Metamorphosis

Posted by Verity on October 15, 2024 in Book review | 2 comments

Penelope Lively, Penguin 2022

Many avid readers of fiction express dissatisfaction with short stories: they’re too insubstantial, nothing to get your teeth into, not enough time to get to know the characters, etc.

None of these charges could be levelled at Penelope Lively, though. Her 2022 collection Metamorphosis is her own selection of her short stories , drawn from an output that spans more than forty years (alongside her children’s books and full-length novels). The title is a wonderfully succinct one, reflecting anything from the subtle changes in attitude and perception that can arise from a casual conversation to more dramatic transformations.

And Metamorphosis is deeply satisfying, short-story doubters. Lively excels at social gatherings such as weddings, and in ‘The First Wife’ (1997) the deluded husband who dumped his first wife because she was getting old finds himself falling in love with her again at a niece’s wedding. Surely a discreet affair with her would do them both good? Her response to such a proposal makes you want to cheer: ‘I wonder what makes you think I would wish to?’, followed by a couple of withering tips – on the unsuitability of his hair dye and ‘Also, the puce shirt is unwise on a man of your age and figure,’…

Though not formally a companion piece, ‘The Third Wife’ offers similar scope for schadenfreude. A conman specialising in serial marriages to rich women whose wealth he syphons off before vanishing indulgently goes along with his latest wife’s wish to view a new house – he won’t be with her much longer – and gets more than he bargained for.

No one does comedy of manners like Lively, but she is not afraid to venture out of this genre. ‘The Purple Swap Hen’ is narrated by one of the birds depicted in the frescoes at Pompeii. Here the transformation is from living, but mute, creature scratching round the gardens of a wine merchant’s villa to immortal image, fixed in the time before the eruption, yet now speaking to us from down the centuries.

Likewise, ‘The Butterfly and the Tine of Paint’ is a comic exploration of how chaos theory works. There is no probing of anyone’s interior world, just a dispassionate (and omniscient) observer’s tracking of the sequence of events unspooling from the careless spillage of a tin of paint to … (no spoilers here!)

The most devasting story is undoubtedly ‘In Olden Times’, a chillingly well-rendered depiction of what, to quote Theresa May ‘just about managing entails. Tellingly, we never discover our heroine’s name. She tends to others that have identities, but she herself remains ‘she’. Every minute of her week is accounted for: she works nights and her husband during the day and the children are passed like batons between them. Her headspace is as crowded as her time: ‘She did sums in her head continuously – as she drove, as she peeled potatoes, as she brushed her hair or cleaned her teeth. The mortgage plus the insurance plus the electricity the gas the telephone the holiday money. Tim’s salary plus my pay.’ All it takes is a bad day … Most working mothers will know exactly where ‘she’ is coming from.

Even if you don’t think you like short stories, I urge you to give this collection a chance. It represents a marvellous blend of consistency in the quality of the writing and the acuteness of the observation, and of unpredictability in the range of the content.