Penelope Lively: 'She remains alive to the world, as any novelist should be.' Photograph: David Levenson/Getty ImagesIt's hard to know how to describe Penelope Lively's new book. At first, I thought she'd joined Diana Athill, Jane Miller and others in sending us a helpful and inquiring dispatch from the realms of old age (Lively is 80, with the result, she tells us, that people in their 60s seem not young exactly, but "nicely mature"). It turns out, though, that Ammonites & Leaping Fish is not precisely this kind of thing. Aches and pains are kept to a minimum; so, too, is the confusing behaviour of the young; death is mentioned hardly at all. The result is less of a memoir than a ledger on which its author has noted some of the objects and memories that, in this final stage of life, continue to tether her to the world that made her.
These days, Lively is costive with her time. She no longer has any desire to pass through airports and will attend only gatherings she is certain to enjoy. As she admits, this is a diminishment of sorts, but it is one she has got used to; there is comfort in the fact that while the body weakens, the mind has "a healthy continuity, and some kind of inbuilt fidelity to itself, a coherence over time". She may no longer be acquisitive, lusting after new clothes or cushions, but she remains alive to the world, as any novelist should be (and, for the record, she still writes very fine novels).
It's perhaps thanks to this particular thriftiness, then, that her book is divided into sections, nifty and economical. First, she maps out her life in brightly coloured snatches of memory: her childhood in Eygpt, the shock of moving to freezing cold Britain after the war, her years as a young mother, squeezing library books into her baby's pushchair. Next, she traces it through the books that fill her house and with which she will not part: the blue Pelicans, the copy of Silas Marner she bought in Alexandria aged 12, a pile of exciting new arrivals. Finally, she measures it by means of six precious objects, "the accretions of a lifetime": an ammonite picked up on a beach; a Jerusalem Bible with a mother-of-pearl cover; a couple of embroidered kettle holders; a model of an ancient Egyptian cat; a sampler from 1788 by a girl called Elizabeth Barker; a pottery sherd.
The final two sections are the most interesting and vital: other people's libraries are always fascinating, and I liked the stories her lifetime's cargo conjured, from a trip to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre with her nanny to a morning spent bird-watching near Adelaide. But they also seemed to me to be the most important, too. Received opinion has it that the old don't need things; we expect them to move into ever smaller rooms, and their possessions, gathered over many years, to disappear to charity shops. As for their books, the sand is running through the hourglass; there is no time for rereading, let alone for discovering a new writer and working one's way through a backlist.
Lively, though, is as attached as ever both to her bookcases and to the items that adorn her mantelpiece and cupboard tops, and I found this incredibly cheering, for all that I also accepted it as a kind of rebuke. All of us dread a disease such as Alzheimer's; we worry, too, that our knuckles will start to resemble ginger roots and our eyes will turn milky and useless. But beyond illness, there are other, more existential anxieties. We fear losing interest. No one wants to think of their last days as something only to be got through, as if the hours were a loaf that needed to be used up, however stale. In this context, Ammonites & Leaping Fish is powerfully consoling. Lively is certainly sagacious, her words careful and freighted. But there is girlishness here, too. Things still catch her eye, her attention. New books. Old stories. Another day for the taking.
