Family Album: A Novel [Hardcover]

 

 

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Essentially a story of love and an appreciation for family, Penelope Lively makes no attempt to mask the importance of the substantial Edwardian House of Allersmead, so central to her story. This is where the main protagonists of Family Album have lived even as Alison and Charles Harper, have raised six children: Paul, Sandra, Gina, Roger, Katie and Clare - along with Ingrid, who had been the family's au pair girl for many years. Of course it is only natural their children will eventually fly the coop, journeying out to all the corners of the world, but Allersmead is always there, occasionally drawing them back: "this real family house with all its scars." The novel opens as Gina - a successful international reporter - returns to Allersmead with her boyfriend Phillip. Phillip is intrigued by Gina's family, and her stories of growing up with her siblings and her resigned and rather detached father Charles - who writes books, history, philosophy, sociology - "a bit of everything," and her mother Alison a homemaker, a housewife, that now outmoded figure that Ingrid is frequently reminding her.

With her life still flashing at her, Gina has decided she should best confront Allersmead head-on. With it's wide flight of steps up to a front door with stained-glass panels, after all these years the house remains a steadfast shrine to family. For Alison at least, the house has such happy memories, where everything reminds her of something. Even as she tells Phillip that you can beat the real old fashioned family life, the kitchen is filled with children's drawings tucked behind the crockery on the dresser, a painted papier-māché tiger, along side a row of indeterminate clay animals that some one made earlier - and also the named mugs slung from hooks: Paul, Gina Sandra, Katie, Roger Clare.

In alternative voices, Lively snaps her literary Polaroid of this family, their past lives folding into the present. And it is the children's memories of the years at Allersmead that form the heart of the novel, the family constantly tumbling through the house - happy smiling faces preserved on mantelpieces and windowsills, on the piano, their images framed on walls. The drama plays out, the author developing a compelling portrait of her characters, beginning with a birthday party, for Gina and a treasure hunt where Sandra and her collide in the pond garden and Gina coming home, her head bandaged, her birthday gone down the drain: "a wretched, accident, a silly wretched accident." Later when Charles who digs his heels in and denies Paul the money for Amsterdam. Alison juddering with irritation that her husband doesn't actually discuss things with the children, the tension between them escalating as Charles tries to focus on the crucial final stretch of his new book.

While Katie and Roger are "the good ones," Sandra becomes wayward and independent, hightailing into the glamorous world of fashion. Clare becomes a beautiful contemporary dancer, and an uncontrollable element. Paul struggles with direction, relationships, and an unassuaged yearning that is filled by drugs and booze. Each time he fetches up back at Allersmead, he gets this eerie feeling that he has never really left it, "as though his life beyond was some imaginary excursion. Meanwhile, Aunt Corrina, educated and childless seems to sit in judgment over Alison and her benign acceptance of her role. Alison is well aware of her deficiencies but not particularly concerned, after all being a wife and a mother was what was expected and she tried to do her job and give a real four star family life "which is what matters."

Hardly subservient - Alison did what she did because that was what she wanted to do. Over the years Alison and Charles haven't really said that much to each other - Alison takes on the role of addressing everyone or attending to a particular child while "Dad" is simply silent, segregated in his study. This is a precarious conjunction of a strange, required system that sets two people along side each other. It is after a silly stupid mistake, caused by Charles and Ingrid there comes a subtle shift, Alison realizes that all had to live with it for always and the best way for everyone was to live with it together as a family. Lively's novel is mostly about the shifting generations and how they move on, but where one can always find comfort in the healing power of family. Essentially a saga on the importance of home, life goes on, the children leading independent lives as adults, their recollections of home essential for fuelling the enchanting plot. Meanwhile, Allersmead continues to hear everything, the house knowing that has been said and all that has been done. Silent speech hangs in the air, and repeats the words that hang on people's heads, the house almost like a separate character, stowing away this inaccessible archive of memories and of love. Mike Leonard December 09.

Penelope Lively's new novel, Family Album, is about a large family that grows up in a large house in suburban London. The Harper family consists of six children, the two parents, and an "au pair girl" who has played an interesting role in family history.

The Harper family revolves around Alison, the mother of the brood, and Allersmead, the Victorian "pile" that the Harper family has lived in for 40 years or so. The father, Charles, a distant figure in the household, is sort of "there, but not there", to his six children. He's a fairly successful writer of non-fiction, often writing about families in far off lands, while moving through his own children's lives at a safe distance. He's often holed up in his library, which is off-limits to the rest of the household. He doesn't get involved with his children, other than with his oldest son, Paul, a neer-do-well who Charles often disparages.

Alison Harper is a "super-Mom". She's the one who wanted a large family and she has made a life for herself seemingly limited to raising the children and keeping the house. She's not the intellectual that her husband is and actually has very little communication with him.

In this melieu the six children - four daughter and two sons - grow up. All but one leave home as soon as possible, but maintain a tenuous connection with family and house. They return to the family home for holidays and birthdays and try, between themselves, to make some sense of their crazy upbringing. An upbringing that only Alison sees as "happy".

Lively is a good writer and most of the nine characters are well drawn. The book goes back and forth in time, depending on who's "telling the story". I found the characters interesting enough so as to almost wish that another writer, maybe one who writes big, fleshy, juicy novels, would take these characters and expand the book.

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