Consequences

I've been thinking about getting old and what that means. My mother and I have both had significant birthdays this month, my husband's grandmother is now confined to bed, and my mother-in-law's uncle died yesterday. All of these events, tumbling together have me thinking about how the generations move on. Penelope Lively's book Consequences traces the lives of three generations of women, from pre-WWII to present day. Lorna escapes her parents' upper class life in London for the love of a young artist, great before his time. Their daughter Molly sails through an unconventional youth to become her own woman sometime in the 1960s. Her daughter Ruth struggles more than her mother and grandmother did to find her path, but each finds happiness in bits and pieces.

Lively tries to tie the women together but I didn't see much resemblence. This isn't so much a book about legacy as it is about the familial ties we create. Traditional family is absent, if not often rejected as Lorna, Molly, and Ruth forge ahead. These women all had to get on mostly on their own so there's a sense of sui generis to their successes and occasional stumbling blocks. What matters here are the characters and Lively is brilliant with these. The best lines go to Lucas, a constant friend from Lorna's early days with Matt, the love of her life. Lucas is no patriarch although he nearly outlasts them all, but his presence is everywhere. He counsels and loves Lorna, Molly, and Ruth through the years in his own haphazard ways. He's an accidental father and father figure, but never really steps up or changes who he is. In a less certain author's hands, he would have been made the gay uncle. Instead, Lively makes his presence essential without overshadowing the role of the women who are her focus.

When Molly reports she's lost her job as librarian, Lucas says, "Was it the turquoise skirt, and those earrings? I always felt you didn't dress the part."

"No, it was Lady Chatterley's Lover," Molly explained. [she'd scandalized the trustees by suggesting a lecture on banned books--remember, this is London in the early 60s and D.H. Lawrence's book had gone to trial]

Lucas sighed, "Well, I suppose you can argue that you fell on your sword for freedom of speech. An interesting entry for the curriculum vitae..."

When Molly rejects her maternal grandparents' lifestyle, she tells Lucas, "I think I have dropped out of the upper-middle class. I can't seem to fit there at all."

"I shouldn't worry," said Lucas, "It's called social mobility. Mind, it usually operates the other way--upward rather than downward."

When Molly's daughter Ruth passes the age of 43, long outliving her grandmother's final age, she reflects, Youth was gone, then, which was occasionally dismaying but a truth that could be confronted, and faced down. More provocative was the erratic process whereby you went in one direction rather than another, did this, not that, lived here, not there, found yourself with this person and not someone else quite unknown, quite inconceivable. How did this come about? Oh, you made choices but in a way that was sometimes almost subliminal, at others so confused that, in recollection, the area of choice is obscured entirely: What was it that was not chosen?

I loved reading about the different lives of these women and they did all seem to make choices, in spite of Ruth's reflections. They are all granted their happiness even if it doesn't last as long as they would have liked, or even if it is unexpected, unintended happiness. This is a great book for multi-generational discussions and between Consequences and Family Album (as well as Heat Wave from years ago), I am firmly back in Penelope Lively's fan camp.