'How It All Began' by Penelope Lively - 4.5 stars

[Algernon (Darth Anyan)]

It started with a mugging... like a stone thrown into a lake, the ripples keep expanding and affecting more lives.

Seventy-seven years old Charlotte is mugged on a London street and breaks her hip. She is forced to move in with her daughter Rose for recovery. Rose works as private secretary for renowned historian Sir Henry Peters but, because she cannot accompany him for a speech in Manchester, his niece Marion Clark is forced to go instead. Henry makes a mess of his presentation and decides to publish something spectacular in order to regain his self-confidence, while Marion, a self-employed interior designer, meets a wealthy hedge fund manager at the official lunch. Because Marion is away from home, she sends a phone message to her casual lover Jeremy Dalton, an antique dealer, that is discovered by his wife Stella, who promptly asks for a divorce. The complications expand from this starting point into radical changes in the lives of these people not directly involved in the original mugging. The balance each of the actors has somehow found in their lives is revealed to be an illusion, but sometimes the push is needed for better clarity or for a change of priorities.

Penelope Lively proposes chaos theory applied to the field to human interactions: a minor event that leads to unforeseen consequences, to change. Thornton Wilder in his 1927 Pulitzer winner: The Bridge of San Luis Rey, investigates several lives in order to discover if accident or fate led them to be in a certain place at a certain moment in time. Penelope Lively looks forward from the point of inflection, to see how one single event can change the lives of people six or less degrees of separation from the focal point.

‘There is an analogy, I understand, with a process that interests the physicists – chaos theory. The proposition that apparently random phenomena have underlying order – a very small perturbation can make things happen differently from the way they would have happened if the small disturbance had not been there. A butterfly in the Amazon forest flaps its wings and provokes a tornado in Texas.’

Charlotte is the anchor of the story for me, not only the inflection point for the people around her. Her strength and her resilience is in sharp contrast with her fragile bones, her mind is sharp and her observations about life, memory and change are always pertinent and clearly expressed. Yet her main charm comes from Charlotte’s relationship with language, with the written word.

This is my second book by Penelope Lively, and the excellent impression left by Moon Tiger is confirmed now. Several themes are familiar from her earlier effort: the focus on history [ History is a slippery business; the past is not a constant, but a landscape that mutates according to argument and opinion. ], the careful mapping of the ways of the heart, the sharp knife the author uses to cut through the pretensions and the dissimulations we deploy around our souls, the tender renderings of doomed romance.
There is a clarity, a directness in Penelope Lively that appeals strongly to me. Much as I like the intellectual dazzle of an A. S. Byatt or Iris Murdoch, I find myself more deeply immersed in the lives of these ordinary people going about their ordinary lives. To find beauty and meaning, walking hand in hand with pain and loneliness, in their stories is probably a greater achievement than to explore the careers of the movers and shakers of history and public life.

[Robin P]

I like this author a lot. I also started with Moon Tiger. I have enjoyed many of her books, and yes, they are about ordinary people with ordinary lives.

[Algernon (Darth Anyan)]

I hope I can fit more from her list on my future reading lists, but this is a fan rating from me. I can relate to a couple of 1 star reviews that I found after posting mine, and I'm glad I did not let them influence my enjoyment of the story.

[Joanne]

Your review has convinced me to try this author. Your comment about reviews confirms my commitment to not look at reviews before I read a book.

[Algernon (Darth Anyan)]

Joanne wrote: "Your review has convinced me to try this author. Your comment about reviews confirms my commitment to not look at reviews before I read a book."

Maybe Moon Tiger is a better entry point than this story

[Joanne]

That is what I am thinking too

[Joy D]

I really enjoyed this book, too.

I agree that Moon Tiger is a better starting point, JoAnne, and I think you would like it.