Blood Ties [Paperback]

Jennifer Lash (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 19, 1998

Violet Farr regretted that at her son's birth she had insisted that he be named after her father, Lumsden. With her passion for control, Violet was even maddened by the boy's ugly unruly ears. Aged seven, Lumsden unnerved his mother by exclaiming, 'You've got tigers in your teeth mummy.'

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Perhaps it is the sad fact that Lash was dying as she wrote it that makes her sixth and last book so thunderously powerful. Set in Tipperary, Ireland, and London, this tragic family saga shimmers with a keen wisdom and resonates vividly with the details of gentrified life in the countryside and with the contrast of the natural world to so-called "respectable living." Violet Farr, on the rebound from a failed love affair, stubbornly enters into an inappropriate marriage. Despite the conception of a child, there is no love between the couple, and Violet's megalomania inevitably precludes a healthy mother-child bond. The shunned son, Lumsden, grows up to become an amoral schemer and a con artist. He is handsome, fascinating and dangerous, so self-centered that we don't wonder when he rejects his own offspring, ill-conceived with lost soul Dolly. That child, Spencer, burdened with insane genes and an alcoholic mother, is the most pathetic of the family lineage. Only Spencer's own offspring, two generations away from the soul-crushing negativity of Violet, will emerge whole and uninjured, suggesting that healing and redemption can be achieved. This story encompasses a broad range of emotional extremes, class issues, times and locations. The world Lash creates is delivered forcefully into the reader's imagination in stark, resonant language. Whether showing the shadowy heart of a vicious, destructive matriarch or describing the pristine terrors of a disturbed child, Lash evokes the full spectrum of human grace, folly and evil with dazzling perspicacity. One of the most impressive contemporary novels to tackle that dubious, cliche-prone realm of "the dysfunctional family," this is a moving, memorable work, which leaves us mourning the early loss of the gifted writer who died in 1993. (Sept.) FYI: Lash was the mother of actor Ralph Fiennes.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

That love makes things bloom while its lack blights may seem a cliche, but the late Lash's treatment of the subject is anything but. Haughty, strait-laced Violet Farr rejects her son (from her marriage to hapless Cecil, a closeted homosexual) and is even less fond of her illegitimate grandson, named Spencer for the tavern where his mother worked. But she lives to see the happiness of her great-grandson, redeemed by a love she cannot give. Upon the heels of a probable suicide attempt, the unhappy Spencer is adopted into the heart of a generous and caring family, who save his life and his sanity. Spencer's son, also illegitimate and born posthumously to the daughter of the family, is cherished. This almost unbearably painful tale was rejected by the British publisher of Lash's earlier novels. Her son, actor Ralph Fiennes, campaigned for its acceptance, and we should be glad he did. The writing is lush and the characters, especially Violet and Spencer, fully realized. For all libraries with readers of serious fiction.?Judith Kicinski, Sarah Lawrence Coll. Lib., Bronxville, NY
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury (February 19, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0747535043
• ISBN-13: 978-0747535041
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,356,742 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant!, September 20, 1999

By 

R. Witte (Croton-on-Hudson, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blood Ties (Paperback)

I am endlessly amazed at the many unexpected surprises life delivers, and "BLOOD TIES" is one such surprise. Having recently read a small item in ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY regarding the campaign being made by Ms. Lash's children to promote this, her last book, particularly by her sons, actors Ralph and Joseph Fiennes, I was intrigued. At first a deeply disturbing story of parental neglect, at its end, "BLOOD TIES" is a story of love and redemption. Ms. Lash's prose is beautiful and lush, and the story, compelling. This is a novel that will stay with me for some time, and one that deserves widespread recognition.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars (A mother's) love makes the world go round., August 16, 2001

By 

Alekos (Cancun, Quintana Roo Mexico) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Blood Ties (Hardcover)

This splendidly crafted work of fiction covers five generations of an Irish family and its focus is on the emotional lameness that can result from a lack of parental nurturing.

Despite violating every known convention of what schoolteachers call the mechanics of writing, Jennifer Lash offers us a magnificent novel of the effects of alienation and indifference on human development. Many think the opposite of love is hate, but this is not the case. The opposite of love is indifference. And this is Violet Farr's problem: she is totally indifferent to anything that involves affect, sentiment or love.

Worshipping the memory of her own dead father and married to a marginally conscious, sexually repressed gay man, Violet is rich, intelligent, cultured and extremely competent in dealing with things and ideas. She has an innate talent for managing things but is inept in her dealings with other humans at the level of emotion, especially as regards needs, apirations, individual interests, fears.

Her son, conceived only because her husband manages to fantasize about a delivery boy during coitus, soon turns into an unclean, foulmouthed drunk and gets shipped off to school in England, where he goes from bad to worse, finally begetting a child on a bimbo barmaid whose mother has died in an insane asylum.

Violet's grandson lives with his slovenly mother for several years but then gets trunked off to Ireland to live with Grandma, who is still emotionally unable to deal with the situation of having a young child around. After a particularly unfortunate incident involving a dead chicken she packs him off back to England as she had done with his father.

The boy goes to school for a while, lives in foster homes, and then takes to the streets and lives a life of meanness and horror in contact with unruly, violent young vagrants. He is rescued from it all by Winifred and her daughter, who nurse him back to health and stability and give him the human kindness he has been denied most of his life. After making love (but it is genuine love) to Winifred's daughter and inseminating her, he is killed in a bike accident.

The child of this liaison has the chance to bring a kind of redemption to Violet and her loveless existence.

The author has a special gift for rich characterization, and even her language changes as she moves from one personage to another describing them and their activities in individually appropriate terms. Only occasionally does she fall into stereotyping, as with the know-it-all priests and the wise, faithful family retainers.

This book can be recommended for anyone interested in human development or parent-child relations. It would also do nicely for those fascinated with the Irish literary tradition, of which it is a noteworth representative.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Blood Ties by Jennifer Lash, January 27, 2000

By 

Patricia Hoad (U.S.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Blood Ties (Paperback)

Blood Ties, by Jennifer Lash. This is Ms. Lash's final book and it is emotionally harrowing. She has exposed, and skillfully, the substance of not caring and its consequences down the generations. There is a terrible price to be paid. I found the story heartbreaking and the acts of alienation hard to forgive. Equally skillfully, Lash looks at what it means to love, the work of the imagination in loving and its power to heal. She is a writer driven by ideas but her work is specific and her people impossible to forget. I'm so exceedingly sorry that she isn't here to write more.