rose’s husband, Gerry, is affected because his mother-in-law Charlotte, whose hip is broken in the process of being knocked to the ground by the mugger, comes to live with them while convalescing. While staying with her daughter, Charlotte, who has been a superb teacher most of her life, and even in retirement has taken on the task of volunteer teacher of English as a second language for older immigrants, finds the idleness of convalescence almost unbearable. This leads to her taking on one of these immigrants in a one-on-one teaching task, which brings Anton, the eastern European immigrant, into contact with her daughter Rose, who to her amazement, mixed with both delight and chagrin, finds herself falling in love with Anton. And let’s not forget Marion, the niece called into the service of her aging academic uncle due to the actions of the mugger; she is an interior designer who by happenstance meets a shady investment broker at the academic convention she attends as PA to her uncle, and the broker engages Marion to restore and decorate an upper end London flat, which in turn, affects the lives of the Polish men whom she hires for the restoration. All these consequences spinning off of this chance mugging.

You may think I have given away too much of the story already in laying out the butterfly-effect above, but in truth, the reader comes to know all of this in the first few pages of the novel. The brilliance of Lively as an author is in her uncanny ability to speak in monologues for each of her many characters and to give the reader glimpses of their inner lives and their particular forms of being-in-time. Again like so many of the philosophers and writers of the past century, Lively does not believe in an external telos somehow guiding human endeavors. There is no such thing as fate or destiny. Instead, there is this incredibly complex network of causation directed by nothing and no one, but hurtling us all towards a chancy and unknown future. We may feel secure in our beliefs about a cozy and fixed future, but it is an illusion that can be exploded as myth in a second by what can only be described as a chance event.

I have been in the thrall of Penelope Lively since I picked up a collection of her short stories many years ago, and each time I read a new novel, I am struck again by her talent as a writer and by her grasp of the existential condition. She is now in her late seventies, but I can detect no erosion of her immense powers of observation, nor in her ability to describe in detail the inner lives of her characters. For me, reading her is like picking up a conversation with an old friend, and she, too, seems to have just such relationships with so many other authors I love: Henry James, Iris Murdoch, Carol Shields, Dostoevsky, and many more whom she mentions in the course of this novel. Perhaps she speaks even more particularly to me now as she talks of the process of aging and the speeding up of lived-time as one grows old.

You are on the edge of things now, clinging on to life’s outer rim. You have this comet trail of your own lived life, sparks from which arrive in the head all the time, whether you want them or not—life has been lived but it is still going on, in the mind, for better and for worse.

I have concentrated on Lively’s treatment of lived-time and on her conviction that there is no human-independent purpose for existence, no external telos, only an unfathomable web of causation and chance. But I could as well have focused in on her views about literature, reading and teaching—all of which get a lot of attention in this novel. She realizes that teachers are, at best, conduits or catalysts; rather than filling empty vessels (one particularly noxious view of education), good teachers simply provide opportunities, suggest books, provide sparks that ignite the inquiring mind.

Let me sum up this wonderful novel using Lively’s own words:

So that was the story. These have been the stories: of Charlotte, of Rose and Gerry, of Anton, of Jeremy and Stella, of Marion, of Henry, Mark, of all of them. The stories so capriciously triggered because something happened to Charlotte in the street one day. But of course this is not the end of the story, the stories. An ending is an artificial device; we like endings, they are satisfying, convenient, and a point has been made. But time does not end, and stories march in step with time. Equally, chaos theory does not assume an ending; the ripple effect goes on, and on. These stories do not end, but they spin away from one anther, each on its own course.

I have been talking about an incredible author, Penelope Lively, and of her newest book, How It All Began. I hope you will allow Lively to enter into the stream of your lived life, transform and metamorphize it.

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Consequences by Penelope Lively

Can even a great writer sum up a life, a lifetime, in a single book. And even if one could, is it a wise thing to try? Penelope Lively, in her novel Consequences, is looking back to 1935, to World War II, and then panning forward—to the cold war and the Cuban missile crisis, and on to Viet Nam and beyond. I can feel her need to overview, to try to make some sense of the chaos and bloodshed and strife, to provide both critique and some form of hope for the future.

While I understand this urge to say it all, to cover all the events of the last hundred years, at least for me as a reader, I find that most really good novels cover relatively short periods of time and not too many characters. Of course, in describing a few days, a year or two, even a decade, one can with the lens of memory cover large expanses of time while still engaging the reader in a here-and-now tale. Lively’s masterpiece, Moon Tiger, does just that. An old woman lies dying in a rest-home, simply a wrinkled, unimportant figure to the bustling nurses and aids who call her ‘honey,’ and treat her as child. But she doesn’t care, for the present is no longer of any importance to her, only the past and the life she has lived, as a historian, a parent, a writer.

But in Consequences (her most recent and probably her last) novel, she tries to whirl us through almost a century, introducing a host of characters as she goes along. I have to admit that for at least the first hundred pages I was slightly irritated and lost. Why this skipping over of years, decades? Why introduce us to an infant only to begin the next chapter with that infant grown to adulthood? She seems simply to be trying to do too much, losing the intimacy she usually achieves by focusing down and in on a short time, a few characters, and through them back and out. Finally, when I stopped reading this novel piecemeal and decided I must live in for a day or two if I hoped to understand what this last effort is about, I began to see her genius as a writer, a recorder of history, emerge.

It seems in many ways a simple story, at least the pivot-point of the novel, a tale about an artist whose medium is woodcutting and his rather sudden and impulsive marriage to a girl from an upperclass and hopelessly snobby family. Shunned by her family, the two lovers escape from London and the girl’s stodgy, privileged life to the countryside and a deserted, tiny farm-laborer’s cottage. The two, much in love, restore the cottage and begin to raise a family, only to have that life ended abruptly by the war and the soldier death of the young husband.

