The short stories assembled in Penelope Lively’s Pack of Cards (1986) constitute, for my money, one of the strongest single author collections out there. Lively is one of those rare authors who has, over a long career, bridged the gap between literary ambition and popular appeal. This, alongside the middle-class, domestic settings of most of her fiction, has tended to put her work, in critical minds, in the company of the likes of Joanna Trollope and Rosamund Pilcher. No shade on those two, but I think this undersells Penelope Lively. At her best, she is a technically exemplary writer: I have used this short story with creative students to demonstrate perspective, withholding and revealing, and adjectival and adverbial word selection. ‘Next Term We Will Mash You’ is exactly the slice of life, moment in time variant of the short form that I described in relation to Chekhov. We are taken to a specific day, a specific place, with backstories unexposed but hinted at, as a small boy is taken by his parents to visit the boarding school to which he will be consigned in the near future. The narrative moves from one character perspective to another (the bluff and insensitive father, the mother assessing the class indicators in the headmaster’s study, evaluating him and his wife). It’s the perspective of the child that haunts the memory after reading. His partial understanding, his already half-cauterised sensibility that, we know, will be further blunted once he enters the casual cruelty of the boarding school environment. Lively delineates all this with admirable economy; her word choice is nearly faultless (just once, when the headmaster rests – this is the 1970s – his hand on the boy’s head and we are told ‘it was as though he had but to clench his fingers to crush the skull’, does she overegg the pudding). In just over four pages, Penelope Lively skewers an entire class and culture, leaving us with its latest impending victim, sitting in the car home, ‘his face haggard with anticipation’.
First published in Nothing Missing but the Samovar by Penelope Lively, William Heinemann, London, 1978. Reissued in Pack of Cards, Stories 1978-1986 by Penelope Lively, William Heineman, London, 1986
A Personal Anthology 