The House in Norham Gardens

There is an invisible character who haunts a great deal of Penelope Lively’s work. Perhaps it’s going too far to call him (her? it?) a character; it’s both less than a fully rounded human character, and more, because more powerful, and implacable, and invulnerable.

That invisible presence is time. Penelope Lively is the laureate of time; there’s more awareness of the presence of the past in her work, both for children and for adults, than in that of almost any other novelist. And the setting for this book is a perfect example: a large old house in a quiet road in an ancient city, a house filled not only with relics of the past of those who have lived there, but also with trophies of expeditions to a much deeper past: to the Stone Age of New Guinea.

The book has an extraordinary atmosphere: everything is poised, hushed, almost breathless, between one state and another. Clare, the girl at the centre of the story, is poised between several kinds of time, several different worlds. She is fourteen years old, no longer a child, and not yet a woman. She’s content to wait. Her beloved Aunt Susan and Aunt Anne, who have been her family ever since the death of her parents, are poised too - fully in command of their faculties, if not of their increasingly frail limbs, they are at a point of stillness, continually interested in the world and all it contains, but aware that the time is coming quite soon when they must leave it. That day will come, but not yet.

The household is poised in other ways too; it’s on the point of balance between getting into debt and getting by. The smallest amounts of money make all the difference. It’s poised in a social sense: the untidy, scholarly, intellectual world of the aunts is balanced by Maureen, the lodger, and Mrs Hedges, who cleans and cooks. And the story is poised at the still point of the year, the dead of winter.

I’m making it sound as if nothing happens. But that isn’t the case at all. The story is full of incident, and full of character too; everyone is clearly delineated, and what’s more they’re interesting people, whom it would be a pleasure to know.

And through it all stalks that invisible presence, time. Among the relics and trophies of the past in the attics and boxrooms of the house in Norham Gardens, Clare discovers a painted ceremonial shield that her great-grandfather collected in New Guinea, and it gradually acquires a hold over her imagination. This would have been so easy to do badly! There was a vogue a generation or so ago for books with a time-slip theme: a character - often a sensitive girl - acquires some object that magically takes her into the past, where she encounters characters and adventures that mysteriously echo her own experiences. There were dozens, scores, possibly hundreds of books like that, and most of them have vanished.

But Penelope Lively is far too subtle an artist to allow this story to go wrong. Clare’s connection with the tamburan is much more interesting and complex than one of simple possession - in any of the senses of possession. Time has worked its way with the tribe who made the shield as well as those who possess it now, and with their own understanding of what such things mean, and in the end, with a lovely, gentle twist, Clare finds her imagination turning to the future as well as the past.

The House in Norham Gardens is one of the best books by one of the best writers who have written for children in the past half-century, and it will remain delightful for a long time to come.

Philip Pullman