Book Reviews - Review 429

As writers get older, ideas come less easily, and they can start to caricature their own work. Penelope Lively does it in this novel from 2011. The subject matter of How It All Began will be familiar to her readers - middle-class Brits going through relationship and career crises. The prose is, as ever, straightforward and unpretentious. Lively was never an adventurous writer, but in her best work she made up for that with subtlety.

In this novel, subtlety is absent. All that's left are habitual stylistic mannerisms untethered to deep strands of thought, and two-dimensional characters without individuality or ambiguity.

The starting point of the novel is the mugging of an elderly woman, Charlotte, which sets in train ripples of repercussion that affect not just those close to her, but people she has not even met. Lively prefaces the novel with a quotation from James Gleick's bestselling popular science book Chaos, and she endeavours to show how the principle of inherent unpredictability - the "butterfly effect" - can affect human fate in a similar way to weather. The flap of a butterfly's wings can, hypothetically, influence the location and timing of a hurricane. Lively's interperation of chaos theory is that tiny and, to all intents and purposes, random events can change large-scale patterns in nature and history in apparently disproportionate - and sometimes devastating - ways.

Charlotte's mugger knocks her to the ground and she breaks her hip. To attend to the emergency, her daughter Rose has to cancel a trip to Manchester with her boss, retired academic Lord Henry Peters, who will be giving a guest lecture there on eighteenth-century politics. Rose is replaced by Henry's neice Marion, so Marion sends a text message to her lover Jeremy to cancel a date. The text message is read by Jeremy's fragile wife Stella. In Manchester Marion, an interior designer short of work, meets rich banker George Harrington, who takes her on for renovation of a large old house he's bought in London.

Meanwhile, Charlotte moves in with Rose while she recovers from her injury. To pass the time, Charlotte gives one-to-one English reading lessons to Anton, an Eastern European economic migrant. Anton is an accountant by trade, working on a building site until his English improves.

Rose is married to the dull, introverted, routine-bound Gerry. Till now, she never expected more than was reasonable from life, but the weekly visits to her house of the exotic, enterprising Anton make her start to wonder if she's been missing out.

So these are the foundations of the story, and the story, itself, is a good one. Lively has thought its outline through clearly, and on every page knows where she's going with it.

However, she doesn't convince me that she is saying anything profound about chance and fate. Every story ever told deals with chance and fate. If Lively is correct that human stories are essentially random and unpredictable, what of interest can they tell us about people's fortunes? If it weren't for Charlotte's injury, Rose wouldn't have met Anton, Stella wouldn't have discovered Jeremy's infidelity, and Marion wouldn't have met George Harrington, the man who brings her business to its knees. Taken to its logical conclusion, Lively's thesis implies that if Charlotte hadn't been mugged, life would have gone on as normal for everybody concerned and there would be no stories to tell.

This doesn't seem to me to be how things actually happen. Like the weather, events in a life may be unpredictable - but they are not random. They are not governed just by circumstance, but also by psychological impulses and expectations that lie deep in each individual, and usually unconsciously. Somehow, and somewhere, they will find expression, but it's never certain when or where. Similarly, the flap of a butterfly's wings may influence the exact time and location of a storm, but the storm will happen with or without it. A small input of energy interacts with billions of other inputs of energy - both big and small - to produce large effects. However, a high-energy phenomenon can't have a single low-energy source - that would contradict the First Law of Thermodynamics.

A man inclined to marital infidelity will always find somebody to be unfaithful with. A woman bored with a predictable and unimaginative husband will, at some point in her life, find herself attracted to somebody more romantic and understanding. In an economic downturn, many people will have financial worries. The immediate and local cause of each life change is unpredictable. The question is whether that unpredictability is inherently interesting, and Lively doesn't persuade me that it is.

For all that, the overambitious scientific paradigm isn't the novel's main weakness. Its defining flaw is that it feels written without enthusiasm or inspiration. Clichés abound. Charlotte received a "nice new shiny degree in English"; her husband Tom "could teach the socks off most of his peers"; Jeremy "fancied [his wife] something rotten". The phrase "sun with his hat on" actually crops up.

The characters have no more depth than those in a soap opera: a stock feckless cad is married to a stock emotionally unstable woman; a stock unambitious housewife with a stock husband on the autistic spectrum falls in love with a stock charismatic economic migrant from Eastern Europe. A stock pompous and wealthy expert on a rather dull period of British history is taken advantage of by a stock young academic on the make.

Given such lacklustre characterisation, the dialogue cannot be anything but banal, and so it is - compounded by the fact that Lively seems to have stopped listening to spoken English around 1966 (who was still using the words "oodles" and "dosh" in 2010?).

The novel has an aura of naivity about it - not the naivity of a young author without experience to draw on, but the regressive naivity of an old author living in a world that has moved on without her. The references to twenty-first-century phenomona like text messages, databases, interior design and villainous bankers seem like relevance box-ticking. Their vagueness and occasional inaccuracy (databases don't "list chronologically") reinforce the impression that Lively has little real interest in the world in which she is obliged to set her story. This sounds unkind, but perhaps she has more in common with her fusty creation Lord Peters than she realises.