And so begins a long journey of both places and characters—not only the life of the widowed woman, but of her children, and their children, and beyond. As is usual for Lively, she not only dances from character to character, but speaks through each of them—usually through the mouths of women characters, but even now and then a convincing male voice. Along the way, we get a view of Lively’s view of art, of book-printing, of poets and conferences of poets, of marriages both good and bad, and always with the reminder of how much our lives are determined by happenstance, chance, rather than by choice or grand life-plans. A chance encounter that leads to marriage, a fall on the ice or a traffic accident—chance so much more important than plans or purposes.

Time, the flow of time, the treachery of memory, the necessity to live in past, present, and future all at once—this fascination with time and its meanings is to be found in all of Lively’s work, and in this retrospective an attempt to sort and understand. In the past year or two I have read similar looking-back, summing up novels by some of my favorite authors. Carol Shields’ final novel Unless, Mary Gordon’s Pearl—both full of politics, of social criticism, and some attempt to point towards a better future. I see so clearly the desire of the authors both to do commentary on the wars and greed and bloodshed of the past century, and also to energize us towards action into the future. Yes, it has been an ugly century dominated by war and greed, but still we must look to the future, put our shoulders to the wheel, and do something for our children, for the children of the world.

I can’t hope to do justice to this novel that covers a lifetime or to the voice of Lively who speaks through it, and while I do not think (in the end) that it is a great novel (partly because it does try to do too much), I think it is a very good one, and one that readers with a social conscience should read. I won’t try to sum up her political views or her views on aesthetics, but I think she tries to do so through a few of her characters. For now, I will simply read you a longish quote, and hope that you will go to the novel yourselves. It is not a long novel (less than three hundred pages), but it is incredibly dense, both with characters and events.

The winter of discontent gave way to the spring and summer of A levels, cultural endeavor and Ms. Thatcher. Ruth worried about Wordsworth, the Tudors and Stuarts, and the roll of puppy fat around her midriff; Molly fielded a touring opera company in Orkney and the Shetlands, and a craft exhibition in Manchester, and fine-tuned the arrangements for the poetry festival. In the background, a woman with an iron coiffeur and awesome insistence began her long dominion of the nation’s affairs.
Molly voted Labour, naturally. Always; regardless. So did everyone she knew. It seemed surprising that there could be Conservative electoral victories when you yourself had barely ever heard of anyone voting Tory, and even more so in that, when you thought about it, you realized that there must be millions of working-class people who voted Tory, which seemed somehow like shooting yourself in the foot. Why ever did they do it? And now, just when you should be rejoicing at the first Woman Prime Minister, she came in the form of this dogmatic harridan with her handbags and her pussy-cat bows.
But if you looked beyond these shores, complaint seemed churlish. In the course of work, Molly had come across artists exiled from their homelands—people who had fled, or whose parents had fled, because circumstances were beyond tolerance, smoked out of Russia or Hungary or Czechoslovakia or wherever. Beside such histories, some local carping about the power of the trade unions or Mrs. Thatcher’s bossy persona became positively obscene……Those who live out their lives in a politically stable country, in peacetime, have not had history snapping at their heels.

This novel is a too quick ride through too much time, but with the brilliant Lively as tour-guide, it is a worthwhile read. I only wish I could say so much about so many topics over so many years.

Making it Up by Penelope Lively

So much in our lives seems to be chancy and contingent; call it choice, or if that word seems too fraught, call it possibility, but such important matters in our lives seem to hinge on chance. The blind-date that ended in marriage, the canceled vacation that may well have led to a new and exciting relationship, the decision to go to this college or that, take this job or that, getting sick at just the right or wrong time. Penelope Lively, who I believe thinks about time and chance and contingency more deeply than any other writer alive, has written a book about directions her life might have taken but did not, realizing that she is more a leaf in the wind than captain of a ship.

In her words:

Somehow, choice and contingency have landed you where you are, as the person that you are, and the whole process seems so precarious that you look back at those climactic moments when things might have gone differently, when life might have spun off in some other direction, and wonder at this apparently arbitrary outcome.

Not surprising that this author, so interested in history, in archeology and paleontology, should write a book at the end of her long career that looks back on the lives she might have lived. She has already announced that she has written her last novel, and this 2005 book that she calls anti-memoir may be one of her last books of any kind. She calls it, appropriately, Making It Up. In my view, Lively is one of the very best writers of the last half century, and one of my favorites of all time. When Lilly Tomlin’s little-girl-in-the-rocker character, Edith Ann, is accused of making things up, she replies in a huff that she doesn’t make things up, because making things up is lying, and she doesn’t lie. But, she adds with a mischievous glint, you can make up the truth if you know how. Lively, like all of the great writers of fiction, knows how to make up the truth, and she knows also that one’s own lived life provides much of substance for that made up truth.

This book has some striking similarities to the memoir of her first dozen years growing up in Egypt, which she titled Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived. But she is quick to deny that it is memoir.

This book is fiction. If anything, it is an anti-memoir. My own life serves as the prompt; I have homed in upon the rocks, the rapids, the whirlpools, and written the alternative stories. It is a form of confabulation. That word has a precise meaning in psychiatric terminology, it refers to the creation of imaginary remembered experiences which replace the gaps left by disorders of the memory. My memory is not yet disordered; this exercise in confabulation is a piece of fictional license.

The pieces in this book take the form of short stories, the first is about a love-affair that might have been but was not. It is called “Mozambique Channel,” and has as its starting point a time when Lively, her mother, and her nanny were forced to flee Egypt just before the Battle of Alamein. In the space of fifty pages, Lively is able to tell us a lot about the class system that existed not only between rich Europeans and the people native to the lands they exploited economically, but between these Europeans and the servants they brought along with them. But all of this occurs in the background as she tells us a touching love story, one so unlike the over-sexed and overdone fictions of Hollywood.

