Product Description

Booker-Prize winning author Penelope Lively is that rare writer who goes from strength to strength in book after perfectly assured book. In Passing On, she applies her distinctive insight and consummate artistry to the subtle story of a domineering and manipulative mother's legacy to her children. With their mother's death, Helen and Edward, both middle-aged and both unmarried, are left to face the ramifications of their mother's hold on their lives for all of these years. Helen and Edward slowly learn to accept what has been lost in their own lives and embrace what can yet be retrieved. "The richest and most rewarding of her novels." - The Washington Post Book World

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #64119 in Books
• Published on: 1999-03-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Greystones is a moldy, drafty house of no great distinction located in the equally nondescript English town of Spaxton. The domineering and cantankerous Dorothy Glover has finally passed away, leaving her middle-aged progeny, Helen and Edward, to examine their lives, both past and future. It's a subtle plot and one that does well with Lively's ( The Road to Lichfield ) gently assured style. By revealing developments through small details--the discarded dishrags that mark the beginning of a relationship and the glimpse of a watch that signals its end--she delicately delineates the impact of love, scandal and turmoil. On the rare occasion when Lively gives reign to sweeping statements, as when the dramatic Louise comments on motherhood ("At the moments you wish you were shot of the whole thing you know perfectly well that it's precisely because you couldn't endure to be without it, now you know about it, that you've got to go through all this"), her writing doesn't quite ring true. But such instances are rare in this consistently engrossing tale.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In Lively's eighth novel, the death of their domineering mother sends Helen, an unmarried 52-year-old part-time librarian, and her younger bachelor brother Edward, a schoolteacher, on introspective journeys. The finely wrought perceptions of individuals in inevitably skewed relationships that Lively drew in Pack of Cards (LJ 4/1/89) and her Booker Prize-winning novel, Moon Tiger ( LJ 3/15/88) are again in evidence. Years of repression and stasis in the moldering home in the Cotswolds now yield to the unfolding of an intense, private inner drama of memory and desire for both Helen and Edward. The novel subtly gathers force as these quite unpretentious but compelling characters experience crises and move from complacency to knowledge and a less-than-happy conclusion. Lively's great talent as a writer of adult fiction is reconfirmed.
- Susanna Bartmann Pathak, Univ. of Tennessee, Knoxville
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Back Cover
Booker Prize-winning author Penelope Lively is that rare writer who goes from strength to strength in book after perfectly assured book. In Passing On, she applies her distinctive insight and consummate artistry to the subtle story of a domineering and manipulative mother's legacy to her children. With their mother's death, Helen and Edward, both middle-aged and both unmarried, are left to face the ramifications of their mother's hold on their lives for all of these years. Helen and Edward slowly learn to accept what has been lost in their own lives and embrace what can yet be retrieved.

"The richest and most rewarding of her novels."-Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World

"This quiet novel will delight Penelope Lively's devoted readers, of whom the present writer is one. Passing On is, for my money, her most attractive novel to date."-Anita Brookner, The Spectator

"Passing On feels like real life drawn to scale, where private dreams dwarf the daily routine. . . . An expert at articulating character through place . . . Lively has a gift for invention and control. . . . The slow unfolding of secrets gives the book tension without melodrama."-Roz Spafford, San Francisco Chronicle

"Her command of narrative is fluent and self-assured, the mark of a novelist completely at ease with her craft."-Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"Engrossing . . . Lively writes in a deceptively simple style passed down from nineteenth-century novelist Jane Austen via Barbara Pym to a new generation of British women authors. . . . The writing is sophisticated, with witty observations of people and their foibles. And the characters' narrow lives shed light on much larger issues of personal-and global-concern."-Judith Rosen, Boston Sunday Herald

"Sly subtleties, keen observations and raw emotional power . . . Remarkably fuses the comic and the tragic in a graceful, fluid narrative."-Sarah Gold, Newsday

Customer Reviews

The Sins of the Mother
Helen and Edward Glover have just buried their mother, Dorothy. Dorothy, the manipulative and domineering woman that she was, raised two meek children who did her bidding and one child, Suzanne who escaped her, but understood the life her siblings had led. Penelope Lively has once again written a wonderfully literate book of characters, showing their foibles, yet the allowing the mysteries of life to unfold in real drama.

Helen and Edward live in a small town near the edge of Cotswold. Helen is 52 and a part-time librarian. Edward is 49 and a teacher at a girl's school. It appears that both of them have not made much of their life, under the eye of their mother who had a need to keep them under her thumb, while allowing them to think they were not worthy of much.

They live in a large, unkempt home Greystones, and have a piece of land known as the Britches, which Edward keeps as an environmentally safe place. After their mother dies, she stays with them in picture and soul. It takes a while before either of them can talk about her. It is while Helen is cleaning her mother's room and then cleaning the entire house that she finds the "nasty" things her mother had done to keep her two children at home. In the meanwhile, Helen has blossomed and has become good friends their solicitor, Giles, She falls in love with this wily man and feels like a school girl again.

Edward, in the meantime becomes more reserved and into himself. An incident occurs that rocks both of Helen's and Edward's lives. As it happens, Phil, their sister, Suzanne's son has moved in with them because he and his parents do not see eye to eye. Both Helen and Edward continue their daily life and seem to make a difference in Phil's life. Has Dorothy's death freed these two characters to pursue their own lives?

Both Helen and Edward appear to be accepting what has been lost in their lives because of their mother and moving on to a new and better life. Their next door neighbor wants their land and will use every wily trick he can muster. Are Helen and Edward smart enough to rebuff this man? What would new found money do to their life? Penelope Lively has introduced us to two characters that move our hearts and souls. She has been able to develop their personalities to such a degree that we can begin to understand how Dorothy, the mother has taken over their very thought and desires. How to break free of this tragic creature?
Can something be done, be retrieved of their lives. A poignant and personal look inside the minds and hearts of two people we come to care about. Penelope Lively has done it again! prisrob

A very good read
I am amazed that this book is out of print, because it is a very entertaining and readable novel by a writer who consistently provides a good read. I recently came upon an English paperback copy of it in an English-language bookstore in Paris, and I found it to be one of this writer's better novels. It concerns the lives of a sister and brother after the death of their old dragon of a mother, with whom they had been living for most of their lives (they are both middle-aged). There are problems with the house and some adjacent property, as well as problems in new and old relationships, and Helen, the sister and the main character, realizes that the mother was even more awful that she had thought, and painfully also comes to realize her own connivance in the mother's viciousness and in her attempt to keep Helen and her brother under her thumb (even after death). Helen is a likable and admirable character, and one gets a good sense of what modern life is like in an English village.

Powerful and Poignant
Only an author of Penelope Lively's talent could present a story of two diffident, almost invisibly shy middle-aged people and make the reader not only care about them, but care deeply.

On the surface, nothing whatsoever happens in the very quiet country lives of Helen and Edward, a brother and sister caught in a time warp of old-fashioned Victorianism smack in the middle of the teeming 80s (when this book was written). Having lost their domineering old battle-axe of a mother as the book begins, both brother and sister are having trouble banishing her critical and strident voice from each of their minds.

As they go about their days--Helen as a part-time librarian, Edward as a schoolteacher--the reader senses that something horrific is about to happen. The very stillness of their lives portends something awful. It is the genius of the author that can portray that feeling without in any way discussing it or warning the reader...it's just there.

And when it happens, lives are shattered, and the reader simply must weep.

This is a tour de force. A brilliant piece of writing. And something that cannot be put down and forgotten.