The Road to Lichfield

A brilliant telling of one woman's midlife self-discovery. The story is emotional without nostalgia. I couldn't put this book down.

I read a lot, and can often anticipate the course a plot will take. Not this time. The central characters in this book all surprised me at important junctures, though the choices they made did not interfere with the logic of their characters. Partly for this reason, the book itself becomes very suspenseful, in defiance of its setting. It ends on a note that is both shocking and, at least to me, highly disturbing, though not sensational. I expected to enjoy it, but did not foresee how caught up I would become. The characters still haunt me a bit. This is not your typical first novel, and not your typical genteel British lady novelist. She is ruthless. She is not politically correct.

The Road to Lichfield, Penelope's Lively's first novel, is a deeply satisfying read. Anne Linton, a housewife and part-time history teacher, goes to Lichfield to visit her senility-inflicted father who is dying in a nursing home. The frequent trips down become a sojourn into the past, into discovering her father and into exploring her growing illicit relationship with a headmaster, David Fielding, who was her father's fishing partner. Lively's Booker-nominated book is an adult, intelligent, articulate novel about how relationships and history shape our past and future. At 216 pages, it paints a vivid, if concise, picture of middle-class British suburban life with full of probable, living characters.

"Anne Linton drove northward toward Lichfield. Berkshire gave way to Oxfordshire, Oxfordshire to Warwickshire and on to Stratfordshire. Her own past, too, waved a cheery hand from over the horizon." So, the beginning of the first book by Penelope Lively. I have grown to love this writer. She provides intelligence, perception and a thoroughly believable and interesting cast of characters. She breathes life into the characters, and her vivid style increases our enjoyment of her novels. Anne Linton is a history teacher married to a stodgy, unemotional barrister. Her husband is caught up in his career and seems to take Anne for granted. Anne is caught in the middle of her life as mother to two teenagers, teacher, wife and now daughter of a man who is dying. Anne begins the fortnight drives to Lichfield to visit her father in a nursing home and to organize the house that they had lived in. The house is actually kept quite clean by the housekeeper. It is Anne's job to look at the finances and to clean out all the morass of years of things. Within the years collected in papers, Anne discovers that fifteen pounds a month are being sent to an unknown woman. She mentions this to her brother, Graham, who tells her that yes; her father had a mistress for many years and this may be where the money goes. Anne is astounded; this information has changed her entire perception of her life. While Anne is visiting her father a neighbor drops by. He is a headmaster of a school, and a little older than Anne. He tells her that he and her father used to go fishing regularly and formed a great friendship. Anne and David form a friendship of their own, and she meets him whenever she comes to Lichfield. The friendship deepens into something else. A startling contrast to her father? How will she resolve this affair with her present life? At the same time, Anne is involved with several other townspeople in trying to save an old building from being torn down. She finds them much too aggressive and dashing forward without the information they need to proceed with intelligence. She tries to tell the group her views, but they hush her and move forward. She withdraws from this group, feeling slighted and out of sorts. Her family's importance to her becomes significant. Her visits to her father renew her energy with her family and her ties to her old life. She visits the daughter of the woman who loved her father. She found surprisingly enough that he father loved music and dance. He was a different person with different needs in this household; She also found that this family loved her father. How to reconcile this family she does not know and the father she thought she knew dying in his bed? Penelope Lively has given us a refreshing validation of the positive aspects of change. This novel is a testament of confidence in human nature. We are all good people trying to do our best in this world. Another great novel about finding ourselves, change and consequence, and

"The Road to Lichfield" is similar to Penelope Lively's other books in that it is a well-written, acutely observed portrait of intelligent, interesting characters. As a narrative device she listens in on or recreates snippets of the consciousness of various characters. The effect of this device for me is that the characters seem utterly real. In this particular story, the main character, Anne, middle-aged, married to a priggish and uncommunicative but solid and responsible solicitor, finds her ideas about herself and her family all suddenly called into question when she learns new information about her dying father and when she falls in love with a new acquaintance. Add Anne's involvement with a project to save a decaying but historic old building from demolition, and Anne has plenty of material for exploration of her ideas about the past. The author is a historian, apparently with an interest in old buildings. I enjoyed the descriptions of the British countryside and life style, and some minor characters were delightful. This book is extremely well written but you won't like it if you don't like novels where the main focus is on social relationships.