Charlotte Moore

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.

Grace Waterhouse ‘knew in general terms that [she] was marrying a hero’. Grace is the central character of this, Thomas Keneally’s 24th novel. In old age she looks back to the second world war and tries to disentangle the circumstances of her widowhood: her husband Leo’s capture and beheading at the hands of the Japanese. Leo Waterhouse, ‘the most beautiful adult boy’, was ‘a fulfilment of daydreams’. He looked like Errol Flynn and was as adventurous and brave as the characters Flynn played. As a key member of the Independent Reconnaissance Squad, Leo’s job was to spearhead stealth raids on the new Japanese empire in the southern Pacific.

‘Nothing was over. Nothing is ever over.’ Thus muses Humphrey Clark as he travels towards the small windswept northern port of Finsterness, scene of formative childhood holidays. Humphrey, a reclusive marine biologist, is on his way to collect an honorary degree. Much more significantly, at Finsterness he will re-encounter Ailsa Kelman, his childhood companion and later — secretly, briefly — his wife. The idea that ‘nothing is ever over’ provides the momentum for this, Margaret Drabble’s 17th novel. As young adults, Humphrey and Ailsa believed that they had found a perfect, time-cheating happiness together.

Novels narrated in the first person by dysfunctional adolescent boys are no rare thing. Nor is there a yawning gap in the market for novels detailing the squalor and eccentricity and thwarted dreams of life in 20th-century Ireland. I opened Carry Me Down, therefore, with a sense of weariness in advance. But I found that M. J. Hyland doesn’t deal in cliché. The stock ingredients are all there — the school bullies, the drunken uncles, the creepy teacher, the feckless father — but the dialogue is nimble and the observations are acute. Hyland can do humour, horror and pathos all at once, as in an early scene when the show-off father fails to drown a litter of kittens.

‘Competitive and rapacious and amoral and moralising and just plain mad.’ That’s how middle-class American motherhood seemed to Judith Warner when she returned to the ‘pressure cooker’ of Washington DC after having her first child in Paris, where she had enjoyed the readily available support and relaxed attitude to parenting that French mothers apparently take for granted. Perfect Madness arises from Warner’s conversations with American parents in their thirties and forties — educated, able, affluent people who ought to be leading happy and fulfilled lives. Instead, she finds a society fuelled by neurotic anxiety.

William Thornhill, convict, is spending his first night in a mud hut in the penal colony of New South Wales. He’s in Sydney, but this is 1806, and Sydney is little more than a huddle of such huts. Beside him, his wife Sal and their children sleep. Beyond is darkness, the ‘vast fact of the forest’. Above are the unreadable stars of the southern hemisphere, ‘as meaningless as spilt rice’. And then, standing in the entrance, is a naked black man holding a spear. How should Thornhill react? He’s neither a hero nor a villain. In London, he was a member of the underclass; he stole because he couldn’t earn enough to feed his family. Having escaped the gallows, he’s now imprisoned by ‘ten thousand miles of water’.

Frankie Burnaby is 12. She lives on a remote farm in British Columbia, where ‘the clear turbulent Thompson River joins the vaster opaque Fraser’. This novella, first published in 1947, charts the two conflicting emotional currents that, like the rivers of Frankie’s birthplace, struggle for dominance. Any new arrival is exciting in this thinly populated neighbourhood, and when beautiful, mysterious Hetty Dorval moves in, she is the object of intense fascination. Mrs Dorval arrives for no discernible reason and with no immediately discernible husband, just a dour guardian called Mrs Broom, a dog called Sailor, and, it is whispered, an unsavoury past. She is a Jamesian character, tainted by the corruption of the Old World, aloof yet predatory.

This is one of those lovely Persephone reprints with a pearly grey cover and endpapers like the maids’ bedroom curtains in a Victorian country house. The title, too, suggests that one is in for a soothing read. Marghanita Laski provides a complete dramatis personae, to add to the reader’s comfort. If one were to confuse Miss Porteous with Miss Moodie, or Green the ironmonger with Brotherton the stationer, one could just flip back to the beginning and check. Sure enough, this is a traditionally organised novel of English village life.

Autism is in the air. Newspaper articles, television programmes and new books abound. It was not always thus; when Liam Nolan’s son, also called Liam, was diagnosed in the mid-Sixties, the term was almost unheard of by the general public. The condition was only identified at all in 1943. During Liam’s childhood, his behaviour was profoundly misunderstood. This book consists of the diary Liam senior kept for one week in August 1968, with an updated introduction and epilogue. ‘Liamy’ was ten. He was home for a holiday; he had already lived in an institution for some time, and still does.

‘Cora sits at the bay window, writing, in a fat manuscript book with a lock, about a man she once married … and wishing in the nicest possible way that he was dead.’ At the beginning of this novel, Cora, former madame of the Hotel de Dream, Jacksonville, Florida, finds herself alone and lonely in Surrey, England, where she has no social, financial, legal or emotional status. Her lawful husband, the one she wants dead, is too concerned about his reputation to grant her a divorce. Her ‘real’, common-law husband is Stephen Crane, an American adventurer, acclaimed author of The Red Badge of Courage. He is the love of Cora’s life, but his wanderlust has driven him to report the war in Cuba, beyond her reach.

'Bold, glamorous, sexy, unrepentant,' promises the jacket. The heroines of Fay Weldon's short stories 'offer a quite unique view of the world as they face their trials without fear or trepidation'. It's not the done thing to start a review by quoting the blurb, but this one unwittingly helps to establish why these stories ought to be good, and why, on the whole, they are not. Most stick to the 'twist in the tail' formula bequeathed to short-story writers by Saki and too rarely discarded since. A faked Early Christian cross works healing miracles, a dowdy book illustrator turns the tables on a smooth-talking con-man, a china-smashing poltergeist shows a displaced Jewish girl the way back to her roots. Whatever expectations are raised, you can guarantee they'll be overturned.