The good ended happily

The most difficult task for a novelist is to engage the reader in an account of happiness. In Consequences, Penelope Lively manages to pull this off. She examines happiness as ‘a state of being that lifts you above ordinary existence, that pervades every moment, that confers immunity’. This ‘sublime content’ is achieved by Lorna, the first of three generations of women; the consequences of Lorna’s idyll shape the lives of her daughter Molly and grand-daughter Ruth.
There is another set of consequences, however; Lorna’s beloved husband Matt is killed in Crete in 1941; the consequences of loss are intertwined with those of fulfilled love for these succeeding generations. The damage sends fault lines snaking down through the decades. The novel assesses the most eventful century in Western history through the lives of these three middle-class Englishwomen; the political informs the personal, but in Lively’s experienced hands social history is never didactic.
Lively