Next, in a story titled “Albert Hall,” she describes a child that might have been hers, would have been hers had circumstances been ever so slightly altered. This story is set in the early fifties, “In those pre-pill days, girls diced with death. The back street abortionists were busy, along with others trading behind a respectable Harley Street nameplate. The single mother was not a recognized social category then, accepted and inviting sympathy.” The social commentary Lively provides in the stories, and in the longish prefaces and postscripts to the stories gives the reader a very clear sense of where she stands as social and political critic.

Of course, I don’t intend to list and describe each story in this fascinating collection. But I will tell you that one story has to do with a plane-wreck, a plane that Lively, herself, might well have been on but was not. In another she talks not simply about how contingency operates in an individual life, but how it seems to have operated on an evolutionary level. She reminds us of all the species that once existed but now do not, and of how unlikely (in so many ways) it was that homo sapiens should come to occupy the place on the planet that they now do. It seems, looking back, that the fact she is not an archeologist or historian but a writer is, itself, a consequence of so many ‘chance’ occurrences. So many lives that might have been lived but were not. “A faithful exercise in confabulation would proliferate like an evolutionary tree. I should write not one book but hundreds; I should pursue each idiosyncratic path.”

The depth of her intellect as well as her mastery of words (and her lack of embarrassment at using the language maximally) endear her to me. I also think that she has a great insights into the connections between reading and writing, and that all aspiring writers would do well to read her. I often tell my students that their real educations will begin after university, when they have been freed from the cycle of courses and exams and required writing. College may prepare them for that education, but is no substitute for it. Lively’s experiences and advice seem akin to mine.

You write out of experience, and a large part of that experience is the life of the spirit; reading is the liberation into the minds of others. When I was a child, reading released me from my own prosaic world into fabulous antiquity, by way of Andrew Lang’s Tales of Troy and Greece; when I was a housebound young mother, I began to read history all over again, but differently, freed from the constraints of a degree course, and I discovered also Henry James, and Ivy Comton-Burnett, and Evelyn Waugh, and Henry Green, and William Golding, and so many others—and became fascinated by the possibilities of fiction. It seems to me that writing is an extension of reading—a step that not every obsessive reader is impelled to take, but, for those who do so, one that springs from serendipitous reading. Books beget books.

One of Lively’s stories is about a bookseller who spends his life in and surrounded by books; she remarks, “… a life in books seems an attractive proposition.” Yes, indeed, and if it is chance that led Lively to be the reader-writer that she is, we are the beneficiaries of that accident. Let me close with a final quote from the story about the bookseller.

A house that contains books has concealed power. Many homes are bookless, or virtually so, as any house-hunter discovers. And then suddenly there is a place that is loaded—shelf upon shelf of the things—and the mysterious charge is felt. This house has ballast; never mind the content, it is the weight that counts—all that solid, silent reference to other matters, to wider concerns, to a world beyond these walls. There is a presence here—confident, impregnable.

Four Great Women Authors

Instead of my customary chat with you about a single book and author, in honor of women’s month, I want to talk about four great women writers of the past fifty years. Choosing four is both difficult and arbitrary, so instead of choosing authors whom most of you will have heard about and read, writers such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Louise Erdrich, I’ve decided to talk about four whom you will be less likely to have read, but who have written such important works during the past fifty years. I’ve intentionally chosen three foreign born authors and only one American; they are Nadine Gordimer, Penelope Lively, Edwidge Danticat, and Toni Cade Bambara.

Nadine Gordimer certainly belongs on any list of great authors of the 20th century. Born and raised in South Africa, she was without doubt one of the most important anti-apartheid authors of her time. Indeed, although she won both the Booker and the Nobel prizes, her books were banned in South Africa for many years, and she was urged by many to leave her homeland because they feared for her life. Undaunted, she continued to live there and to write, in spite of having to send her books out of the country for publication. She has also written bravely, fearlessly, about changes in Africa since the official end of apartheid, and about the psychological tensions of whites and blacks living and working together. Gordimer has a wonderful mind, and any reader who knows philosophy will see how well she understands and uses philosophy in her novels. My view is that you can begin with any book Gordimer has written, either working back from her latest works published in the 90s, or beginning with early works such as Burger’s Daughter or her Booker prize-winning The Conservationist. She has also written several collections of short stories, and I have yet to find a book of hers that I did not thoroughly (and usually immediately) enjoy. Perhaps my favorite of all is A Sport of Nature, published in 1987; feminism is much more a theme of this novel than of others of hers I recall, and she talks bravely, insightfully, about romantic relationships between powerful, aspiring black leaders and white woman who are dedicated to the eradication of racism while they are themselves targets of suspicion both because of race and gender. In spite of the quality and quantity of her work, in my experience she is still relatively unknown among American readers.

Partly so that it won’t seem that I am concentrating only on older writers, my next choice is a very young author, Edwidge Danticat. Born in 1969 in Haiti, Danticat came to the U.S. when she was twelve years old, but her early works concentrate on her native country. I can still recall the chill I felt both during and after the reading of Krick? Krack! Although the language is beautiful and haunting, the story is about desperate lives lived in Haiti. I have not yet read Danticat’s work directed at young readers, Behind the Mountains, but her other works are almost unbearably sad, and yet told with a grace and beauty that both cuts through and magnifies the sadness. Her second work, The Farming of Bones, shows how well she listened to the stories told to her by her elders, since it is about Haitians living in the Dominican Republic in the thirties and forties. We certainly need to hear the voices of those who have experienced first hand the economic oppression visited upon them by European and American market economies. While it takes a bit of strength to listen to the voice of Danticat, it should also convince us readers how important it is to hear such voices as well as how beautifully they can write.

