Customer Reviews

Blood Ties

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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.

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.

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.

Excellent buy with a great reading experience...amazing work by aurhor Jennifer Lash.
Passed on to my daughter and to read in her book club.

Blood Ties is a real find--I wouldn't have known about it if her children (the Fiennes brothers plus producer sister) hadn't appeared on Charlie Rose to celebrate it. She has the abillity to reach depths that aren't usually covered in mainstream writing, with exquisite description and attention to images that hover and haunt. The poignant pathetic lives of the main characters are entered into with an expert scalpel, again by way of pictures that describe their state of being ( Janet McTeer would do a great Violet). There is a Lawrentian intensity throughout, but Lash's characters' passion is twisted inward. I don't quite buy the last minute redemption of Spencer and possibly Violet; it takes a great deal more to be capable of love in the long term, so maybe Spencer had to go out in a blaze of crumpled metal.

Blood Ties is the wrenching story of the deadly, reverberating consequences of parents' inability to love their own offspring. Violet, a proud, educated Irish woman, enters into an affectionless matrimony with the simpleton Cecil (who also happens to be a closeted homosexual), and together they produce a son. Reared by a nanny and severely shunned by his parents, Lumsden, the son, grows into a scheming, self-loathing caricature, who himself conceives a son, Spencer, during a loveless liasion with Dolly, who is yet another product of parental incompetence.

Spencer, eventually relegated to the care of his indifferent grandfather and misanthropic grandmother, is no menacing mirror of his father, but looms awkward and tormented nonetheless. By chance, however, he is rescued from 'utter dereliction'(to pilfer an expression from the book). In a love-filled union, he fathers a son who comes to receive all the affection so curiously and cruelly denied the previous two generat! ions of boys. He is the beacon of a brighter future for this traumatized tribe.

Blood Ties is harrowingly beautiful, if a bit uncomfortably precise for today's post-Freudian readership. It is lyrically lucid and infused with an invigorating maternal zeal. Its life-altering potential is perilously high; anyone considering rearing children of their own will find it difficult to ignore its near-supplicating message that you only have one chance to get it right.

The Fiennes Bunch used their considerable star power to get this work published posthumously. Their mum wrote this while fighting breast cancer, a battle she lost soon after completing Blood Ties. I don't want to ruin anything so I'll just keep it general. Jini's writing is opulent and sumptuous. Her descriptions, whether addressing the plot, story line or character imagery, have a decadent and extravagant quality and I mean that in a good way. Reading her work is like discovering jewels embedded in the floor of a stony brook, crystal toned colors sparkle and jump out at you from within the muck. Loved it...competent and engaging story and characters that break your heart. I am so impressed.
I think Jini Lash had some sort of precognitive vision of the man her own real-life son, Ralph Fiennes, would eventually turn out to be. The character of Lumsden, a conning, womanizing, self-obsessed and deceitful son, bears an uncanny resemblance to her real-life eldest son, actor Ralph Fiennes. The way Jini portrays Lumsden, right down to his manipulative and cruel exploitation of women, gigantic ears, huge veins on his hands and windmill arms physically describes Ralph Fiennes spot on...even his spacey blue eyes are the same. Lash even gives Lumsden a romantic interest coincidently named Francesca, paralleling Ralph Fiennes real-life relationship with Francesca Annis, whom Fiennes cheated on from 2003 till 2006 with a $500 a night Romanian prostitute. This must have been purely clairvoyant on the author's part since the actual association between Fiennes and Annis began in 1995, several years after Lash's death. To this day, Ralph Fiennes exploitive and spiteful treatment of woman continually lands him in the tabloids. It is a good thing Jini did not live to see the extent of his cold, calculating, malicious conduct.
The fact of the author's own sociopath son must have frightened her immensely and she obviously felt compelled, at the end of her days, to explore the fear and loathing associated with raising such a monster, a child you simply cannot love. It's heartbreaking, really.
One other thing I found strange is that Lash, who, like I said, wrote this piece while dying from breast cancer, describes every female character's breasts. It's kind of odd.