The Photograph by Penelope Lively 2003
Lively is among my favorite contemporary authors, and ‘The Photograph’ is a fine example of he great skill. Her ‘Moon Tiger’ was a Booker Prize winner and the book chosen from among the 1980’s Bookers as the best of the decade. This novel is not quite in that league, but it’s a fine read, nonetheless.
The story is told in typical Lively style by six different characters and flips back and forth from the current time to the past. The plot revolves around Kath, a beautiful and apparently care-free lover of life. At the time the book opens, Kath has been dead for 10 years and has largely faded from the day to day life of her husband, Glyn, an academic landscape historian. Kath has also faded from the daily memories of her older sister, Elaine, Elaine’s husband Nick, and their daughter, Polly. Nick’s former business partner, Oliver and Kath’s best friend, Mary Pickard round out the characters who will be torn from their day to day complacent lives and thrown into a maelstrom of emotion by Glyn’s discovery of the eponymous photograph.
This is a novel about the impossibility of truly knowing others. Glyn, Elaine, Nick, Polly, and Oliver all have their own views of Kath and her life, her personality, likes and dislikes, and inner being, but none of them, in retrospect, were true, whatever ‘true’ means. Only Kath’s best friend, Mary and a few relative strangers who Glyn chases down after finding the photograph, have a somewhat clear view of Kath’s inner self as opposed to the one she showed the external world.
The book is about our interior selves, love, marriage, relationships of all kinds (siblings, husband/wife, aunt, friend, co-worker), and how life and time keep moving inexorably forward despite our individual traumas and upheavals. One line in particular spoke to something that I’ve observed several times in my life, i.e. the moment when one’s world is knocked off its axis and everything changes. Lively puts it this way in Glyn’s thoughts: “It is several weeks since his discovery of the photography, the event that has come to seem a defining moment. There was before the photograph, a time of innocence and tranquility, insofar as such a state exists. Now, it is after the photograph, when everything must be seen with the cold eye of disillusion.” These moments occur in every life, though hopefully not leading to disillusion and disaster.
Read ‘The Photograph’ for Lively’s wonderful writing and for a finely wrought story. For me, it was the wonderful experience of a novel that stayed with me during the hours when I wasn’t reading it, filling me with anticipation and eagerness to return to it. Unsettling yes, but totally engaging for certain.
