Heat Wave
-
- ¥1,200
-
- ¥1,200
発行者による作品情報
Pauline is spending the summer at World's End, a cottage somewhere in the middle of England. This year the adjoining cottage is occupied by her daughter Teresa and baby grandson Luke; and, of course, Maurice, the man Teresa married. As the hot months unfold, Maurice grows ever more involved in the book he is writing - and with his female copy editor - and Pauline can only watch in dismay and anger as her daughter repeats her own mistakes in love. The heat and tension will lead to a violent, startling climax.
In Heat Wave, Penelope Lively gives us a moving portrayal of a fragile family damaged and defined by adultery, and the lengths to which a mother will go to protect the ones she loves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lively (Moon Tiger) considers the bliss of romantic love, and its frequently tragic disillusionment, in her 11th satisfying novel, which provides further evidence of her ability to build a fascinating plot from minutely observed character. Ensconced in World's End, her summer cottage in England's rural midlands, Pauline Carter, 55, is copyediting an allegory of romantic love while trying not to observe that the seemingly idyllic marriage of her daughter, Teresa, to ambitious professor/writer Maurice, is treading rough water. Trusting, vulnerable Teresa and her baby son share the premises with her mother, while charming Maurice comes and goes. Pauline soon realizes that he is involved in an affair with his editor's girlfriend, conducted when the couple visits World's End on weekends and during Maurice's sudden, unexplained midweek trips to London. To Pauline, the situation carries the echoes of her own betrayal by Teresa's father, Harry, also in his time an unscrupulous professor/lover on the make. Remembering the wasted years of her life before she had the courage to divorce Harry, Pauline is terrified that Teresa is doomed to repeat her history. Events in the novel's last few pages prove otherwise, adding a final shock to the steadily mounting, clearly foreshadowed tension. Lively is most interested in the difference between appearance and reality--between the apparently tranquil countryside and nature's casual mayhem, between the exterior of the stone cottage and its state-of-the-art interior technology, between Maurice's beguiling reassurances and his cynical adultery. Acutely aware of ironies and misperceptions, she is also a master of descriptive detail, evoking the landscape with techniques akin to an Impressionist painter's. Most importantly, she creates a convincing picture of obsessive sexual love tainted by jealousy and misery, and of the kind of maternal love that carries its own implacable mandates.
