Ammonites and Leaping Fish: a life in time

hat do ammonites and leaping fish have in common? In this particular instance, it is not a marine connection which brings them together, but rather the arbitrary juxtaposition of two objects, fossil and pottery, in a life. Penelope Lively uses these personal memorabilia as a trigger for discussions about time – the deep time of paleontology and the more recent human past – and how past time relates to the present. This is a theme which has preoccupied her much in her fiction; she has talked extensively about it in interviews and articles, and a good deal of this material resurfaces here. Now she is over 80, she is clear that the accumulation of years gives her a privileged perspective, “one of the few advantages of writing fiction in old age is that you have been there, done it all, experienced every decade”. We are told that old age is “the new demographic”: this generation is more numerous, more healthy, more economically powerful than ever before, yet still subject to the ills that accompany declining years; more hopefully, the old are also the repositories of memory, collective and private.

Lively is fascinated by history and archaeology. Memory represents the working of these two forces at an individual level, and the chapter devoted to it produces some of the book’s better insights. Like a novelist with her new creation, we try to impose an architectonic on what might otherwise appear “random, inconsequential, capricious”; in other words, human beings experience memory as essentially teleological. She quotes Brodsky, Nabokov, William James admiringly; she digresses on why history should be taught in school: otherwise, “you cannot see yourself as part of a narrative”. But her journey down memory lane also allows her, it seems, a certain indulgence; the vignettes from her own history flash past us “in no pattern I can see, no particular revelation”. It is strangely unsatisfying, trivial even, running counter to the desire to give structure to life which she evokes elsewhere.

Odder still that the chapter entitled “Life and Times” suffers from the opposite tendency: a rather queasy interface between her private story and events which have marked the world stage. The most successful account dates the furthest back, and has been the subject of her memoir, Oleander, Jacaranda. As a child she was in Egypt while the Libyan desert war raged, and her parents knew many in the military and diplomatic “set”; this she conveys quite atmospherically. But relating the shenanigans surrounding the Suez and Cuba crises as a backdrop to one’s own political development just comes across as self-aggrandisement, while the report of her visit to the Soviet Union in 1984 is embarrassingly naive when one considers the copious terrifying witnesses to the excesses of that regime.

We are back on firmer territory with “Reading and Writing”. Lively tells us of the “books which made her”. Such maps of writers’ imaginative minds are always intriguing precisely because they can show us how other authors’ original material is transmogrified into something new, rich and strange. But a riff on why carbohydrates may contribute to myopia reads disconcertingly like popular science, and other such divagations pepper the book.

So we end with “Six Things”, including the eponymous ammonites and leaping fish. The longest section, noticeably, is devoted to a small but exquisitely bound New Testament, bought for her in Jerusalem by her governess when Lively was nine. It becomes the occasion for talk of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and its history; St Helena’s early forays into archaeology; the Crusades; the language of the King James Bible, a favourite topic with agnostics; and her late husband’s attitude to religious faith. This list mirrors the text as a whole: a curious mixture of the significant and the forgettable; the private and the public; the arbitrary and the archetypal.

Hilary Davies