The Purple Swamp Hen And Other Stories

Penelope Lively

Fig Tree, £14.99

Review by Lesley McDowell

If today’s world of social media rudeness is too much for some, then the politeness of Lively’s latest short story collection will be a relief. Barring one or two necessary expletives, Lively has fixed most of her stories in a more civil past. Even the few contemporary tales feature characters who prefer a dignified silence to a vulgar spilling of beans.

Does this mean, though, that Lively has ceased to be a writer of relevance? In 1987, she won the Booker prize for Moon Tiger, a novel also concerned with history and what its gains and losses may teach us. A popular choice, it didn’t seem out of tune with what else was published at the time (she won against Chinua Achebe, Brian Moore, Nina Bawden, Iris Murdoch and Peter Ackroyd). The importance of the past has remained a constant with her, both in fiction and non-fiction.

But there’s a way to make the past relevant to the present, which is Lively's aim. Her opening story in this collection is set almost at the dawn of Western civilisation, with her narrator a purple swap hen from the murals that once adorned the walls of a senior Roman official, Quintus Pompeius. The hen lives in the gardens and describes the shenanigans in Quintus’s marriage, the harsh life of the abused slave girl, Servilia, the rumblings in the city the night before Vesuvius erupts. The girl escapes, as does the bird, “And then, at last, in a good marshy place…we settled, and bred, as have my descendants, thus ensuring the survival of the species from that benighted age into your own.” It’s a neatly Darwinian tale that’s thought-provoking in its simplicity.

Where the past’s intrusion into the present is less successful, is in stories like Who Do You Think You Were? Caroline Gladwell, a history student working on her own family’s roots for her dissertation faces the challenges of the London housing market and diminishing career prospects. As she digs deeper into her family’s history, she uncovers another Caroline Gladwell who died aged 24, “struck by a coach”. When present-day Caroline steps out in front of London traffic just after reading this…well, how much are we in charge of our fates? Lively asks.

To frame that question within a ghost story, as she also does in The Weekend, where young Martha plays with the ghost of another little girl, and in DIY, where a house, once the site of a murder, exerts a malevolent influence over the couple now renovating it, seems a little obvious and predicable. The past can be benevolent or bad for us but the modern relationships here react to it with an old-world politeness.

That comes across most strongly in Mrs Bennet, which imagines a mid-20th century version of Jane Austen’s husband-seeking matriarch. Frances Bennet has three daughters to marry off in 1947, not easy in the days after the Second World War and a depletion of men. But eldest daughter Pam makes a great match, then second daughter Clare is married off, too, if to a less socially stellar man. Daughter number three, Imogen, reflecting the social upheaval of the Sixties where class boundaries got truly subverted, goes for the artist son of a blacksmith.

The focus on marriage for women as their primary concern is appropriate enough, perhaps, for a story set in the 1950s and 60s, but it does figure in the concern of young women from a more contemporary era, too (when to have children, how many to afford and so on). Perhaps Lively just wants to stress that nothing very much changes in human nature regardless of social progress, but she doesn’t have her finger on the pulse here. That becomes glaringly obvious when Mrs Bennet ends with the declaration that Imogen’s great-great-great grand-daughter (presumably not for several years to come then) will become "Britain’s second woman prime minister".

A host of unspoken assumptions in that mis-prediction rest on a worldview that feels dated, socially and politically. Lively is as fluent and warm and human as ever. But this collection already seems like a part of history itself.