The third writer whom I wish to talk about today is a writer of almost unbelievable skill. It continues to surprise me how few of my students have heard of this giant. Her name is Penelope Lively, and she continues to write and publish at quite an incredible rate. Born in Cairo in 1933, like Danticat she moved from her birthplace when she was twelve, although she was born of English parents and returned to England because of the intense war actions in Egypt during World War II. She began her writing career by publishing children’s fiction, and did not publish any adult fiction until the 1970s. I did not discover her until the late 90s when I stumbled across her Booker prize winning Moon Tiger published in 1987. Once I had found her, I read up everything I could get my hands on, and not once have I been disappointed. I have used her fairly recent novel, The Photograph, in several of my classes. It was published in 2003. Lively writes about lived time, about the ways in which past and present merge into each other, with perhaps greater skill than any other writer I have read. Martin Heidegger insists that we are beings-in-time, that being in time is one of the universal and necessary conditions of what it is to be human. (He calls these conditions existentialia.) Karl Marx and Immanuel Kant also recognized the incredible importance of temporality in human life, but no one, I think, describes how we live in time with the detail and acuity that Lively does. Moon Tiger begins (and ends) with a woman in her eighties who is living in a rest home, simply another old, dying woman to the staff there. But her daily lived-life has next to nothing to do with that dismal, sedentary existence. It is her past in Egypt and England that occupies all of her waking and dreaming moments. Having lived as a writer who concentrated on political history, she now questions the very meaning of history. Is there such a thing? Can it possibly be written? What has the history of wars or of great political figures to do with the lives of ordinary people, with their histories? Again, I would recommend to you anything she has written, including her skillful and labyrinthian short stories, one collection of which is called Pack of Cards. Just citing a couple other titles will suggest her preoccupation with time and memory: City of the Mind; Spiderwebb, Passing On.

And finally, let me mention one American writer who unfortunately died in 1995. She was only fifty-five when she died, but she will be remembered as one of the most important writers and activists of the seventies and eighties. Her name is Toni Cade Bambara, and I first ran across her by reading a wonderful collection of short stories entitled Gorilla My Love. I used that book in teaching philosophy in literature almost every quarter for several years after I discovered her. Most of the stories are told through the eyes of a street-smart and tough little girl who runs and talks faster than anyone else around her. Bambara writes in the language she learned as a child, and her ear for dialect is truly wonderful. One reviewer of Bambara says of her: “Ms. Bambara grabs you by the throat ... she dazzles, she charms.” Yes, she has lots to tell us, and she does it with dazzle and charm, but also with deep insight and tenderness. During a particularly bleak period for me politically, when it seemed to me that the male-dominated new-left had abandoned the fight, I happened to read Bambara’s novel The Salt Eaters. In that novel, strong, black women encounter a kind of cynicism emanating from disenchanted male activists much like what I thought I saw around me, and they react immediately and forcefully. They refuse to hide or deny the sexism they experience in the African-American community, even though they are told that they must keep a united front, that sexism is a problem only among whites. And they also refuse to give up or hunker down or make suspicious deals with The Man. I came out of that reading with a new sense of strength and purpose. Aside from her writing, Bambara was a community activist and freedom fighter all through her life. Both tough and tender, both critical and understanding, she was a fine person as well as a great writer.

There are so many names I have not mentioned: Zora Neale Hurston, Jane Smiley, Doris Lessing, Alice Munro, Marge Piercy, Margaret Atwood, May Sarton, Iris Murdoch and a host of other great women writers. So many voices of so many bright and strong women. They have saved me from despair and pointed out directions for me, and I just plain love reading them.

Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived by Penelopy Lively

I want to talk to you this morning about two authors and two books. What they have in common is that they are both British, both brilliant, both writing about events during and slightly after World War II, and (perhaps the most relevant commonality) both having written books that I happened to read lately in close succession. The two authors are Penelope Lively and Ian McEwan. Lively’s book is a memoir entitled Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived, and McEwan’s an early novel of his, The Innocent. I consider these two writers to be literary giants of the past fifty years; both write about lived time in ways that I find profound and extraordinary.

It may be that only those of you who already have a passion for Lively will really enjoy her autobiographical account of the first twelve years of her life growing up in Cairo. It is not what you would call a page-turner, no twists of plot nor adventure, simply an adult woman trying to put together a few crystalline images from her past. I am a reader who has a deep fascination for Lively’s writing, and I read this little book wanting to know just how she could have become such an incredible writer with such a deep understanding of how we humans live in the past, present, and future all at once.

Lively, like Immanuel Kant and many thinkers since, realizes that memory is a synthetic faculty rather than a strictly reproductive one. She understands that the mind is not so much a recorder and camera as it is a story-teller, a fabricator, and when telling stories about childhood, a story-teller that has to spin her tale from disparate shards of evidence. In her words:

I have tried to recover something of the anarchic vision of childhood—in so far as any of us can do such a thing—and use this as the vehicle for a reflection on the way in which children perceive. I believe that the experience of childhood is irretrievable. All that remains, for any of us, is a headful of brilliant frozen moments, already dangerously distorted by the wisdoms of maturity.

Lively was born in 1933, and her narrative covers only her first twelve years growing up in Egypt plus a handful of memories from 1945 when she returns finally to England. For someone as ignorant of history and geography as I, Lively’s account of Cairo, Alexandria, and the multifarious life-forms of the Nile is both informative and mind-boggling. She recalls for us a land populated by a rich juxtaposition of Greeks, French, Italians, British, Maltese, Lebanese, Syrian, and Turks, and all seen through the eyes of a child, though informed by the acute mind of an adult looking back.

But while Lively does want to tell her readers something about how the war impacted Cairo and the desert surrounding it, as well as a good bit about the long history of conquest and occupation by so many different powers, her primary concern is to talk about how children perceive, and how the purity of childhood perception is lost to us as adults. Again in her words:

No thought at all here, just observation—the young child’s ability to focus entirely on the moment, to direct attention upon the here and now, without the intrusion of reflection or of anticipation. It is also the Wordsworthian vision of the physical world: the splendor in the grass. And, especially, Virginia Woolf’s creation of the child’s-eye-view. A way of seeing that is almost lost in adult life. You can stare, you can observe—but within the head there is now the unstoppable obscuring onward rush of things. It is no longer possible simply to see, without the accompanying internal din of meditation.

