Heat Wave

Rating:
Summary: Worth reading but...
Review: "Heat Wave" was my first Penelope Lively novel. To be honest it took me some time to finish it. Midway, I'd wish there were more incidents to light up the drab life of one middle-class fiftyish copyeditor (Pauline), her daughter and their family snuggling up in a humdrum English rural outpost. The momentum of the book is sustained by flashbacks of her divorced husband's marital infidelities as she watches her daughter and son-in-law plunge into a similar marital crisis of sorts.

It was not that Lively's prose drags (it is wonderfully crisp and at times, witty) but rather that she is describing the mundane everyday going-ons between a family trio (or quartet, if one takes into account the toddler grandson), which the material was stretched too broadly on the canvas to my taste. Lively's observations of suspicion and growing mistrust within a marital union are the best parts of the book. The twist at the end provides a welcoming relief -- I was just wondering whether the "crisis" would drone on indeterminately. What would please other readers is that Lively's characters are well-drawn, believable figures like you and I. Personally I felt that given the paucity of events, the book might do better as a short story or a novella -- however the quality of Lively's prose would surely invite me to read another of her books.


Rating:
Summary: This Heat Wave Is Chilling
Review: I had not read a Penelope Lively novel in so long, I had forgotten how brilliant a writer she can be. Her talent is very evident in "Heat Wave." A deceptively simple story with very dark undertones, the book is a masterpiece of "novel-as-understatement."

Long-divorced Pauline, a freelance book editor, is spending the summer at her country cottage, World's End, with her daughter Theresa and her family--husband Morris, baby son Luke. Theresa and family occupy one half of the duplex, and Pauline the other. It's an agreeable relationship that allows each household the privacy it needs as well as the companionship, as the entire family gathers for dinner and other outings.

All is seemingly serene in both houses, but as the weather turns hotter in an unusually strong heat wave, the civilized overlay between the adults gradually melts away. For in an almost obscene coincidence, as far as Pauline is concerned, her daughter's husband Morris is engaged in an affair that is destined to break Theresa's heart--the same as Pauline's was broken many years ago by her husband (and Theresa's father) Harry.

The similarities between Morris and Harry are chilling. Both are authors. Both are self-centered, charming, and careless of their women. Both have affairs with young women who are "editorial groupies." As Pauline watches Morris become increasingly involved with Carol, the vacuous girlfriend of his own editor, Jack, she begins to relive (and re-feel) the horrible emotions she encountered as a young wife betrayed by her own cheating husband. The novel moves effortlessly between the present and the past as Pauline watches her own daughter's betrayal and is helpless to stop it. As her emotions churn, so does the weather. Only Luke, the innocent baby, is unaware of the terrible events unfolding all around him, and only Luke is unscathed in the end.

Similar in tone to the works of Joanna Trollope, "Heat Wave" is just about as good as it gets. It is beautifully written, spare and to-the-point, and it ensnares the reader completely in its seemingly simple story of love and loss.

Rating:
Summary: Another winner from Penelope Lively
Review: If you haven't yet discovered this Booker Award-winning British novelist, now's a good time to pick up one of her many books. Moon Tiger is her most well-known novel, but the others deserve equal attention.
In Heat Wave, Lively aims her magnifying glass on Pauline Carter and her married daughter. It starts out as a quiet story, set in a summer cottage in England's bucolic countryside. But with each turn of the page, the tension increases and increases...and increases...until the stunning conclusion just knocks your socks off. At it's base, it's a story of romance. Pauline is editing an allegory of romantic love while watching her daughter, Teresa, struggle with the romantic side of her married life, after realizing that her son-in-law is conducting an affair right under their noses.
About midpoint, you think you know where this book is heading. You would be wrong. Lively, in all her books, is fascinated with the conflict and difference between what is real and what appears on the surface. The serenity of the countryside is offset by the violence of the natural world; the appearance of romance is threatened by cynical adultery; love is marred by jealousy.
Don't miss this book; it's one of her best.

Rating:
Summary: A Summer At World's End
Review: It is a May day at World's End. The beginning of a long, hot summer in Pauline Carter's greystone cottage in England, about two hours outside of London. Pauline is copyediting an allegory of romantic love. Her daughter, Theresa and her husband Maurice, and their son, Luke live in the second half of the cottage.

