Year Marked

In this first and sweetest section of the novel we are told about the rustic idyll that the young couple create for themselves, notwithstanding the oil lamps, candles and absence of running water, in a tiny country cottage from where they can see the distant shore of Wales. But the idyllic hideaway is soon overrun with the effects of the war in Europe 8220;People talked of the war as though it were a condition: a chronic condition8221; and eventually Matt is also called to action.

After Matt8217;s death, Lorna and her little daughter Molly move back to London where Matt8217;s publisher and friend, Lucas, gives Lorna a job. Lorna and Lucas later get married, but death and loss are never far away. Molly, growing up in a greatly changed country, works in a library and gets into a relationship with an older and wealthy married man. But she is a child not only of the nineteen-sixties, but of a strong-willed mother. And so, when she discovers that she is pregnant, she decides not to marry her wealthy lover but to go ahead and have the baby on her own.

Ruth, the result of this union, finds that she doesn8217;t have many 8220;official8221; relatives 8212; but then she decides that she doesn8217;t mind having 8220;a peculiar family8221;. A middle-aged Molly, now an arts administrator who sometimes falls asleep at poetry readings, meets a poet and decides to get married for the first time in her life. Ruth herself, working as a journalist, marries an ambitious colleague only to find herself pushing a double buggy and grappling with the many demands of motherhood. The marriage doesn8217;t last, but the motherhood does; although the children spend time with their father, they live with their mother in terms of the divorce, and their parents negotiate dates and times by e-mail. It is now the year 2000.

Consequences is a warm, engaging story about relationships and generations, about memory, loss and endurance. And the first part of the novel, about the early married life of Lorna and Matt, is lovely enough to return to it many times. Yet, this is not one among the best of Lively8217;s work. There has always been something about her imperfect and all-too-human characters, but one problem with Consequences is that everyone is so very nice about everything 8212; so much so that the nastiest character is Ruth8217;s careerist husband. And he8217;s nasty mainly because he thinks art can be written about as a commodity, and because he steals toys from his children for story ideas about the market for children8217;s stuff. Other than this new-age brute, it is only the circumstances that are evil 8212; war, death, AIDS, cuts in arts funding8230; Another weakness is that the novel moves too fast, with three generations telling their stories within three hundred pages. Decisions are made so quickly that we get little sense of conflicts 8212; or, indeed, their difficult consequences.