The Road To Lichfield

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Yes. Anne.” How could illness make a person appear literally to have shrunk? His eyes were filmy – how much could he see? At a conservative estimate, I should think you’re about twenty miles out, with that method. Here, let me.” for intense emotion forgotten since her early days with Don, who for many years has been utterly absorbed in his career. Anne lives a village life in Cuxing, when she’s not visiting her father’s village, Starbridge, via the road to Litchfield, and here we find the largely comic character of Sandra, a middle class woman who hasn’t a job, and has endless local projects on the go. help that Anne is given to a great deal of abstract reflection on the nature of memory, experience, history and time, very little of which provokes answering thought or reflection in the reader. "The present does alter the past,"

The Road to Lichfield is the Booker Prize shortlisted first novel by Penelope Lively, published as a Penguin Essential for the first time on the 40th anniversary of its publication. Yes,” said David Fielding. “Yes, I’m afraid he is.” And he laid his hand for an instant on her arm, removing it almost at once so that it was only later, at another time, that she felt his touch, in the way in which recollection can sometimes be more real than experience itself. She had said to Don, later “It’s just like him. Just like him to be getting ill and not tell anyone and then up and dump himself in some nursing-home, with everything arranged and sorted out. It’s only three months since we were there. He seemed perfectly all right then.” Despite the death at its center, "The Road to Lichfield" is a pleasant book -- too pleasant, perhaps. We never feel any sense of dismay (or wonder) in Anne at her own newly discovered capacity for duplicity and betrayal, nor does she seem particularlyProtagonist Anne Linton lives in Cuxing with her husband and two children. She travels regularly to Lichfield, where her widowed father is in a nursing home. During these trips, Anne learns one of her father’s secrets, which changes her perception of her past, and finds an unexpected relationship, which changes her perception of her present (specifically, her marriage). She loses her job as a history teacher and becomes involved in a local effort to save a historically significant cottage.

Passing On") it features grown-up siblings, houses and unruly sexuality. But like "Moon Tiger" -- and, again, like quite a few of the author's later works -- it is also concerned with time and memory, the Her father was out of bed again, sitting up in the armchair, wedged in with pillows, a rug across his knees. . . . Beyond the closed door, in the passages, the comings and goings of the place, footsteps and voices, seemed also to abandon the neat room I've become an avid Penelope Lively fan and I dived into this one. It was like diving into cool translucent water on a hot day, so lucid the prose, so calm and unhurried the plot, so careful the nudges towards a theme. This is known territory: middle-class, middle-life, middle-England. Sounds tedious and parochial? What saves it is Lively's understanding of what I'm going to be daring (#pretentious) and call the 'psychic infrastructure' of her chosen subject. Benign smiles, Anne thought, at least mine is. Benign understanding smiles, as to a child. He shouldn’t be talked of like this, as if he weren’t here, or was too stupid to understand. And David Fielding, seeming to share her feelings, pulled up a chair and sat by the bed. He talked to her father, waiting patiently through his laboured responses, and making his own remarks clear and careful. Anne thought: what a nice man, why did father never mention him I wonder, but he always liked to shut off bits of his life, even when mother was alive. She always complained she never knew his friends.A searing study of the peculiar state of being in love . . . there are few contemporary novelists to match her on this subject' Sunday Telegraph Read more Details on her arm, removing it almost at once so that it was only later, at another time, that she felt his touch, in the way in which recollection can sometimes be more real than experience itself." And here is Anne, miserably separated The Matron smoothed her hand across a card in front of her, hesitated a moment, “Parkinson’s, of course, but that can be controlled nowadays – there is this new drug. His heart is weak. Incontinence.” She looked across the desk at Anne. “Old age, in the end. The body running down, you know.” This is a quiet story of a women who realizes that you can never really know someone and that other's don't really know her.

Ann Linton leaves her family in Berkshire and sets up camp in her father's house when he is taken into a nursing home in distant Lichfield. As she shares his last weeks she meets David Fielding, and the love they share brings her feelings into sharp focus. Deeply felt, beautifully controlled, The Road to Lichfield is a subtle exploration of memory and identity, of chance and consequence, of the intricate weave of generations across a past never fully known, and a future never fully anticipated.

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I read this in my own parents’ new house, full of old family things, where I keep discovering familiar furniture and object and remembering where they were in the old house, and in my grandparents’ houses before that. So the novel’s themes of the past and how it can be inscribed in places, and how it isn’t as permanent or unchanging as we might imagine really spoke to me.