Maurice is a professor and writer and is busy writing a travel journal of local places. He often invites his editor and his girlfriend down for the weekend to help with each chapter. The issue is Maurice's infatuation with his editor's girlfriend. Oh, what memories this stirs in Pauline's heart. She fears for Theresa, who is so in love with her husband.

Years ago, Pauline fell in love with Harry, a professor and bon vivant. Pauline and Harry married much to everyone's surprise. Harry was known as a lady's man and not the type to marry. And, in due course, Theresa was born to Pauline and Harry. Harry was not much of a father, he loved Theresa but was not involved in her life. Much the same could be said of Maurice and his behavior with Luke. Pauline is so afraid for Theresa, she could sense imminent betrayal, and no one was speaking of it. Pauline was much respected by Maurice, but he offered no excuses nor did he feel he needed to excuse his behavior. This type of thing just happpened.

Penelope Lively has given us an elegant portrayal of fragile family dynamics that have already been greatly affected by adultery. Pauline will do anything to assist her daughter, and she opens her heart to Theresa. She discusses her own life with Theresa's father, and the fact that she should have left him long before she did. However, Theresa is not ready to discuss anything about her husband with Pauline at this time- denial is the name of the game. Pauline must take little steps with her daughter and support her as best she can.

This is once again, a book not to be put down. Penelope Lively has a habit of writing this kind of novel. The conclusion adds a form of the unusual and unexpected. I was not ready for this story to end, but the author knows best. We realize that the anxiety and suspicion we have felt has led to frustration, and now we can look at the situation with clearer eyes. This is Penelope Lively's eleventh novel, and I must read each one. She is an author unlike any other. Each book is better than the last, but how can that be? A witty and intelligent author with every novel a number one in my book! prisrob

Rating:
Summary: A Summer At World's End
Review: It is a May day at World's End. The beginning of a long, hot summer in Pauline Carter's greystone cottage in England, about two hours outside of London. Pauline is copyediting an allegory of romantic love. Her daughter, Theresa and her husband Maurice, and their son, Luke live in the second half of the cottage.

Maurice is a professor and writer and is busy writing a travel journal of local places. He often invites his editor and his girlfriend down for the weekend to help with each chapter. The issue is Maurice's infatuation with his editor's girlfriend. Oh, what memories this stirs in Pauline's heart. She fears for Theresa, who is so in love with her husband.

Years ago, Pauline fell in love with Harry, a professor and bon vivant. Pauline and Harry married much to everyone's surprise. Harry was known as a lady's man and not the type to marry. And, in due course, Theresa was born to Pauline and Harry. Harry was not much of a father, he loved Theresa but was not involved in her life. Much the same could be said of Maurice and his behavior with Luke. Pauline is so afraid for Theresa, she could sense imminent betrayal, and no one was speaking of it. Pauline was much respected by Maurice, but he offered no excuses nor did he feel he needed to excuse his behavior. This type of thing just happpened.

Penelope Lively has given us an elegant portrayal of fragile family dynamics that have already been greatly affected by adultery. Pauline will do anything to assist her daughter, and she opens her heart to Theresa. She discusses her own life with Theresa's father, and the fact that she should have left him long before she did. However, Theresa is not ready to discuss anything about her husband with Pauline at this time- denial is the name of the game. Pauline must take little steps with her daughter and support her as best she can.

This is once again, a book not to be put down. Penelope Lively has a habit of writing this kind of novel. The conclusion adds a form of the unusual and unexpected. I was not ready for this story to end, but the author knows best. We realize that the anxiety and suspicion we have felt has led to frustration, and now we can look at the situation with clearer eyes. This is Penelope Lively's eleventh novel, and I must read each one. She is an author unlike any other. Each book is better than the last, but how can that be? A witty and intelligent author with every novel a number one in my book! prisrob

Rating:
Summary: Potent, capable, slow-moving, tragic, venomous
Review: Lively is a capable professional writer. As she describes some of the scenes you can see past them to the novelist carefully surveying a place, taking notes and returning to proficiently write them up. The novel moves incredibly slowly, as if Lively can't bear to leave any detail overlooked, any hint of shoddiness.

We get such a strong feeling of being inside Pauline, and Pauline is a triumph of authenticity. Lively, like Lodge, has the sense (and brave candour) to write mainly from the perspective of someone she could best understand - someone almost autobiographically like herself. This is not to say this is anything but imaginative fiction, and the events some sort of thinly disguised `tell-all'. Rather the way the central character views herself and the people around her feels very true. Hey, I'm not an introspective middle-aged woman, how would I know, but I suspect I've got a better idea of it after reading this book.

