Strangely familiar

In 1935, Noël Coward included in his series of playlets, Tonight at 8.30, a jaunty, song-filled exposé, in Victorian dress, of fam- ily relationships, Family Album. Penelope Lively’s novel of the same title, her 16th, covers similar territory — without the jauntiness or predisposition to burst into song.

It is an apt title. Lively’s novel is an extended meditation on the meaning of family, the nature of blood relationship and our interconnectedness based on the accident of birth. In place of conventional plot, it proceeds by snapshots and vignettes, a series of portraits and first-person narratives, not so much a story as a sequence of word pictures held together like beads on a string by the flexible thread of the subjects’ kinship.

It recounts the progress from infancy to wind-scattered adulthood of the six Harper children. Joining Paul, Sandra, Gina, Roger, Katie and Clare are their mismatched parents, Charles and Alison, and the family’s Scandinavian au pair of 40 years, Ingrid. Although the six grown-up children are spread across the globe, their reminiscences share a unity of place: all centre on the family home, a rambling, Edwardian suburban villa called Allersmead. Family Album explores in fictional form the central concern of Lively’s 2001 memoir, A House Unlocked — the manner in which houses absorb and retain aspects of the lives lived within them. Allersmead is this novel’s nearest approach to a hero: it is the one ‘character’ who inspires consensus in all nine family members.

The Harpers are the sort of family who have always peopled Penelope Lively’s novels: thinking, talking, agonising middle-class folk with a modicum of inherited wealth and a degree of anxiety concerning their own happiness and personal fulfilment. Interestingly, Family Album charts — unwittingly? — changes in British society since Lively’s first adult novels, written in the Seventies.