West country matters
Teresa Waugh
SPIDERWEB by Penelope Lively Viking, .f, pp. 218 To read a novel which precisely describes the place where you live is strange indeed, and this reviewer has spent some time wondering whether Penelope Lively's Spiderweb would have found more or less favour with her had it been all about Thirsk, Baldersby St James, Ainderby Quernhow and Skipton-on-Swale rather than Taunton and Williton, Watchet, Monksilver and Bishops Lydeard, not to mention the bastardised village of Kingston Florey where our heroine, Stella, settles in retirement and in half of which your reviewer lives. It is a moot point, in any case, whether long lists of place names give local colour or not. By way of handing out helpful hints to the newly arrived Stel- la, Lively's characters seem to refer unnat- urally often to the villages around them, although Stella should have been warned that the excellent bakery in Williton closed down several years ago.
Unfortunately, Stella is not an easy char- acter to warm to. She is a recently retired social anthropologist who has spent large parts of her life doing fieldwork in mud huts in Egypt, in Malta and in the Orkneys, and much of the novel is devoted to flash- backs to these episodes and to her time at Oxford where she made friends with the highly unlikely, conventionally frivolous Nadine. How that girl ever got into Oxford is a miracle. Stella is a fiercely indepen- dent, intelligent and courageous woman who has had her share of love affairs with- out ever wanting to marry — so far so good — but the pity of it is that she appears to have no sense of humour and to be unbear- ably smug. Thus, when Richard, Nadine's dull widower, takes her to a restaurant to thank her for addressing some local histori- cal society, she thinks, 'A terrible waste of money . . . His privilege . . I have always been rather too ascetic . . . which is just as well or I could never have done what I've done . . . I was ever thus.' She deserves to get a bowl of soup thrown in her face.
Having spent most of her life studying other societies, rather as a spider watches flies, Stella, most annoyingly, settles down to study the population of west Somerset as though she were not now part of it — a population which she sees as being divided by ancestry and what she chooses to call `happenstance'. Happenstance plays a large part in Stella's thinking as she philosophis- es over the spiderweb of human inter- action, of one person's tenuous but existing link to another, and over her belief that the future is implicit in the present, which is clearly demonstrated by the fact of the pre- sent being a product of the past.
But enough of all this; there are two out- standing aspects to Spiderweb which leave us in no doubt that Lively is still up there in front with the best of them. Down the lane next to Stella's cottage, in a horrid bunga- low surrounded by an agricultural slum, lives the Hiscox family. Hiscox is an agri- cultural contractor, dominated by a wife who drives furiously up and down the lane in her red car, and there are two morose teenage sons. The creation of this family is a masterpiece. Every one of them is a tri- umph and it is they who provide the second outstanding aspect, suspense. Their brood- ing presence hangs like a sword of Damo- cles over the novel and most particularly over the head of our heroine. Smug she may be, but God preserve her from what looks like coming her way. In the end, Lively lets Stella off the hook.
Happenstance brought the Hiscox family to west Somerset. No such monsters could be the fruits of our soft, rolling hills and rich red earth. Lively is right there.
Previous page