Slow paced, sure, but Lively analytically explores a classic common domestic tragedy: adultery. She doesn't rage about it - these are educated English characters, there's no swearing, slamming doors or gunplay. But don't mistake it - there is an ice-cool venom here too.

There's also despair at impotence: Pauline watches her daughter's innocent contentment being punctured; she understands to several decimal places exactly what is going on - and what will ensue; how awful and unjust it is; and how there is essentially nothing she can do about it.

The novel eschews the satisfying relief of offering the characters (and the readers) the `answer': "Now listen, Teresa, what you need to do right now is...". Rather it more insightfully forces us to endure the ugly tension of living and conversing with someone who has betrayed and is essentially unrepentant and relatively unscathed. While the one deeply hurt through no personal fault is made to feel guilty. The conversations, the situations, the irresolvable tensions are played out in this awful understated but plausible way. Indeed, we get to feel it twice as Lively seamlessly moves between past and present.

I'm still left a bit uncomfortable with Pauline's (Lively's) utter certainty. In her world, much as in that of Passing On, we know precisely what to think of each character. I don't really like having it spelt out for me quite so restrictively, and I'm forced towards suspicion of her implacable judgements. Oh, she's careful to make sure we know this is not simply an `all men are bastards' diatribe: Pauline has genuine affection for Hugh, and shows motherly care for Chris Rogers. But can we just write some folks off the way they are here? Maybe we can: if I was writing an honest novel about my feelings there'd be some irredeemable turds in there, and I'd not give them the time and space Lively gives to Maurice and Harry. But, as I say, this book gives you no room at all to move.

Spoiler warning:

If you've read the book, you know exactly what I'm about to address. If you haven't read the book, show some sense and stop reading this review now.

Blimey - that was not the finish I was expecting, even if I might have wanted it. Very much like Passing On - all the action is crammed into the last chapter, or in this case, the last pages. Blam. That venom thing I was mentioning earlier .... Here's this articulate, utterly civilised, educated, thinking, academic caring older woman, and the moral to the story: "It'd be better for everyone if you were dead." No, this is not hyperbole.

Lively takes the liberty of fiction to apply a solution that does all it can to shake off the complacency of the adulterer.

Rating:
Summary: Unsympathetic Characters failed to draw me in
Review: Set against the backdrop of the English countryside in the hottest summer on record, this novel explores the relationship between a mother and daughter as it develops in a crisis.

Four people, representing three generations of a family, are spending the summer at World's End, a pair of stone farming cottages in a remote cornfield. We have Pauline, Mother and Grandmother, staunchly independent at 55, long since divorced from Theresa's father. Theresa, 29, glowing with marital happiness and maternal contentment. Maurice, Theresa's husband, charming and self-centred at 44. And then there is Luke, Theresa and Maurice's 18-month-old child.

Pauline has known Maurice for years, and doesn't trust him. When she first knew Maurice, he flitted from woman to woman and, like all their friends, Pauline found this a bit of a joke. The idea of Maurice as a son-in-law she finds less amusing.

Theresa is in love with Maurice and Pauline is appalled, afraid for her daughter's vulnerability. When Maurice is unfaithful to Theresa, Pauline is the first to guess. As she watches him interact with his lover and his wife, painful memories are stirred up of her own destructive passion for an unfaithful husband. The author neatly interweaves the present and the past, drawing uncanny parallels between Theresa's current situation and Pauline's past one.

As Pauline sees Theresa's happiness disintegrate into uncertainty and then despair, she is filled with rage. Sensing his mother-in-law's growing hostility towards him, Maurice confronts Pauline, leading to the book's startling climax.

This is a powerful novel that will absorb you completely. You will need to read it at least twice.

Rating:
Summary: chilling
Review: This book is very well written. The characters come fully to life and Ms. Lively examines the emotion of jealousy with a thoroughness that I haven't come across before. Most people who have ever been jealous or insecure in a relationship will be able to relate to Ms. Lively's characters who suffer from jealousy, but Ms. Lively takes the plot a step further and introduces an observer - the mother - who cannot stand to see her daughter cheated on, in part because the mother went through the same agony. This book isn't bashing men or relationships, though; Ms. Lively includes loyal men and healthy relationships in the novel. You wonder, though: is Ms. Lively intellectually compelled by the notion of jealousy, or has she felt it herself to this extent? The novel is balanced between careful observation and heated emotion.