Penelope Lively – She Reads Novels

Before I started blogging I used to keep a list of the books I read in an A-Z notebook – the title, the author and a rating out of 5, but no other information. I did this from the mid-1990s to around the year 2000, but sadly kept no records after that until October 2009 when I started my blog.

I still have the notebook and a few years ago I began writing a series of blog posts highlighting some of the books listed under each letter, but only got as far as E before getting distracted and forgetting to do the rest. I did enjoy working on those posts, so I have decided to continue and try to get all the way to Z this time – and yes, I do have a book listed under Z!

So, without further ado, here is a selection of the books that appeared on the ‘F’ and ‘G’ pages of my notebook. I originally gave the books ratings out of 5 and the additional symbol * means that I particularly loved the book while X means I didn’t finish it. Although I’ve included my original ratings here, these do not necessarily reflect what I would feel about the books if I read them again today!

Books beginning with F and G:

The Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake 5/5*
I remember buying this book after watching the BBC adaptation in 2000. My edition includes all three novels in the trilogy – I didn’t like the third one, Titus Alone, but loved the first two, Titus Groan and Gormenghast.

The Far Pavilions by M.M. Kaye 5/5*
This wonderful novel set in India is one of my favourite historical fiction novels. I loved it the first time I read it and when I re-read it in 2010 I was pleased to find that it was still as good as I remembered.

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell 5/5*
I have read Gone with the Wind several times and don’t know if this particular entry refers to my first read or a later re-read. It’s another favourite, though, so it would get 5/5 from me every time.

Grim Pickings by Jennifer Rowe 5/5
This was a great Agatha Christie-style mystery novel set in Australia and revolving around a murder that takes place in an old woman’s orchard where her family have gathered to pick apples. I think it was part of a series, but I never read any of the others.

The Ghost of Thomas Kempe by Penelope Lively 3/5
This is one of Penelope Lively’s children’s books. I can remember what the front cover of my copy looked like (and I think I still have it somewhere) but the story has faded from my mind. I would like to read it again as I think I might appreciate it more now than I did the first time.

The Fog by James Herbert 3/5
I very rarely read horror novels these days but I used to read a lot of them. I enjoyed this one, about a mysterious fog that spreads across Britain, altering the minds of everyone who comes into contact with it.

Freezing by Penelope Evans 3/5
I have no memories at all of reading this book. According to Goodreads, it’s a crime novel about a photographer who works in a mortuary and tries to find the identity of a drowning victim who is brought into the morgue one day. It sounds a bit gruesome but I must have enjoyed it enough to give it a 3/5 rating.

First Impression by Margot Dalton 3/5
I can’t remember this one either. It’s another crime novel, this time about a detective trying to solve a missing child case.

The Ghost Road by Pat Barker 2/5
If you’d asked me whether I’d read anything by Pat Barker I would have said no, but obviously I did read this one. I think I’ll have to read it again as I can’t remember anything about it and I suspect it deserves more than 2/5! It’s the third in the Regeneration trilogy and I don’t have any record of reading the previous two, so maybe that was the problem.

Fog Heart by Thomas Tessier 2/5
The story of two couples who are drawn together when they attend a séance and meet a young medium called Oona. I do vaguely remember reading this book, but I wasn’t very impressed by it.

The Ghosts of Candleford by Mike Jeffries 2/5
Neither the title nor the author sound familiar to me but Amazon tells me that this is a ‘classic tale of the supernatural’. Seeing how many books I’ve read and then completely forgotten about has confirmed for me (if I needed to have it confirmed) that starting a book blog was an excellent idea!

Have you read any of these books? Can you shed any light on the more obscure ones?

I’ll be back soon with another selection, but if you missed my earlier Remember These? posts you can see them here.

The famous historian Claudia Hampton is dying. From her hospital bed she tells the nurse that she is going to write a history of the world: “A history of the world…and in the process, my own”.

Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger won the Booker Prize in 1987 and yet it’s not a book that I’ve ever heard much about. Maybe it’s a good thing I didn’t know anything about it, as I would otherwise probably have felt too intimidated by the thought of reading it and might never have picked it up. And that would have been a shame because although it was certainly a complex, challenging book, it was also one that I found very rewarding and I didn’t regret the time and effort I put into reading it.

I really wanted to love Moon Tiger. And I did love parts of it. The whole book is beautifully written (I particularly liked the final chapter) and I found myself constantly marking passages I wanted to remember. The only problem I had was that the story was too fragmented for me. The narration jumps from third person past tense to first person past tense to third person present tense – as well as back and forth in time. Eventually I began to really appreciate how well-structured the story actually was, but unfortunately it didn’t start to work for me until I was halfway through the novel.

As Claudia explains at the beginning of the book she is taking a ‘kaleidoscopic’ view of history. One idea leads to another with only very tenuous connections between them. The most tiny and innocent things that happen in the hospital (a conversation with the nurse about God, a poinsettia plant brought in by her sister-in-law) trigger memories which lead to other memories and then other memories…

Sometimes the narrator also changes very abruptly, so that we see the same scene from two different perspectives. This made things even more confusing, but did help build up a full, balanced picture of Claudia. And Claudia is not the most likeable of people. I loved her as a character – she’s fascinating and unconventional – but not as a person. At first I couldn’t understand her animosity towards her sister-in-law, Sylvia, and I was frustrated that she wasn’t more loving to her daughter, Lisa. The reasons for her behaviour are revealed only very slowly as the story progresses and the secrets of Claudia’s past come to light. This gave the novel some suspense and mystery, as not everything was obvious from the beginning and a lot of things didn’t fall into place until near the very end. I still couldn’t actually like Claudia, but at least I could understand her better.

I did like the way Claudia talked about history and how she was able to relate historical events to events from her own past. To Claudia, history is a personal subject – she writes her history books for the general public, in language that they can understand. And just as it would be difficult to write a history of the entire world in strictly chronological order, the story Penelope Lively tells in Moon Tiger is not chronological either.

Where the book really comes into its own is in Claudia’s recollections of Egypt when she was working in Cairo as a war correspondent during World War II. The descriptions of Egypt are vivid and realistic, the type that could only be written by someone familiar with the country (as Penelope Lively was). It’s in these sections that we begin to see a softer side of Claudia – and in case you were wondering, this is also when we finally learn what a Moon Tiger is!

I still find it hard to say what I thought about this book. I was impressed by it, but did I actually enjoy it? No, not really – but it was certainly one of the most interesting and unusual books I’ve read this year.