Penelope Lively: A House Unlocked

By MARGIE THOMSON

The idea that objects or places contain invisible layers of meaning is compelling, almost animistic, if you take it to one extreme.

In this questioning, roving memoir of a family house, which incorporates the sweep of 20th-century social change and turns out to be an acute investigation of her own persona and marriage, Penelope Lively describes her use of the furnishings of a house as a mnemonic system.

"I have always been excited and intrigued by the silent eloquence of the physical world, past events locked into the landscape or lurking in city streets. Every house tells a story," she writes.

Those who love her novels will have marked her enduring interest in memory and the meaning of times passing. In A House Unlocked she appears to have compressed all her experience as a human and a writer into this small, jewel-like bundle, her intellect dazzling on every page.

Lively is nearing 70 and, even more than ever, prefers the long view. With the aid of objects in her grandmother's house - the hall chest, a gong stand, potted-meat jars, the bon-bon dish - she casts her memory back to her childhood and her prewar memories of visiting that large house, called Golsoncott, in the green glory of west Somerset.

And then she casts her imagination back even further, thanks to ancient sepia photographs that provide glimpses of the past. Looking at a photo of her young grandmother in late-Victorian garb, Lively has a sharpened vision of how a life "spans the metamorphoses of its backdrop".

"History," she remarks of a young refugee from Germany who stayed with her grandmother in 1939, "had him by the scruff of his neck." And this is what she seems to be saying throughout this book. Golsoncott, which the book is ostensibly about, stood still - people came and went and grew and changed, elsewhere all was sound and fury. Yet it was irrevocably touched by the long shadows of history.

The children depicted on a sampler stitched by her grandmother in 1946, for instance, were not family members, but wartime evacuees staying at Golsoncott, some of the nearly four million people who fled Britain's cities between 1939 and 1944. Then there is a Russian woman whose husband had been killed by the Bolsheviks. She escaped to England and, through quirky fate, became lifelong friends with Lively's grandmother and later generations.

Attendance at the local church dwindles, attaching Golsoncott firmly to the 20th-century trend of evaporating Christianity, or at any rate, the need to go to church; the house's large and beautiful garden is a palimpsest of 19th and 20th-century botanical history, adventures and styles; the existence of the dressing room, attached to her grandmother's bedroom and in which her grandfather usually slept, becomes symbolic of the changes in expectations and practices of marriage ("My grandmother's was also a long marriage, curtailed only by death, but it was without the intimacy, the edge, the eyeball-to-eyeball quality of late- 20th-century marriage," she writes).

While her immediate subject is British social change - attitudes to class and the relationship between town and country - many of her themes are universal: the pitting of individuals against tumultuous social change, for instance, and the great displacement of people in time and space that, she says, is one of the great themes of the 20th century and certainly has resonance here in the New World. An absolutely enriching read.

Publisher: Viking

$44.95

* Margie Thomson is the Herald books editor.