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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Almost Ghosts,
By John Gough "John Gough - Deakin University" (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Stitch in Time (Essential Modern Classics) (Paperback)
Penelope Lively has become a prize-winning adult novelist and writer.Initially she was a prize-winning children's author. My doctoral thesis in 1985 explored all of Lively's writings up to just before her Booker Prize winner "Moon Tiger". My thesis argued that there was close continuity in style and theme across Lively's children's and adult fiction. In fact an early novel "Going Back" is largely ABOUT children in World War II, but the central emotional point of the book is what happened to them as adults. Moreover, "Going Back" (like Richard Adams' "Watership Down") has been variously published as a CHILDREN'S book and also as an ADULT book. Most unusual. And a fine novel! Sometimes, for some authors, the literary genre -- children's literature, or adult novel -- blurs I titled my Lively thesis "Haunted Landscapes". Just so. Lively's first book (based on her final undergraduate Honours -- summa cum laude -- work in History) was a non-fiction discussion of the way almost the whole geographical face of Britain has been shaped by human occupation across millennia. With suitable historical training, it becomes easy to "read" the shape of the land and see the history. (How thrilled I was to visit England in 1996, and spot the tell-tale ridges of an ancient hill fort outside Blewbury, south of Oxford!) This sense of the visible past remaining within and interacting with the living present informs almost the whole of Lively's fiction. "A Stitch in Time" is one of Lively's masterpieces for children, alongside "The House in Norham Gardens". What is it about? A rather ordinary family goes to have a holiday at Lyme Regis -- famous for its cliffs and ancient fossils -- on the south coast of England. Adults will know this as the town of John Fowles' "The French Lieutenant's Woman", and the film. The family stays in a house which is usually, out of holiday season, occupied by an old lady. The daughter in the family is at the cusp between childhood and young adulthood. She is also a solitary person within the family -- an only-child -- and prone to talking to inanimate objects, such as petrol pumps, or animals, such as a cat (but a real cat, not a Cheshire cat). As the family settles into the house, the girl slowly begins to tune into the "spirit" of the house. This is NOT a ghost story. But it almost is. Maria hears a dog barking: but there is no dog. She finds that someone has been playing on the swing in the backyard: but there is no one in the backyard. Slowly Maria begins to suspect that a catastrophe occurred to someone in the house, many years earlier. Just as slowly Maria begins to suspect that a version of that catastrophe is threatening to occur. Clues. Hints. Guesses. Premonitions. This is far to good a book to spoil. But it has an uncanny-disaster-threat feeling that is similar to the classic Hollywood ghost-across-time romance "Portrait of Jenny", based on Robert Nathan's haunting novel. Another comparison is with Philippa Pearce's classic children's novel "Tom's Midnight Garden": a strange, haunting time-slip romance. It also has aspects of the surrealism of Russell Hoban's remarkable adult novel "Kleizeit", where the existentially angst-filled central character (literally, "Little Time") is able to talk with Memory, and Word, and Death -- and God! And in some ways Maria is just as much in her own jumbled Wonderland of the present natural world and the memories of the lived in landscape as was Lewis Carroll's "Alice". The almost writhing fecundity of plant-life in the vigorous heat of summer induces a psychological crisis comparable to Jean-Paul Sartre's remarkable philosophical novel "Nausea". And the title? Hanging in the old house is an old cross-stitch (needle-point) "sampler". It contains some of the first clues to the mystery of the old house and what happened to those who lived in it. This is a quiet, slow, absorbing, and profoundly rewarding book. But then, that's the kind of book Penelope Lively writes! Interestingly, Maria's growth as a character resembles that of Fern Arable, in E.B. White's "Charlotte's Web". And Joan G. Robinson, who may be best known for her delightful stories of "Teddy Robinson", also wrote comparable stories of almost-haunted children, such as "When Marnie Was There", and "The House in the Square". Lively is in fine company! John Gough -- Deakin University -- jugh@deakin.edu.au
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Amusing, wonderfully written,
By
This review is from: A Stitch in Time: 2 (Hardcover)
The story is about a girl, Maria, on a summer holiday with her parents. (I don't remember this place she went to, I read this some time ago) At this place she went to for her holiday, she met a boy who is like Maria in a way he enjoys his privacy, but he also is comfortable with his hectic life with his family. The other part of the story is that she finds out about a girl, Harriet, who lived (I'm not sure about this) about 100 years ago, who started an elaborate sampler... but never finished it. And Maria wants to find out why.
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