Product Description

Destinies can change in an instant. In 1935, privileged misfit Lorna meets the love of her life. Falling for a pennyless and bohemian artist, Matt, she abandons her stuffy Kensington existence in London and moves to a rustic cottage in Somerset. A baby, Molly, is born, but the coming war takes Matt – and Lorna’s dreams – away … Lorna’s decisions and their unforeseeable consequences come to shape the stories first of her daughter, Molly, and then her granddaughter, Ruth. Consequences tells of three generations of women in their own twentieth-century times united by their shared experiences of love, pain, fate and happiness …

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #68557 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Review
A flawlessly constructed mini-epic that will delight (Daily Telegraph )

Nourishing fare from a fine writer on sparkling form (Daily Mail )

Thoughtful and beautifully written (Woman and Home )

From the Back Cover
`A flawlessly constructed mini-epic that will delight' Sunday Telegraph

`Sensuous and beautiful prose...proof that the best novelists change and grow' The Times

`Elegant, meticulous, sensitively portrayed' Independent

`Nourishing fare from a fine writer on sparkling form' Daily Mail

About the Author
Penelope Lively has written many prize-winning novels for adults and children. They include: The Road To Lichfield, According To Mark, Moon Tiger (which won the 1987 Booker Prize), Heat Wave, Spiderweb, The Photograph and Making It Up. Penelope Lively lives in London.

Customer Reviews

Beautifully paced
I disagree with O Moore on this. I found this book quite charming. Yes, there is more detail of the initial characters, yes later characters slip away quietly, but I don't think this is meant to be a detailed saga. What this book does beautifully is capture moments in the lives of a trio of women, of small, often accidental events, and consequences. At some time in our lives many of us look around and ask "How did we get here?". There are the small events on which our lives turn. Many of us know little of our parents' and grandparents' lives - this book is about an exploration which, I suspect, many of us wish we could do; to answer the question "What consequences formed me."

Starts well, but trails off to a lacklustre ending- disappointing
The story of three generations of women, Consequences begins in 1936 when upper class Lorna rebels against her parents' world of coming out balls and good marriages to marry grammar school boy and artist Matt. Their happiness is inevitably cut short by the war, when Matt is killed leaving Lorna alone with their daughter Molly. This first part of the book is lovely- beautifully written and very touching, perhaps partly because you can see Matt's death coming from the start. The characters are drawn in detail, and given the opportunity to be more than cardboard cutouts plonked in to move the story on and prove Lively's point. Lorna's death, when it comes, is shocking and you really feel the jolt of a life cut short too soon.
The same cannot quite be said for the adult Molly. Her rebellion seems a little pointless and her refusal to marry the publisher (whose name I have already forgotten) slightly adolescent. But we plough on with her, to the point where she is suddenly killed off with a phone call and never mentioned again except in passing. This seems a more than dismissive way of disposing of a main character, however bored Lively may have got of her.
But that is sadly nothing compared to the tedious vehicle for the final part of the novel, Molly's daughter Ruth. Ruth doesn't really seem to have a personality other than "disillusioned 30-something mother"- which is hardly original. Her husband is also a stereotype- this time the soulless careerist- so much so that leaving him and embarking on a Shirley Valentine-style Cretan tryst seems fairly conventional and dutiful rather than an act of rebellion. And to cap it all, the steamy one night stand that is supposed to launch Ruth's new life of independence is bizarrely anything but; her lover treats her more like a confused child, and gives the impression that he is going through the motions out of kindness rather than lust. Maybe this part is more subtle than I am giving it credit for, and that was Lively's intention. And then Ruth's real love story is shoe-horned neatly in before the end.
The novel as a whole leaps around from decade to decade with little warning or explanation, leaving you to work out where you are from little contextual clues. Unfortunately these clues are often misplaced- pizza boxes and Oddbins bags in the late 70s? Google in the mid 90s?- and these little details, which shouldn't matter, start to grate because they are the only crumbs you are thrown. This added to the overwhelming feeling of deja vu I had reading this- it was like the stories I used to write at school, starting out with big ambitions but tailing off half way through when the writer runs out of steam and ties it all off in a hurry before rushing off to do something more interesting. Very disappointing from such a well-known and usually reliable author.

Repetitious and pointless
This is the first (and now last) Penelope Lively novel I have read. I found just as the story finally gets going the main characters are killed off. These are replaced with another one who also dies and then with a third (who is really boring). The book just doesn't flow in my opinion, it jumps from one bit to the next, it is disjointed and disappointing with several boring bits that nearly stopped me completing it. There are some potentially interesting characters (e.g. Lucas or Simon) but they are never developed. For me this didn't have a beginning, a middle and an end, more a beginning, a muddle and an end.