Just as in her masterpiece, Moon Tiger, when Lively describes so wonderfully and tantalizingly the life of an old woman, near death in a care facility, her mind alive finally only to the past, the present irrelevant, in this kaleidoscopic memoir we experience life through the eyes of a child captured as it were under glass. Her ability to deal with lived time simply stuns me.

... continue to Ian McEwan's The Innocent ...

Passing On by Penelope Lively

I want to talk to you this morning about another book by Penelope Lively, this one entitled Passing On. My tendency when I discover a really good writer is to keep reading them, book after book, until I think I have gotten from them what I can. In Lively's case, I think I will simply read all that she has written, including even her fairly long list of children's stories and her non-fiction. Incidentally, one of those non-fiction books is titled The Presence of the Past, and certainly if there is a single theme that runs through all of her work, it is that of temporality—of how we carry the past with us, how our memories distort and refashion the past, and of how we live simultaneously in the past, the fleeting present, and anticipations of the future. Her understanding of lived time is, I think, unparalleled.

This novel, as the title suggests, is about a death and how that death affects the lives of the living. The lead character, Helen, is in her fifties and has lived almost her entire life at home with her mother, as has her younger brother Edward who is in his forties. I suppose one could say that the main theme of this novel is the influence that Dorothy, the mother, has had on these two now grown children and on how they cope with her death. One other child, Louise, more rebellious and more social than her older siblings, has escaped the home and small English village, but, of course, has not escaped either her genes or her upbringing.

Helen watches her mother being put into a hole in the ground, and then begins the long process of experiencing the hole, the vacuity in her life. All who have experienced the death of a really significant person know that the relationship between them, the conversation, does not end with death. It is Helen's relationship with her mother that the reader gets most fully and clearly, both in memories of the past and in the daily struggle after her mother's death.

During the ensuing days Helen felt as though her mother were continuously present in the house as a large black hole. There was a hole in Dorothy's bedroom, in the bed where she was not, on which, now, the blankets were neatly folded and the cover spread. There were various other holes, where she stood at the kitchen table preparing one of those unappetizing stews, or shouting instructions from the landing or inspecting a caller at the front door. There were perambulant holes in which she creaked down the stairs or came in through the front door. Almost, Helen stood aside to let her pass or maneuvered around her large black airy bulk as she occupied the scullery or the narrow passage by the back stairs. It was weeks before Helen could walk straight through her, or open her bedroom door without bracing herself for the confrontation.

Quite obviously, this was not a mother who was sweet and attentive and missed now because of her kindness. The question Lively poses for the reader is why this aging man and women have stayed with a mother whom they saw as oppressive and selfish and whose bleak presence in their lives continues even after her death. It is not a simple story, nor does the blame rest simply on the dominating mother. Both 'children' are, in complicated and interconnected ways, complicit in their imprisonment; both in some sense or other give Dorothy her power over them. Indeed, she seems (at least in the memories of her children) to have been quite indifferent about whether they stayed or left—as indifferent to them as to most of the world around her.

.... she had no interest whatsoever in people as such. She was expert and scholarly in disposing of extraneous material; there was the world which related to her, to which she had been or to whom she had spoken, and there was the rest, which was irrelevant. Needless to say, she could not see the point of history and ignored politics. As Helen, Edward and Louise grew up they had come to recognize their mother's outlook for what it was. They realized with discomfort that she was not so much egotistical as fettered-trapped within a perpetual adolescence. She moved for ever within a landscape whose only point of reference was herself.

As always with Lively, there are a number of important, overlaying themes in this novel with the main story-line in many ways simply a convenient hook for everything else she wants to address. There are questions of wealth, of the great divide between haves and have-nots, and the ways in which media culture keeps the desire for material possessions sharp and keen whether or not one has the money to buy them. Dorothy, as shallow and selfish as she is many ways, is simply not acquisitive, does not care much for what she does not have, and (in the eyes of the villagers) stubbornly and foolishly holds onto a piece of land that could be subdivided and sold for a small fortune, could render her one of those who is able to buy and buy, and thus become important, adored, respected. The oddly reclusive Edward lives much of his life in this small patch of 'wild' land (named, for reasons no one knows, The Britches), and he seems to care for nothing but the wild life that he encounters and cultivates there. Through Edward, Lively is able to raise a host of environmental questions without seeming to preach and quite within the development of his character.

Even as these two odd characters begin to struggle away from the influence of their now dead mother, she remains behind, scolding and berating. Helen, at fifty-two, begins to develop a relationship with a widowed attorney, and finds herself in constant conversation with Dorothy about her silliness, her gullibility, her plainness. Helen is stunned by the intensity of sexual feelings she has imagined to be long since dead and by what she sees as an adolescent obsession with questions of when he might call, what he thinks of her, when he might touch or caress her, and she imagines her mother's smug responses to her teenaged reactions.

And one other theme that Lively raises, flirts with, causes her reader to worry over is that of how the intense homophobia of the dominant culture shapes and constricts the lives of homosexuals. Students and friends of mine have sometimes expressed surprise, puzzlement, even shock over what they consider to be inappropriate and surprising choices gay people have made in acting on sexual impulses. Lively so skillfully and subtly points out in this novel that it is the dominant, heterosexual culture that determines the parameters of choice for homosexuals-shows us how homophobia creates guilt in young gay people, causes them to repress their quite natural inclinations, to struggle with themselves in ways that can lead to humiliation and disaster when the fiercely repressed urges manifest themselves at the wrong time or towards the wrong person. I don't want to give away much of the plot-line here, but I think Lively presents some of these issues in wonderfully lucid ways.

