Consequences by Penelope Lively — decisions, decisions

With some novels there’s a clear answer to the question “what message is the author trying to convey?” With Consequences the answer felt so obvious that I couldn’t help wonder what I was missing.

Penelope Lively’s novel follows the lives and loves of three generations of women — Lorna, Molly, and Ruth — who are respectively grandmother, daughter and granddaughter.  Their lives are played out from the 1930s to the end of the twentieth century, showing how they are affected by significant events in those decades and the consequences of their decisions and actions.

Lorna would never have met Matt if she hadn’t had a serious bust up with her mother that day in June 1935 and ran off to St james’s Park to shed tears of frustration. If Matt had chosen to focus on mountains and moors instead of waterways and estuaries for his first commissioned work as an engraver, he wouldn’t have been in the park sketching wildfowl that day.

They wouldn’t have married, move to a damp, remote cottage in Somerset where Matt made wood engravings and became famous and Lorna grew vegetables.

You get the idea. Choices — even minor ones — have consequences. Lives turn as a result of small moments. it’s not a particularly remarkable reflection on life yet in case we didn’t understand the point, Lively repeats it in each successive generation.

Years later, she would think that you do not so much make decisions as stumble in a certain direction because something tells you that is the way you must go. You are impelled by some confusion of instinct, will, and blind faith. Reason does not come into it.

Having read her superb, tightly woven Booker-prize winning novel Moon Tiger I was expecting a lot more from Penelope Lively. But Consequences didn’t only lack insight, it suffered from the same problem as many other family sagas — it runs out of steam.

The Matt/Lorna section is by far the strongest. The descriptions of their lives in Somerset are wonderful, particularly the details of how Matt decorates their bedroom:

It was peopled, populous; it was full of colour and life and action. The walls were dancing, figures spun across them, holding hands, man and woman, naked, vibrant, joyous. They whirled from corner to corner, arms outstretched to one another — this pair, that pair, these, those, the same all around the room, dipping down, flinging up toward the roof, a continuous sinew of movement.

I’m not sure I’d find it easy to go to sleep with all that activity surrounding me but the decor certainly beats the standard magnolia emulsion hands down. After we lose sight of this couple, my interest in Consequences waned. Their daughter Molly grows up amid post-war austerity and the dawning of the sixties, exhibiting a streak of her mother’s independence by opting to be a single mother in her early decades. I won’t spoil the novel for other readers by revealing what happens to Lorna’s great granddaughter, except to say that with her the novel comes full circle.

Consequences is a pleasant enough read but it’s not a book that is going to linger long in my memory. .