Book Reviews - Review 56

Claudia Hampton, a elderly, successful popular historian, is dying in hospital. She tells her nurses of her plan to write a history of the world, but what she comes up with, we are led to assume, is this memoir of her own life, incorporating reflections on human history and fate.

The book is not technically orignal, but is none the worse for that. Hampton's reminiscences flit from one part of her life to another, with detail gradually filled in about her relationships with, among others, her brother, daughter, on-off lover and, over and above these, the one man, Tom, with whom she found, working as a journalist in Egypt during the Second World War, all too brief romantic fulfilment.

Lively is a skilled wordsmith, her descriptions of the beauty and the horror of wartime Egypt being particularly vivid. This is a novel of reflection rather than of ideas, as such: ideas are extrapolated from a life, rather than governing the novel's structure. The life and character of Hampton are convincingly portrayed, and Lively's view of human relationships is observant and subtle. On balance, although life-affirming, this is a sad book, acknowledging the impossibility of life or love ever matching up to our ideals for more than brief periods, and contemplating head-on the unfairness of fate in deciding to whom it distributes suffering and blessings.

I found this a very moving and stimulating novel; also, in places, it's highly erotic. It won the Booker Prize in 1987.