I have talked to you about a number of Lively's excellent novels, and although I intend to read all that I have not, I probably won't review her other works for you. Let me say once more that I think Lively is one of the finest writers I have ever read; I always seem to learn from her—about politics, archeology, biology, relationships, temporality. I think she is a brilliant person, and what luck for us that she is still living and still writing. You won't find much action in her novels, no sex or noisy adventure, but you will find a lot to think about and to worry over. I know that I have.

The Photograph by Penelope Lively

I want to talk to you this morning about the latest book of an author who is, in my opinion, one of the greatest living novelists, as well as one of the very best of the last hundred years. Her name is Penelope Lively, and the book is The Photograph, published in 2003. It seems incredible to me that I did not even discover Lively until a few years ago when I stumbled across her Booker Prize winning Moon Tiger (published in 1987), but since then I have read so many of her intricate novels. Martin Heidegger insists that we are beings in time, indeed that this is one of the universal and necessary conditions of what it is to be human. But while philosophers from Hegel onward have insisted on the paramount (and generally neglected) importance of temporality, it is novelists who have spelled out just what it means to live in time, to be that strange combination of animal who simultaneously lives in the past, hurls towards a future, and takes too little note of the always vanishing present. Lively understands not only how we are caught and suspended in time, but also has an astute sense of time on a non-human scale-of paleontology, geology, archaeology. I think of her as primarily a philosopher, an intellectual who is intent on doing a kind of phenomenology of time, especially lived time—her stories meant more as a way of telling us about the human condition than to catch her readers in merely clever plots.

In The Photograph she takes up (as she so often does) the whole idea of history. Is there such a thing as objective history? Is memory a reproductive faculty, like a camera, or is it, instead, more a creative faculty, fashioning out of the helter-skelter of sensory input a story that it tells and retells to itself until it finally seems more real than the hodge-podge of daily experience? The story begins innocently enough with a landscape archaeologist/anthropologist rummaging through his old files in search of a particular piece of data needed for some current project. That he is looking through this particular pile of the past is happenstance; he may well have lived out his life without ever sorting through this stuff again. And again, that out of some forgotten folder a packet should fall and catch his attention is pure chance. What catches his attention is the hurried scrawl on the outside of the packet written in his dead wife's handwriting, and even that would not have diverted his usually well focused scholar's attention had it not carried the inscription “Don't Open-Destroy!” That is simply too tempting. Not one to have listened very carefully to his wife's injunctions even when she was living, he quickly, if distractedly, opens the packet and discovers among a collection of personal detritus a single photograph, and in that moment's discovery alters not only his own life, but the lives of many others in his circle of family and friends.

Iris Murdoch and Penelope Lively love to display for their readers just how simply one's supposed past can, in an instant, be overturned, scrambled, destroyed. The photograph is innocent enough, simply a gathering of friends on a weekend outing, two of the gathering with their backs to the camera. Only a second and longer look shows that these two are holding hands behind their backs, and hence begins an earth-shattering, a past-shattering, a life-shattering tale. The woman is his wife, Kath, the man his brother-in-law, Nick. And now the reader is treated to the experience of how this bit of data disrupts the lives of the husband, Glyn, Kath's sister, Elaine, Elaine's husband, Nick, and a host of friends. I could open to dozens of passages in which Lively skillfully, mischievously displays for her readers the tricks of memory, the mysteries of time. I will consult just one in which the sister, Elaine, ruminates on the photograph.

Elaine looks back at the photograph. Something strange is happening-to her, to the figures that she sees. She sees people who are familiar, but now all of a sudden quite unfamiliar. It is as though both Kath and Nick have undergone some hideous metamorphosis. A stone has been cast into the reliable, immutable pond of the past, and as the ripples subside, everything appears different. The reflections are quite other, everything has swung and shattered, it is all beyond recovery. What was, is now something else.

And hence begins an analysis of just what history is, what memory can and cannot do, and how lies and deceit can reach suddenly into the past to restructure, rearrange, destroy. The woman in the picture, Kath, is dead, but not in the hearts and minds of those with whom she lived. A kind of hero to her sister's daughter, Polly, a kind of frustrating enigma to her hardworking older sister, Elaine, and a thoroughly kind and benign presence to almost everyone else that she has lived around, all of whom have some sort of investment in keeping intact their private pictures of the past.

As usual, I intend to reveal nothing more of the story than this skeleton, which the reader would discover in reading just the first few pages of this short but wonderfully complex novel. Let me introduce just one other theme that Lively takes up and worries in this book (such an excellent one for the busy city-reader, easily read in a weekend or a few evenings of concentrated attention). How much difference does it make if a woman is really, really pretty, and are the consequences of such arresting good looks the same for a man as for a woman? In the passage I will read, it is the niece, Polly, who is worrying the question, but the reader discovers as the book unwinds that Lively has had this question in mind all along, and that she wants us to think hard about it. In this scene, Polly has just reported to a friend that Kath had always been told that with her good looks she just must go in for acting.

I mean, that's so stupid. The idea that what a person looks like decides what they ought to do. You might as well say that red-haired people should drive London buses. And it happens to women more than men. Above all it happens to ultradecorative women. A good-looking guy can ride it out. He can end up as prime minister, or governor of the Bank of England, or whatever you like. I'm not saying that they do, but you get the point. If a girl is very, very pretty, then that's going to put a particular spin on everything that happens to her. She's privileged, but there's a sense in which it's a curse as well. She's directed by her looks. In Kath's case the actress stint meant that there was no college, no learning how to do anything, just muddling along until that becomes a way of life.

And how much do her good looks have to do with her marrying the distinguished scholar, Glyn? How much to do with the photograph itself? How much to do with an entire life and all its existential questions?

Certainly, I'm not going to tell you, but Lively tells you lots and leaves lots for you to ponder and worry over. This is a treat of a book; the reader learns from it in spite of herself.

