Road to Lichfield Book

I've lavished praise on Penelope Lively in the past but I can't think of anything positive to say about this. Anne is married to Don, an unimaginative man who likes to get his money's worth. It's a thoroughly bland marriage. I was more interested in this marriage than in anything else in this book but Lively skips over it as if it's somehow normal for two people who barely have anything in common to live with each other for years on end. Maybe it's an indication of how much things have changed that Lively seems to regard this kind of marriage as a normal state of affairs without need of commentary. When Anne's father is diagnosed with dementia she discovers he has been giving money to a mysterious female every month. Turns out she is the daughter of a dead woman her father had a long standing affair with. Meanwhile Anne herself begins an affair with a neighbour of her father. There's plenty of potential in such a ground plan. However, this is a novel that stumbles along without a purpose, like getting into a car without any destination in mind. Every relationship in this novel is almost unbelievably bland. The affair must be the blandest account of adultery I've ever read. And the focus is all over the place. For some reason we get an extensive account of Anne's brother's life - a bachelor who favours young girls over women. Eventually we will discover his life is no less bland than Anne's. The upshot of the mysterious woman is bland as well. A supposedly pivotal moment in the novel is when Anne joins a committee to save from demolition the oldest building in her village. But Lively makes this building wholly unattractive so we have little concern for its survival. Finally she gives it some skeletons in the closet as if to further ram home the point that everything we idealise is a sham. This is a novel that seems to posit middle class mediocrity as the best we can hope for. Yuk is all I can say.