THE PHOTOGRAPH by Penelope Lively
Viking 2003
In her latest novel, 'The Photograph', Penelope Lively takes a
simple but stark originating event as catalyst for an exploration
of the connections between memory and history and the capacity
of the past to radically affect the present. A widower discovers
a photograph of his beautiful dead wife which indicates that she
once had an affair with her brother-in-law. The husband, Glyn,
is a professor of landscape history, a subject which lends itself
nicely to metaphor, and his professional expertise, in obsessively
tracking down the tell-tale signs which reveal the 'truth' of the
past, informs the novel's structure.
But, as contemporary fiction has taught us, the past, like the
truth, is a very dark horse and, as we should also know, snoopers
never find good for themselves. The novel is told from the standpoint
of various characters, all of whom have played some role in the
old affair.
That this affair turns out to be a very banal event is part of
the point of the book. Everyone once involved gets it way out of
proportion - but that, of course, is a feature of human psychology.
What the novel explores is not only the fact that we often do not
know those we live closest to, but that we largely choose to ignore
them in pursuit of our own selfish objectives; and our indignation
at discovering undisclosed elements to their lives is pathetic
and naive.
Glyn's first move, on discovering the photograph is to show it,
and thus reveal what it implies, to his dead wife's sister, an
action which precipitates the break-up of her marriage. Glyn's
self-serving need to share his situation with his sister-in-law,
Elaine, to ensure he will have a companion in being cuckolded,
is well observed. It is a petty, but it turns out typical, act
of unthinking insensitivity, which fits with the larger picture
of the man which gradually emerges.
Elaine herself is no moral oil painting. She has forged a successful
career as a landscape gardener and lives in a state of mutinous
annoyance with her husband, Nick, who has had the fling with her
sister. But then Nick, too, is a bit of an ass, a dilettante, who
had learned to batten on his wife's superior maturity, to run his
life, and her earnings to replace his wine and car.
Their daughter, Polly, is a thirty-something website designer,
who runs her life on pragmatic lines but wants her parents preserved
as a fixed point of childhood nostalgia. Understandably, she is
dismayed when their marriage of forty years is thrown into disarray
by the photograph and, as a consequence, her father, in a neat
piece of cliché reversal, becomes an embarrassing social
hindrance in her London flat.
Penelope Lively always writes with penetration and intelligence.
A difficulty with this book, for me, was that I found few of the
characters sympathetic. Not that all characters must charm - but
they must win our involvement and too often I felt that for the
author the principal dynamic was irritation rather than understanding.
Easily the most compelling character is the absent Kath, whose
image, neither dead nor alive, is preserved in the photograph and
whom we meet in recurring complex images in the minds of those
who knew her (memory also being a series of indefinite snap shots
of the past). Here, too, expectation is reversed, for far from
being a contemporary Rebecca, or the adulteress of Glyn's suspicions,
Kath is revealed as a poignant figure, a natural lily-of-the-field,
whose gift is to reflect life's joy for others but is tragically
incapable of feeling it for herself. Her suicide is the consequence
of disappointment, not over any affair, but in the limitations
of those who purported to love her most, who discover her frailty,
and their own derelictions, and capacity to destroy too late.
There is are two survivor who redeem the rest: Oliver, Nick's
business partner, and Mary, a sculptress, have seen Kath not through
the lens of narcissistic need but purely as herself. Neither has
a sexual or familial role in Kath's life, as if Lively is saying
that we are most endangered by those who seem most to promise love
- an acute, if dispiriting, observation.
Salley Vickers © 2003
Independent January 2003
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