Penelope Lively

I would like to talk to you this morning about an author I have mentioned once before, Penelope Lively. Last year, when I first discovered this wonderful author, I reviewed her 1987 Booker Prize winner, Moon Tiger. Today I want to recommend to you three more of her novels, and indeed, to recommend to you everything she has written. Lively is definitely writing about the world we find ourselves in today, and she is doing so with a sense of history and an intellectual acuity that we readers are likely to find very infrequently.

Moon Tiger was published in 1987, but Lively had been writing excellent novels long before that. Judgment Day was written in 1981, and any observant reader should see that the philosophy of history that she lays out in Moon Tiger is already very much there in this earlier novel. Like another important British novelist writing at the same time, Iris Murdoch, Lively insists on not just telling, but showing her readers that while there are patterns in history that can be understood, there is no teleology, i.e., that there is no human independent purpose functioning in the universe. And again like Murdoch, Lively does not think this is something that needs to be argued for; rather, any halfway careful perusal of history should convince us that, as Nietzsche puts it, being aims and nothing and achieves nothing. It is human beings that have purposes and goals and intentions. However, to say that history is not teleological is not to say that we cannot learn by studying it. Indeed, if we have any chance to predict what the future will bring us, any chance to avert global disaster, that chance lies in understanding how the present is a function of the past, and the future a function of the present. Judgment day will not occur at the hands of an angry father god, but through the future that we bring on ourselves, the chains that we forge with our of own activities.

In my view, most great novelists reveal features of the world to us that are far more important than the stories they tell us, more important than the characters they describe to us. And it also true that great novelists tend to tell us the same ‘big’ story over and over in their works. In the case of Murdoch, it is the laying out of an ethical theory and an attempt to point to the good via her allegorical stories. Lively, who is a much better and more acute historian and social critic than Murdoch, wants to show us how failing to learn from history condemns us to ever more disastrous consequences.

Her 1991 novel, City of the Mind, takes us into the world of giant corporations; corporations that raze huge tracts of land (with important histories of their own) to build cites of glass. Lively, the historian and archeologist is there to remind us, over and over, about what such tracts of land looked like in another time—during the second world war, or at a much earlier time when there was only land and crops, and then again changing her time-scale suddenly, drastically, reminding us of what the land was like long before human locusts swarmed over it. It is not only her readers who are taken on these sweeps through time; she likes to show us how each of us lives always in a rather confused welter of past, present, and future. We travel along in this story with an architect who drives from London to its outskirts to oversee the building of one giant glass structure, but as he drives, he remains in the present only because he must guide his car along a river of cars, a modern freeway, while his mind never rests, taking him back to the ‘great war’, to the nightly air-raids that brought down buildings and people, and further back to his own childhood, and then sweeping him along, adding to what he has experienced what he has read, what he has come to know through his interest in science, in paleontology. Expanding and contracting his universe, his city of the mind. This novel, more than any of her others, shows us the ruthlessness of market economies, the lack of concern for people in the rush to destroy countryside and to construct ever bigger and in so many ways, ever more fragile and technology-dependent structures.

The title of her 1993 novel, Cleopatra’s Sister, tells us immediately that this is, at least in some sense, a historical novel. Her readers learn more about Cleopatra and her less famous (and perhaps more ruthless) sister than they could have known, though always learning by looking back through the eyes of a living person, always a history constructed through a discrete, particular historical person. And so, Lively reminds us, is all history constructed. Lively is like Mark Twain, wanting to remind us that what gets called history is simply lies that are agreed to. All views are perspectival, and the human-eye view is, itself, perspectival, revealing only so much, and leaving much more concealed than it reveals.

And finally, let me mention a very recent novel of hers, again a superb piece of writing bound to make any thoughtful reader wonder and worry about the world we live in. Its title is Spider Web, and as the title suggests, the reader is shown again how complex and interrelated is the web of history, the web of our own lives. The lead character in this novel, Stella Brentwood, is a semi-retired anthropologist who decides to settle in a village in the west of England that was once remote and almost inaccessible. Today, with the shrinking of space and the rapidity of travel, it is close to the center of things, to Birmingham and Liverpool and Manchester and London. A lifetime of observing people leaves her unable not to observe and record and speculate about family trees, about ancestry and happenstance. But even as she loses herself in research and speculation about the local people, she is swept at once into a much broader world of human relations. During her life as an intellectual, she has traveled all over the world, never having a place she could or would call home. All her life she has tried to understand family structures, and certainly she is unable not to do so now in what she has decided will be her home, her resting place. And if her body is at rest here, certainly her mind is not. Social anthropologists, she suggests, meddle with people’s lives, meddle by the very fact of their presence; thus, their task it to meddle constructively. And that is what Lively wants to do in our lives, to meddle constructively, to remind us again and again that we must study history, must learn from history. Since we are bound to shape what will come, just as what has passed has shaped what is now, we must all learn to meddle constructively.

While Lively is a realist, not at all interested in trying to calm us about the future, about the world we have created, neither is she cynical nor unduly pessimistic. Her lead characters always describe themselves as agnostic, meaning that they have no real belief in any form of teleology. They do believe in the reality of chance, not meaning contra-causality, but in events that are not planned, are not on purpose. She wants to remind us that any day, any moment, we may be thrown back into the real world--the world that cannot be fit into our neat sense of teleology. Most of us are not starving, are not dying of a dread disease, are not hopeless third world victims of global greed, but a slip on the ice, the loss of a job, the wreck of a car—anything could rent the fabric of our articially spun security, our secure teleology, and cast us into the real world. Then we would be unable to ignore, as we are so often now, the vicissitudes of that real world. Perhaps, she suggests, we would all be better of, and the world we live in a better place, if we would suspend our cozy teleologies.

Let me leave you with one of the ruminations of the retired anthropologist, Stella:

She recognizes that she has landed at one of those alarming junctions in life, where decision is treacherous, where alternatives existences stream into an unimaginable future.

