The Road To Lichfield

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The old man said suddenly, ‘mr Fielding runs that school. He’s the headmaster. You know, that school “‘ He looked from one to the other of them for help, his voice trailing away. The story is told me an omniscient narrator, but occasionally slips into the first person. At its centre is Annie, who travels from her home in Berkshire to the home in Dr Johnson's home town of Lichfield to visit her dying father. Annie is married to the dull but reliable Don, and has a more flamboyant elder brother Graham who works as a television producer and has never married. At her father's bedside she meets David, a teacher who was her father's fishing companion, and an affair ensues. Parallel to this narrative, Annie discovers that her father has been giving money regularly to the daughter of a former mistress she knew nothing about. Annie is a historian, and another plot concerns the fate of an old but dilapidated farmhouse in her Berkshire village and the failed campaign to save it from developers. He is quite comfortable. We can see to that. But he will go downhill from now on, I’m afraid.” The Matron paused and went on, delicately. “I think that if you feel – if you wanted to make arrangements about his house, that kind of thing, it might be wise.” No, no, father,” she laughed. “I wasn’t born then. Don’t make me feel older than I am. It would have been about 1939 – the last war, not the one before.” Anne’s relationships with her husband, brother, lover and children are never played for melodrama, but lead her to reflect on her past.

She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award. She was appointed CBE in the 2001 New Year’s Honours List, and DBE in 2012. You sound as though he’s done you an injury. He was trying to save you trouble, presumably, and preserve his own independence.” she got up and adjusted the rug that was slipping from his knees, and held his hand for a moment. The fingers clutched hers. -- From "The Road to Lichfield." 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. A flawless novel about the role of the past by one of Britain’s best.”” Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)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 for intense emotion forgotten since her early days with Don, who for many years has been utterly absorbed in his career. There are lots of funny moments here: the cottage campaigners are all newcomers to the village. They invite one elderly resident but complain she isn’t “up to date,” though she has lived the history they are preserving on their walls in the form of highly polished old farm implements. Meanwhile the developer knows much more about the cottage’s history, because he is a local man and his own grandparents once lived there.

Oh, do be quiet, she thought, you don’t understand at all, and when he ploughed on with, “Hadn’t you better get hold of Graham?’ she had snapped, “Look, do leave that to me,” and the disagreement might have blossomed and run its proper course except that reasonable people do not quarrel at such a time. Or, indeed, much at all. 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.”And he was not, she could see, taking in a word. He smiled and blinked with the half-comprehension of the deaf (yes, he was a lot deafer last time we were up, that I did notice). Start again, more slowly, more clearly; what could be more tiresome when you are old and ill than someone, albeit someone you love, yapping at you things that you cannot understand. And yes, that’s better, now he’s remembered who Judy is, now we’re getting somewhere.

It is hard to describe the impact of this book in a few sentences. It is slow in developing, and I was not sure where it was headed, but once I finished, I felt like I “got it.” This book examines a person’s history, of the passage of time, and memories, and how these elements impact one’s perceptions of life. The tone is quiet and contemplative. The characters are well developed and easy to picture. 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. I did not enjoy The Road to Lichfield quite as well. The writing is still exceptional, and it's better than most of what's out there. Ms. Lively does not waste a reader's time--she always offers you the meat, not the fat, and, when you hit the bone marrow, your teeth chatter, you start to shudder, and sometimes you can't quite stop. Before and after visiting hours, Anne stays in her father's house in a village outside Lichfield. She sorts through his papers and putters around in his garden. She also falls in love with one of his neighbors. The affair reawakens in her a capacityHer father, propped high on pillows that seemed to devour him, their plumpness engulfing his thin face and body, turned his head as they came in, peering.