Playing with possibilities

Fiction: How many variations may be played of one life. Not nearly enough, most would reply. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, former Booker prize winner, gifted screenplay writer and one of fiction's shrewdest masters of the light and telling touch, attempts just that in this engagingly candid performance.

In the Apologia that acts as a preface, she writes "these chapters are potentially autobiographical: even when something didn't actually happen to me, it might have done so".

As the title suggests, this is a book offering nine stories, nine versions of the way one life may, or may not, have developed. She is playing with possibilities not ambiguities. In each sequence, a female narrator tells the story of her life by focusing on the players who most shaped it for her.

India has an important role. It is the place that both haunts and draws the narrator, as well as, of course, Jhabvala herself, who was born to Polish parents in Germany in 1927.

In 'Life', the first story and among the most moving, the narator says: "I have gone back to live in India, partly for economic reasons. It's cheaper for me here than in New York, and that has been a consideration during these last years." It immediately becomes clear that the narrator having first come to India in her youth, has now had to return in old age.

She notes the many changes but most painful of all is the realisation that her landlord's family "referred to me as the 'budiya' - the old woman - up there". She continues: "it is difficult for me to realise that this description fits me as it used to fit Somnath's old mother: she had a hump and a chronic bad knee that she clutched all the time while groaning and calling to God for release".

The passage is typical of Jhabvala, who tends to soften moments of pathos with humour. Her prose possesses such ease and fluidity. Always in the background is her engagement with her mixed German/Polish heritage and later involvement with India. But instead of battling these cultures, she avails herself of the multinational layers of richness they confer in terms of experience and sensibility.

The narrator of 'Life', a self-confessed unglamorous academic woman, reports: "My parents considered India an unsuitable, dangerous place". After their divorce, Otto, her father marries Susie, who always takes a secondary role behind that of the narrator's mother, Otto's first wife, Nina. When she decides to travel with the narrator to India "to see for herself what it was all about", Otto, himself the victim of a heart attack, fears for Nina - "what if she fell sick in India with one of those diseases people got there?" This is exactly what happens. After Nina's death, the narrator recalls the way in which "she sometimes came alive for me again among her possessions: so that when I ran a scintillating necklace through my fingers, it seemed to be herself who came sparkling back to life".

In 'My Family', the by-now-familiar narrator begins by discussing Debbie, her middle-aged daughter, a fussy All-American mother of two children who life has treated differently. The narrator then recalls the man who was Debbie's father. It is an account of a secret and inexplicable passion.

Again, the account is shaped by humour. Looking back from the safe distance of age, the narrator, who had acted as his secretary when he attended conferences, admits of her stolen moments with her secret lover: "I cannot say that these excursions were the happiest hours of my life, but they were certainly the most ecstatic. It is impossible to describe the bliss of being with him, this stolid Prussian professor 30 years older than I, who after making love at once turned over on his side and went to sleep, snoring tremendously. But he performed as a lover as he did everything: with all the force of his being - which was, after all, that of a man who had explored and conquered vast territories, impenetrable thickets of the mind. I adored him. But also, when he was not there and I was left alone all day in his hotel room, I shed bitter tears at the humiliating nature of the affair, and its futility."

'Springlake' is the story of a brother and sister burdened by their shared impracticality and the ease with which they have been able to move through life, largely due to their late father's property. "When we decided to sell the house, my brother George kept saying, 'it's The Cherry Orchard, American-style'. But this was far from being a close parallel. For one thing, we aren't all that American - not in the way that Madame Ranevsky and her brother were Russian."

It is this heritage of mixed cultures that brings Jhabvala's characters and her stories to life. Memory and those sharp discoveries that are the eventual outcome of the slow process known as realisation.

It is no secret that Jhabvala has read her Chekhov. This new book is a terrific story sequence. Not that the narratives are interlinking - they're not - yet it is the notion of variations on a theme, the random paths a life, any life, may follow, that makes My Nine Lives exciting, engaging and so very convincing.

My Nine Lives: Chapters of a Possible Past By Ruth Prawer Jhabvala John Murray, 277pp. £16.99

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times