I have no doubt that Lively believes we are all of us, always, at just such a crossroads. The trick is to convince us of this, to convince us to seize the moment, to transform history. I think Lively does her best to help us along.

Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively

I want to talk to you this morning about a truly extraordinary intellectual and writer. Her name is Penelope Lively, and I want to talk especially about her 1987 novel, Moon Tiger, for which she won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize.

I think there is a fear in most (if not all) readers that they may someday simply run out of new authors and great books. Given the incredible outpouring of novels from all over the world, and the relatively recent phenomenon of books by authors from third world countries being not only written but published, the fear is probably an idle one. Still, I can’t tell you how thrilling it was for me to discover Penelope Lively. Somehow, in spite of winning the Booker, I simply had not heard of her. And then one day, having made the mistake of going for a doctor’s appointment without a book, I was scrounging through a box of rejects in my trunk and discovered a collection of short stories by Lively entitled Deck of Cards. The incredible thing is that two or three pages into the first short story, I knew that I wanted to read everything this author had written. I quickly scanned the frontispiece page to discover that she had, indeed, written many books.

Great novelists do lots more than tell us intriguing stories. Lively is a first rate historian who obviously is also deeply interested in archeology and paleontology. But to say simply that she is a historian is not enough. Like Tolstoy and a handful of other great writers, Lively has a distinct and intricate philosophy of history; she is an historiographer. As you probably know, philosophers are addicted to what are called ontological questions—questions like, ‘What is it to be human?’ or ‘What is it to be true?’. Usually, such questions are expressed in a slightly simpler fashion, ‘What is the meaning of truth?’, ‘What is the meaning of knowledge?’, ‘What is the meaning of good?’, or ‘What is history? What is the meaning of history?’ This is the question that Lively returns to in everything she writes. Again, like Tolstoy, Lively reminds her readers that history is not the history of great persons, nor the history of wars, nor the history of empires. Indeed, the history lessons that we get in history books are not, she would insist, the essence of history. But then, what is history?

Lively is not naive enough to suppose that there is a simple answer to this question, but her novels and stories are constantly shifting and complex attempts to give some sort of answer to this perhaps hopelessly complicated question. Like Marx, Lively is convinced that those of us who don’t learn from history are bound to perish from it, to relive mistakes, to continually reforge the chains that bind us. And, of course, there is no finally objective view of history. After all, it is subjects who ask the question; it is (in Heidegger’s language) we who question the being of history, and our comportment will inevitably affect the answers we give.

Many nineteenth and twentieth century historians and philosophers were deeply struck by the fact that we are beings in time; we are historical beings who cannot (no matter how hard we try) escape our histories, our temporal nature. And yet, Nietzsche and Marx and Heidegger and many others were convinced that most intellectuals have simply ignored our temporal, historical condition. They have treated intellectual issues and phenomena as if they transcended history, as if they were timeless. But, in fact, we are beings who live simultaneously in a past we cannot transcend, and who hurl ourselves towards a future that is uncertain and has not yet happened, while also slip-sliding in a present that is gone almost before we can experience and comprehend it. This tripartite way in which we are literally caught by history, past, present and future, is a constantly recurring theme in Lively’s books. Here I am now, caught in a traffic jam in a buzzing, racing, noisy city while a piece of seventeenth century music plays serenely on my CD player; I look out the window and what I see takes me back to my childhood or to times long before I was born, perhaps (depending on who I am and how much I know) to times before any being of our sort roamed the earth. And before I can finish my thought or react to the car honking behind me, I am transported again to a possible future, a meeting I am late for, a child who is in hospital, a spouse from whom I am estranged.

Lively captures the ways in which we belong to time as well or better than any author I have ever read. She was born in Cairo in 1933, and belongs as much to Cairo as to London, to the desert as much as to the city, to the past as much as to the present or future. Moon Tiger is, in many ways, a book about the second world war, and specifically about the war fought in and for stretches of barren desert. And yet the book begins in a hospital room in London, an old woman, writer and intellectual, dying rather slowly as, in her head, she writes a history of the world. Her past is much clearer to her, much more important to her, than is the present. She is less convinced by the odd and wrinkled visage that occasionally looks back at her from a mirror than by the much more vivid mind-pictures of a much younger and more vibrant woman, a war correspondent who later becomes what one might call an historical novelist. And in these last few days of breathing, questions about who she is, about the meaning of her own history as well as of the times in which she lives swirl around her. Past, present, and future merge, as they always do—all constantly there in the moment, all happening at once, together. Magnified, no doubt, by the drugs she is taking, by the slow slip into death, still her condition is the condition she has lived always, and that she must remind us that we all live.

Had Lively written only this one book, I think she would (or should) be remembered as a great writer, and profound thinker. But she has, of course, continued to live and think and write. In a more recent book, City of the Mind, she demonstrates clearly her understanding of how greed and overproduction are quickly changing the face of the world, how growth economies are spiraling us towards global disaster, how the hunger for power and money burn and kill and mutilate and are considered, if at all, only as necessary side consequences of growth and progress.

And while she does all of this clearly, convincingly, never does it seem that we, the readers, are being preached to. While she cannot help, given what she knows and how well she writes, being didactic, it seems as if she is simply telling us a story, and a fascinating story at that. A couple who has separated, a child who is caught between, a city of glass that is being constantly torn down and reconstructed, built with blood.

Penelope Lively is a great writer. While her novels are dense and complex (and certainly not happy little stories), they are relatively short—usually about two hundred pages and readable in a day or two. Though I dare you to try reading one that quickly. Personally, I am so captivated by the questions she poses, the conundrums of history she describes, that I cannot read for many minutes without going off on my own—thinking of my own past, my own history, my own relationships—thinking of how I might help in the struggle to change how things are, to bring about a less brutal and fairer future. She makes me want to write, makes me want to make amends for past lapses, makes me want to become a better person and struggle for a better world. What more can a writer do?