COMFORTABLY in demand as a freelance book editor, Pauline is professionally secure enough to spend the summer out of London and is working from her small country house. She is not, however, entirely alone, as Teresa, her grown daughter, is also staying at the renovated cottage with Maurice, her husband and their baby son, while Maurice completes the book he is writing.
Pauline appears to be a detached, self-contained woman, and it soon becomes clear that while she is living in the present, her thoughts are continually returning to her painful earlier life.
Even while she observes her daughter tending the little boy, she sees images of a distant, younger Teresa, "with cropped hair and a ragged fringe, gap-toothed - and further Teresas yet, a procession of them. There is not one Teresa, but a metamorphosis, of which she is always vaguely aware. And when she dreams of Teresa, it is always of a child that she dreams. Teresa is once again four, or six, or nine - and Pauline is unsurprised. Dreaming, she accepts without question this reincarnation, and is carried along by the dream's narrative of anxiety, or protection, or annoyance. The next day, it is for a moment unsettling to find again the adult and alien Teresa, who is at the same time deeply familiar and in some profound way quite unknown.
Written in the continuous present, this intense, closely-observed novel is a powerful exploration of the indelible wrong which Pauline carries with her. At 55, she has reached a state of self-sufficiency while also perfecting the art of self-protection, which she refers to as emotional neutrality. Even so, she cannot relinquish those humiliations suffered at the hands of her adulterous former husband. As an expert on emotional hurt and jealousy - "She could write a treatise on jealousy, a disquisition, a learned paper with footnotes and appendices" - Pauline can spot internal distress at 20 paces, and although remaining a sympathetic, responsive individual, she is certainly cautious, remote and does not interfere. In fact, she sees more than she wants to. Aware that she does not like her son-in-law, she also suspects his editor's girlfriend. Pain has made Pauline alert to the blatant deceptions some people engage in.
So professional and competent a writer is she that Penelope Lively is very easy to take for granted. Her prose is brisk, often banal, and her approach to narrative has a business-like, tidily detailed precision. One can imagine her using language with an impersonal deliberation, as if it were a set of robust gardening tools. Lively does not indulge herself with words, she merely selects them according to their efficiency.
Often, her innate exactness results in a schoolmarmish tone. When she is good she is average and able, typical of that intelligent, predictable school of British fiction. Yet at her best, as in this sad, angry book, Lively can hold a reader because of rather than in spite of her crisp style. She won the 1987 Booker Prize with Moon Tiger, a good English novel. Heat Wave, as a study of a betrayed woman alert to the cruelties people can inflict on others, is a far better book, probably her finest, most moving to date.
Even when watching her daughter's various trials with a demanding baby whose moods swing abruptly between anguish and ecstasy - "he writhes and roars and weeps. He is a soul in torment, you would think, not someone who is merely bored and tired" Pauline operates on two levels: she watches and remembers; she compares and contrasts. Now reinforced against all hurt, she "realises she has not cried for years. We'll . . . the occasional tear of sentiment, perhaps. But not real, raw, bleeding tears of pain. She has not sobbed herself into exhaustion, seen her face red and swollen, tasted the salt of misery. Not for years."
Set during a summer of unnaturally superb weather, Heat Wave is plotted around a build-up of tensions. There is both a sense of urgency and prevailing stalemate. The characters tread warily around each other. Maurice, formerly a peripheral acquaintance, is 15 years older than Teresa and Pauline feels responsible for the marriage which increasingly reminds her of her own.
Perceptive and intelligent, this is a felt, bloodied, thinking novel written with a commendable control.
