A review by alexisreading23
Heat Wave by Penelope Lively

3.75

 

Pauline has left London to spend her summer in a rural cottage by the name of Worlds End, next door to her daughter Teresa, her son-in-law Maurice, and her young grand-son. 

It’s the kind of sweltering hot summer that sets the scene for L P Hartley’s The Go Between or Ian McEwan’s Atonement, and like these two novels, the rising heat brings passion and desire, often of the illicit kind. Pauline is helpless as she watches her daughter succumb to the same mistakes she made once as a young wife and mother. 

Lively is so fascinated by memory, time and space in this novel - the way the past collapses into the present, so close behind you it could be your shadow. 

Pauline muses on how the illusion of rural life as a pastoral idyll, so propagated by nineteenth century romantics, has always been an urban dream that ignores the noise, smell and other tangible realities of the agricultural calendar. 

 

Worlds End is a more apt name temporally than physically - Pauline reflects on the ending of her marriage with her ex-husband and the insistent memories that have risen up like dust, disturbed by Teresa and Maurice’s marriage. 

 

Roland Barthes said in ‘A Lover’s Discourse’, ‘Am i in love? Yes, since I’m waiting’. Two women, two wives and two mothers - both reflecting on the experience of waiting for their husbands, are defined by what Barthes terms the lover’s ‘fatal identity’ - the one who always loses the game, the one who waits. After all, jealousy and love burn hot, all the hotter in the middle of a heat wave.