My first book for this year's TBR Pile Challenge was Heat Wave, by Penelope Lively. This is my first Lively novel and I found it absolutely compelling, well-written, and thought-provoking.
It is very tight, very taut book. Taking place between May and August, entirely in the English countryside, with but a handful of characters, the focus is intense and the tension palpable. As the summer progresses, and the heat wave consumes the wheat as well as the people, the plot folds in upon itself until everything explodes with the thunderstorm that ends the story and the heat wave.
Pauline is a fifty-five year old divorced editor, living in one of two cottages she owns. The other cottage is inhabited by her daughter, Teresa, and her husband, Maurice, and their son, Luke. The story is told in the present tense and entirely from Pauline's perspective. Her ex-husband Harry, Teresa's father, was charming but pathologically unfaithful to her. She is in despair as she suspects that Maurice is following the same path that Harry did, and she frets about what to do. To tell her daughter, to scold Maurice, to mind her own business, to grieve her own lost marriage? She thinks about maternal instinct--the need to protect one's young even when they aren't young anymore. She thinks about betrayal and love and fate and patterns that repeat.
Heat Wave is a wonderful literary novel--I got to exercise my English major brain and note how Lively used nature to parallel her plot and increase the tautness of the narrative. If Heat Wave is representative of Lively's writing, then a fan is born. I think I'll a get copy of her Moon Tiger next.
I became a fan recently after reading Making It Up, a collection of short stories based on incidents from her own life. Then I read Family Album which I loved. I'll have to add this one to the TBR list!
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you enjoyed this, I think it's one of her very best. You make me want to read it again :) Don't you want to know how their lives carried on, after that storm?
ReplyDeleteI'm a Penelope Lively fan too, but I haven't read Heat Wave. I first read some of her books years ago, before I began my blog and in these last few years I've only read two - Consequences and The Photograph, both excellent books, which I liked because of her style of writing, richly emotional but still taut and concise, as you noted too. So, I think you can take Heat Wave as representative of her work.
ReplyDeleteI really like the idea of the nature plot connection. Such things are one of the things that make good books so good. Heat and thunderstorms are such great fodder for authors!
ReplyDeleteI've only read Lively once, but I liked her style of writing. This sounds like a good read. (And I could use a little heat wave right about now...the January cold is starting to get old.)
ReplyDeletePenelope Lively has been on my 'authors to read' for ages. Moon Tiger is the title I had in mind, but Heat Wave sounds excellent, too.
ReplyDeleteI haven't read any Lively but I'm going to now!
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