Penelope Lively
Spiderweb
London: Penguin, 1999. Pp. 218. $18.99
Reviewed by Nora Foster Stovel

Novels chronicling the parallel lives of groups of female college friends have proliferated in recent decades, ever since Mary McCarthy's The Group in 1963. Spiderweb, the latest novel by Lively, an Egyptian-born British author of numerous novels and story collections for both children and adults and winner of the Booker Prize for Moon Tiger (1987), is an intriguing variation on that theme. Opening with Stella Brentwood's recent retirement from her Midlands university teaching job, it chronicles the beginning of her new life as a lady of leisure. An anthropologist who has specialized in kinship networks (hence the novel's title) and traced lineage patterns in farflung exotic locations, such as the Nile Delta, a Maltese village, and the Orkney Islands, Stella has just settled in Somerset, where she turns her well-trained eye on a typical English village: "The invisible swam into sight, like the hidden shapes in a child's magic drawing book" (70). Lively is a superb evoker of place, and this situation affords her a fine opportunity to turn her powers of description on the English countryside, as Stella observes: "A scatter of colour-washed cottages in a cup of pitching fields and woodland.... A small ancient-looking chapel of perfect simplicity perched above a hedgebank that sparkled with flowers. Sometimes it was difficult to take this landscape seriously - to remember that it had evolved from centuries of agricultural endeavour and blithe environmental disregard. At points it could look like a carefully designed scenic effect, probably for the sort of calender pressed upon customers by local garages" (149).

Living in Somerset prompts a renewal of an old friendship with fellow anthropologist Judith Cromer, who lives in nearby Bristol in an uneasy partnership with the possessive Mary Binns. "Stella was finding that she lived now on two planes. There were all the familiar references of her own past and present, tapped into daily by way of visitors such as Judith, by letters and phone calls. But there was also this new backcloth, this social and physical landscape of which she was now an element. She eyed it with interest, and saw that she in turn was watched" (70).

Lively's fiction frequently involves a study of the influence of the past on the present, and this novel plays back and forth between the present at the end of the twentieth century and its past in the fifties, when Stella was up at Oxford along with her best friend, Nadine. While Stella, a tall, angular redhead, was already a confirmed bluestocking, who wished to pursue an independent professional career and remain single in order to reserve herself for some grand passion, Nadine, a trim brunette, planned to marry a professional man, have two children, and live in an affluent suburb. Nadine accomplished exactly that, marrying a civil servant, raising two lovely daughters, and living in a beautiful villa in a desirable neighbourhood. What Nadine had not planned on, however, is the cancer that kills her shortly before Stella's retirement.

Prompted by an encouraging letter from Nadine's widowed husband, Richard Faraday, who has retired to the Somerset countryside, Stella decides to settle nearby. She becomes a home-owner for the first time in her heretofore nomadic life. In an effort to become part of the Somerset scene, she even acquires a dog, a springer spaniel named Bracken, who is utterly devoted and adoring. But she has not reckoned with the Hiscoxes, a dysfunctional family composed of a termagant mother, passive father, elderly grandmother, and two confused youths with a penchant for setting fires and killing animals. The present-day narrative counterpoints their and Stella's perceptions. The convergence of the twain proves catastophic.

Richard Faraday asks Stella, as a special favour, to speak to the local history society, of which he is a member, about her anthropological career. "She had decided to talk to them about the baffling nature of cultural identity, basing the discussion around the proposal that interpretation is distorted by expectations" (78). Preparing this paper inspires her to recall her field work and to perceive finally how her own identity as a single young woman has coloured her observations. "All her life, wherever she was, she had thought of herself as a bird of passage... in the field she had been in the ultimate state of trasience- the invisible observer, the visitor from outer space. The people in whom she was interested were there, in that place - she herself was both there and crucially apart. If she lived permanently anywhere, it was in a landscape of the mind" (175).

Stella has had the grand passion that she envisioned in her college days - more than one, in fact: with the peripatetic journalist Dan Mitchell in Malta and the rooted Orkney farmer Alan Scarth - but she has resisted marriage or any kind of permanent commitment. Now Nadine seems to have willed a connection between her husband and her best friend. And Judith Comer is obviously uneasy with her female partner. The question is: will Stella be true to her life plan, or will it prove time for a change? The possibilities are limitless. And Lively's delicate touch for subtlely conveying the social network of relationships and the nuances of intellectual differences, as well as portraying farflung places and times in graceful prose, is well represented in Spiderweb.