Penelope Lively – The Purple Swamp Hen & Other Stories review: flawed but delightful

Growing up, I was a hungry reader, as many adolescents are. But I could not respond to the male American novelists who were still the major figures at that time: Mailer; Roth; Updike; Bellow despite his ardent style. They seemed self-absorbed and harsh, and clearly could not imagine that female characters might be as interesting as male ones.

Then, at some point in my twenties, I discovered the women, more precisely those wry intelligent English women whose novels had begun to appear in the 1960s: Margaret Drabble and her sister AS Byatt; Fay Weldon; Rose Tremain and Penelope Lively, although Lively’s first book (for children) was published in 1970.

Some of these novelists were initially dismissed as “women’s writers” or as chroniclers of middle-class life, though when Tolstoy or Flaubert described domestic upheavals and infidelity among the middle or upper classes, no one accused them of writing chick lit. Margaret Drabble has achieved in her fiction a kind of supple movement between time and space that can take the place or ordinary narrative, and her subjects are deep and varied. Weldon is a standard bearer of early feminism, Byatt’s work is dazzlingly clever and Tremain’s daring.

As for Penelope Lively, like many fine writers, she has spent her literary life pursuing a particular obsession. In her case, this has taken the form of a concern with the nature of memory, and therefore of history. A historian herself before becoming a novelist, she remains fascinated by how the past endures into the present, is in fact indistinguishable from it. "Linear memory is nonsense," she declares with the firmness one finds in many of her bright and determined characters. So instead of a line or road, time is a circle, or a landscape in which our current and past selves meet and where "everything co-exists", as a character in her 2003 novel, The Photograph, has it.

The 15 stories gathered in The Purple Swamp Hen, while not her best work, continue to explore Lively's obsessions, not only with the mystery of memory, but with the tensions that develop when characters try to sustain a discipline of work while trying to build an intimate life with another person. A Biography, especially, returns to the theme of an early novel, According to Mark, in which a young biographer, researching the life of an Edwardian essayist, discovers that his subject was composed of myriad selves, with perhaps his deepest and most tragic self hidden from all who thought they knew him best.

A Biography has young Julia composing a "Life" of the dynamic and charming Lavinia Talbot, a historian whose studies of children (a "big book": Love and Labour: The History of Childhood and a BBC series, The Child in History) made her rich and famous, though when the story opens she is recently dead. The assiduous Julia interviews Lavinia's family, friends, colleagues, lovers; her puzzlingly chill and repellent husband. But the pith of Lavinia's life remains a secret (revealed to us at the end, though never to her biographer). This is an affecting story, written with economy yet conveying the full sweep of Lavinia's life. And like the other stories in this collection, it maintains a clear and elegant style that compels the reader right from the start. But again, like the other stories here, it suffers from a certain gimmickry which is blessedly absent from Lively's longer work. Not only is Lavinia's secret obvious enough, there is something reductive, simplistic, in how it is presented as the key to an entire life. From a writer as sensitive to nuance as Lively can be, such pat endings are a bit of a disappointment.

Yet A Biography is technically fine, with each interviewee speaking in his or her own pitch-perfect voice. And Who Do You Think You Were is another well-written story which reveals that the past is never dead. Postgraduate historian Caroline is researching "her own family history, back to the early seventeenth century . . ." This research makes her ancestors real to her in an immediate, intimate way: "Names – she can cite them – the Johns and Georges and Alberts, the Elizas and Janes . . ." Caroline observes to her fiancé, "It is almost creepy that these people are my forebears. That there's a connection . . . And that nobody, so far as I know, has ever done this before . . . Touched them, as it were. I am their future."

Lively manages to smuggle a sly in-joke into this narrative, when Caroline’s friend suggests, “Write a historical novel. Be the next Hilary Mantel.” And Caroline wants to explain that she “can’t think like that” and that “what she reads in lists, entries, bare references, has come to reflect some alternative reality”. But she refrains from saying this, for fear of “sounding fey”.

Yet like many of its companions in The Purple Swamp Hen, this story ends on a note which is, in fact, fey: a complicated narrative turned simplistic on the last page, as if the author had grown impatient with her characters, and decided to finish them off in a formulaic manner reminiscent of O. Henry. Perhaps these are tales rather than stories?

There are ghost stories here, as well, in which, yet again, interesting characters turn to cardboard at the end. And yet, after all, I would recommend The Purple Swamp Hen to readers, despite the compunctions above. Why? Because Penelope Lively's style is a delight, and because her unsentimental portraits of individual lives and of the workings of family, coupled with her sometimes wicked sense of humour, make these flawed, though intelligent, stories a pleasure to read.

Elizabeth Wassell is a writer and critic