Published in 2003, this is by Penelope Lively (now 93...). She also wrote Moon Tiger, which I liked very much.

It was a good read. It opens with the accidental discovery, by Glyn, a not particularly likeable academic-cum-TV-personality, of a picture of his dead wife, Kath. She's holding hands with Nick, the husband of her sister, Elaine. And it's not innocent-looking kum-ba-yah hand-holding. It's suspicious-looking, implying-something hand-holding -- a conclusion supported by the instruction on the envelope ("DON'T OPEN -- DESTROY"). The photograph was taken by Oliver, Nick's former business partner. Elaine is in it, too, as is a woman called Mary, who was a friend of Kath's.

Glyn's little world crumbles. He's a landscape historian, and now the ground on which he stands has been rocked as though by an earthquake. But his research instinct immediately kicks in, and digging through this particular piece of his own past becomes an all-consuming priority. What was going on? Was there anyone else? What did he miss? How can he find out?

Layer by layer, we learn more about those who are still alive. And floating in the background, always, unable to speak for herself but more and more intensively present, is Kath. Beautiful, graceful, easy-going Kath, whose carefree exterior hid (we eventually learn) a world of pain.



Glyn is self-absorbed, and his work sucked up so much of his attention and energy that there was little left over for his wife.

Elaine is the big sister, less dramatically affected than Kath by the early death of their mother, and not particularly inclined to be supportive. Elaine is another workaholic, very driven and single-minded in the pursuit of her landscape gardening career. She and Nick have one child, Polly (now grown-up). Family responsibilities and a successful career mean there was never much time for her sister, relations with whom were in any case clouded by rivalry.

Glyn (very unwisely, we feel) shows the offending photo to Elaine. She has been getting increasingly frustrated with Nick (one of those ineffectual dreamers who never quite manage to realize anything), and this is the final straw. She throws him out.

Through the voices of the different characters, Lively constructs piece by piece a composite picture of Kath and her world. And there's a definite page-turning quality about that. Oliver (quiet, tolerant, observant) comes across well. As does Polly (who had a really good relationship with Kath). The others seem, in their different ways, quite callous. Nevertheless, we definitely want to find out what actually happened to Kath, and what brought about this somewhat incongruous liaison with Nick. We want to solve the puzzle.


Glyn, "sitting on the side of a Dorset hill..."

***

And this is where you should stop reading if you don't want to know the end...

Glyn ferrets out various people who turn out to be red herrings (rather than unmasking themselves as additional lovers, they just surround Kath with an even more positive and sympathetic glow).

Glyn eventually concludes that this thing with Nick was definitely a one-off, but by then it has stopped being the point. What Glyn's research reveals to him is that he knew incredibly little about his wife...

Towards the end, it's confirmed to the reader that Kath's death was due to suicide. We had suspected this, as no indication of any accident or disease had been given, and people seem to skirt around the topic of her death as though it's delicate in some way. We also learn that both Glyn and Elaine failed to respond to Kath's phone calls on the day she ended her life.

But all the explanations for the increasing unhappiness that led to the suicide come right at the end from Mary -- whose role becomes that of a dea ex machina, as this Kirkus review puts it. I think that's a bit of a structural weakness.

At least, though, it provides an answer to our puzzle. We've noted plenty of distress signals from Kath, which her most important support people (her husband and her sister) were never available to pick up on. Not available on the crunch day when she killed herself, and not available before that either. Mary knew not only that Kath was increasingly uncomfortable in her beautiful skin -- was prone to carefully concealed depression, in fact -- but also that a second miscarriage had shown her that the children she longed for were likely to be an impossibility. Glyn didn't know anything about that. Neither did Elaine. They didn't know about the first, pre-Glyn, miscarriage either.

So she fulfils an important function, but I still felt Mary had been pulled out of a hat somehow.

I also had questions about Kath's persona. Why, actually, did she marry Glyn? She tells Mary she married him because he loved her. But what does that mean? What evidence did she have? As far as we can see, Glyn really only seemed to love his career. And why the relationship with Nick? Mary says Kath very much regretted that; it was a mistake. But what was the motivation? Was she looking for someone who was the polar opposite of work-obsessed Nick? Or was she choosing him simply because he was Elaine's? Either way, the two seem so far apart that I didn't quite find the liaison convincing.


Glyn surveys "the eroded ramparts of an Iron Age hill fort", and as he's in Dorset, it could well be Maiden Castle. Which we could see from our house in Dorchester. Which we frequently walked on. Yet apparently photographed only once and very badly...

What Lively does well, though, is make Kath's presence grow and grow, and become darker and darker. Fairly early in the story, Elaine reflects that there are now many different Kaths: "She is fragmented now. The dead don't go; they just slip into other people's heads." By the time we finish, however, we feel that she's going to haunt the key characters in much more uncomfortable ways. Alfred Hickling comments: "The Photograph sets out to cover familiar ground [for Lively], yet as it gains momentum it becomes astonishingly bleak. Centring on the absence of someone who seems 'least likely to be dead', the book is chilled by the baffling capriciousness of death."

The really important life point that comes across loud and clear in The Photograph is that we need to LISTEN to each other. Glyn, in particular, is an expert at not picking up on cries for help. At one point Kath tells him she wishes she were one of his students. When he asks her why, she replies: "Oh... just, they know someone I don't." To us it's obvious that she feels she'd get more of his time and attention if she were his student. But he doesn't get it, and doesn't pursue the matter.

I guess The Photograph humbles us. It shows us once again how very little we know about each other. When we -- accidentally -- come into possession of an unknown piece of information, it may change our perspective completely. Hearing about the miscarriage, Elaine, for example, thinks: "Kath's non-children. Because of them -- because of these beings who never were -- there is a new flavor to much that was said, much that was done. When Kath speaks now, Elaine hears a new note in her voice. Kath says the same things, but she says them in a new way." I've had experiences within my own family history where I've found out things that have given me a completely different perspective on someone's actions or character. The problem is, the finding out often comes way too late for us to actually do anything about it. We're so limited as human beings. We find it so difficult to juggle our lives and all the people who are in them. But it's good, every now and then, to be reminded of the consequences of failing to try a bit harder.