THE PHOTOGRAPH BY PENELOPE LIVELY
Readers’ Notes for Penelope Lively’s The Photograph
Who wrote this novel?
Penelope Lively was born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1933. When she was 12, her parents divorced and she returned to England: ‘When I got to this country – a very traumatised and muddled adolescent – one of the first things I remember being able to take an abstract interest in was the past, noticing the English landscape and things like churches – the complexities of the visible past.’ She went on to study Modern History at Oxford University. Her many novels include Moon Tiger (1987), which won the Booker Prize for Fiction, and Treasures of Time (1979). Her many books for children include A Stitch in Time (1976), which won the Whitbread Children’s Book Award. She has written two volumes of autobiography about her childhood and her most recent work, Making It Up (2005), is a sequence of stories looking back on her adult life, imagining where alternative paths might have taken her.
Author photo: © Jerry Bauer
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What is the novel and what is it about?
 The Photograph (Penguin, 2003) is a novel of about 250 pages. Like all Penelope Lively’s work, its true subject is the relationship between the past and memory. The novel shows how an everyday object can unexpectedly shed revealing light on the past, and in so doing, splinter the certainties of the present. The novel’s central focus is what happens when Glyn Peters, a self-centred, charismatic landscape historian with ‘a five-star capacity for obsession’, discovers a photograph he has never seen before while searching through a little-used cupboard at home. It shows his wife, Kath, holding hands with another man. Glyn experiences ‘the most appalling stomach-churning, head-spinning cauldron of emotion. Rage is the top-note – beneath that a seethe of jealousy and humiliation, the whole primed with some kind of furious drive and energy.’ As Glyn tries to discover ‘Where? When? Who?’, he disrupts lives and begins to perceive Kath in a new and clear way. The novel also explores emotional neglect within marriage, the curse of physical beauty, and experiences of loss and remembrance.
What kind of read is it?
A sad and haunting one. We accompany Glyn on his painful journey to find out, now he has lost her, what kind of person his wife really was. At the same time, it is like reading a mystery as we are drawn on to discover what happened to Kath ‘Back then. When she. When.’ And when we do discover the truth, it is tragic. The world of The Photograph is sombre. And because the story is narrated by different characters (different chapters take different viewpoints), we feel as far as possible the troubled and tangled emotions of the characters as they remember Kath and reassess their own lives. Penelope Lively brings the characters’ thoughts alive by using short sentences and everyday language. The dialogue is sharp, and there are some tellingly funny moments, for example, when Nick, Kath’s former lover, congratulates himself on his skill at ‘marital peacekeeping’, just as his wife prepares to tell him to move out.
When we’ve read it, how could we structure our discussion?
• ‘The dead don’t go; they just slip into other people’s heads.’ Kath is a strong presence in the novel although she is never there. What do you think Kath was like? What do you think she wanted most in life? How clearly do you see her?
• ‘If a girl is very, very pretty then that’s going to put a particular spin on everything that happens to her. She’s privileged, but there’s a sense in which it’s a curse as well. She’s directed by her looks.’ To what extent do you think Kath’s physical beauty was a tragic flaw?
• ‘There is an agenda; it is smouldering in his pocket.’ How do you react to Glyn’s decision to discover the story behind the photograph? And to the manner in which he goes about it?
• Glyn tells us his business is ‘the interpretation of vanished landscapes’. How does knowing about Glyn’s work affect your feelings towards him? How do you feel towards him at the end of the novel?
• ‘It was a very coming and going sort of marriage.’ How would you describe Kath and Glyn’s marriage? Why do you think they married each other?
• Which of Kath’s relationships do you think made her happiest and why? What do you think Kath and Elaine’s relationship was like during their childhood? How would you characterise Kath’s romantic relationships?
• ‘… the vision of Kath sparked by the kestrel is due to episodic memory, which is autobiographical and essential to a person’s knowledge of their own identity. Without it we are untethered, we are souls in purgatory. Those glimmering episodes connect us with ourselves, they confirm our passage through life.’ What are your views on the place and purpose of memory in our lives?
• Which of the narrative voices rang truest for you? What, in terms of style, made that viewpoint so convincing?
Reading group tip
You might like to further your discussion about narrative voices by reading short sections of The Photograph aloud. For example, members could select and read aloud extracts from Glyn’s narration that they find particularly realistic and revealing about him.
If we enjoyed this, what other writing might appeal to us?
In Penelope Lively’s novel Moon Tiger, Claudia Hampton, a historian, reflects on her troubled life as she lies dying, and in particular on her memories of a love affair with a young soldier during the Second World War. Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived is a moving, critically acclaimed autobiography of Penelope Lively’s childhood in Egypt in the 1930s and 1940s. It is also an investigation into childhood perception, in which the author uses herself and her memories as an insight into how children see and know. A House Unlocked continues the story of Penelope Lively’s childhood in England. She recalls the events, customs and people that together paint a slowly shifting picture of English country life in the 20th century. It is at once personal and social – a diary of the house and its occupants, and a memoir of the historical landscape.
Click here for a full list of Penelope's Lively's books on this site.
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