Spiderweb by
Penelope Lively

Nominated by:

All her life Stella Brentwood has considered herself a bird of passage. As an anthropologist she studied social networks - in the villages of the Nile Delta, Greece and Malta, and the community of an Orkney island. She has known love, but she remains alone, by choice and by chance. Now retired, she has decided to buy a home, to root herself in the Somerset landscape. Her retirement plans signify a new phase of stability, but Stella finds life in the West Country as subtle and elaborate a social system as any other she has encountered. She is absorbed by the emotions aroused by new and old relationships - with Richard, the prosaic widower of an old college friend, whose baffling overtures take her by suprise, and with Judith, an archaeologist whose relationship is in flux. The hamlet that is now her home proves itself deceptive - an apparently tranquil backwater where tensions within a dysfunctional family build to a destructive climax. Penelope Lively's new novel is a shimmering complex of narrative, letters, journal entries and news items, which spins its own airy web around stella and her different incarnations. Penelope Lively is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of PEN and the Society of Authors. She is married to Professor Jack Lively, has a daughter, a son, three granddaughters and a grandson, and lives in Oxfordshire and London. She has written many prize-winning novels and collections of short stories for both adults and children. Penelope Lively's most recent book, Beyond the Blue Mountains, a collection of short stories, is now available in Penguin.

Here's what the members of the Reading Group based at our Raheny branch library think of Spiderweb:

Spiderweb is the story of a sixty-five year old retired anthropologist. Stella Brentwood has spent her life, living with and studying communities in places as far flung as the Nile Delta, Greece, Malta, and an Orkney island and is a recognised expert in that field. Now that she has settled in Somerset she has great difficulty getting to know local people and getting involved in local activities. The husband of her now deceased friend suggests they live together. Her lesbian friend also suggests that they share a house. She rejects both and puts her house on the market. Concurrent with the story of Stella, we are told of a dysfunctional family living at the end of the same lane. They are a family of five; mother, father, two sons and a grandmother. The mother, a crazy woman, who thrives on putting people down. The father who says very little and takes refuge in his work when things become too unpleasant. Two surly sons who are completely confused by the irrational mother. Stella's efforts to befriend them is misconstrued, they swear to "get her" for the insult. The grandmother, whose house was sold to purchase their house, is treated shamefully. She seems to have decided that it is safer for her if she is seen as doting. It is a pleasant read for the most part. I imagine a sequel will have to be written to find out what happened to Stella and where the Hiscox family disappeared to after the fire, leaving the grandmother in hospital.
(Member of Raheny Library Reading Group)

Stella Brentwood retires to Somerset after a working life as an anthropologist mainly spent in primitive societies in remote places. She discovers that the developed society in which she now finds herself is no easier to penetrate. Unlike the latter it is fragmented and people can remain outside the social networks and live in isolation, as do the ghastly Hiscox family. The book is fragmented too: Stella's past and present lives, her past relationship with Nadine and her present relationship with Nadine's husband Richard (whose feelings and intentions she fails utterly to read in spite of her skills), her non-relationship with her neighbours in Somerset. Somerset, apart from some lyrical descriptions of the landscape, seems extremely dull, full of unprepossessing people - the last place one would want to retire to. This is an interesting, well-written book by an established author and I felt I should have enjoyed it more than I actually did. Perhaps it was because I failed to get involved sufficiently in any one strand of the book. Just as I felt I was, the scene shifted somewhere else. (Member of Raheny Library Reading Group)