How It All Began

by Penelope Lively

When Charlotte is mugged and breaks her hip, her daughter Rose cannot accompany her employer Lord Peters to Manchester, which means his niece Marion has to go instead, which means she sends a text to her lover which is intercepted by his wife, which is just the beginning in the ensuing chain of life-altering events.

In this engaging, utterly absorbing and brilliantly told novel, Penelope Lively shows us how one random event can cause marriages to fracture and heal themselves, opportunities to appear and disappear, lovers who might never have met to find each other and entire lives to become irrevocably changed.

Funny, humane, touching, sly and sympathetic, How It All Began is a brilliant sleight of hand from an author at the top of her game.

Genres: Fiction, Book Club, British Literature, Literary Fiction, Contemporary, Adult Fiction, Novels

229 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: once in 1977 for her first novel, The Road to Lichfield, and again in 1984 for According to Mark. She later won the 1987 Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel Moon Tiger.

Her other books include Going Back; Judgement Day; Next to Nature, Art; Perfect Happiness; Passing On; City of the Mind; Cleopatra’s Sister; Heat Wave; Beyond the Blue Mountains, a collection of short stories; Oleander, Jacaranda, a memoir of her childhood days in Egypt; Spiderweb; her autobiographical work, A House Unlocked; The Photograph; Making It Up; Consequences; Family Album, which was shortlisted for the 2009 Costa Novel Award, and How It All Began.

She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award. She was appointed CBE in the 2001 New Year’s Honours List, and DBE in 2012.

Penelope Lively lives in London. She was married to Jack Lively, who died in 1998.

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 1 out of 5]

This wretched novel begins with the mugging of an old lady and it appears I may be in the process of repeating that loathsome crime as Dame Penelope Lively was 78 when she wrote it. It is not nice to put the boot into such a poor defenceless old creature lying there with only a damehood, a Booker Prize and a few million quid. It’s a nasty job but somebody has to do it.

REMORSELESSLY BLAND

This book is a 248 page dictionary of English middle-class cliches. You’ve seen all the situations in the least amusing British comedies, you have met all the characters several thousand times before and everyone spouts relentlessly clapped-out uninhibitedly banal dialogue made up of every cutesy unctuous well known phrase or saying that would make you wrench your own teeth out if you heard them coming out of your own mouth.

The guy’s made off? Dodgy, I imagine. I hope he hasn’t stung you for too much.

You wouldn’t be doing yourself justice.

He’s right out of his league with these people.

I do wonder if it landed on the right desk.

What have I got to complain about?

We shouldn’t get set in our ways.

They all talk like this. As does Dame Lively when she narrates.

THEIR NOSES IN THE TROUGH

As we know the middleclass are all food snobs and love to eat stuff that other people couldn’t afford even if they’d heard of it and had the terminology explained. Dame Lively loves to (affectionately I am guessing) parody this element of her characters’ lives - or maybe she just like to indulge in food porn and this isn’t a parody :

It turned out over the crispy pork shoulder, celeriac puree, wild mushroom and poached egg, and the grilled John Dory fillets, Nicoise salad, banana salsa and mandarin and elderflower foam, he is still buying property for renovation.

TERMINALLY PALLID

This novel is hopeless. One of the main stories is about an affair between two interior decorators. I detect your eyes are glazing over now. As glaze they should. Another main character is Lord Peters, an ancient historian of the 18th century, who thinks he might like to take a crack at television. Most of the characters in this novel are played for semidemi-comedy, you know, not too broadly (because I think Dame Lively loves these people) but Lord Peters is played as farce. Cue scenes where sharp TV creative types collide with his bumbling antique obliviousness ha ha I think you could all write these scenes yourselves.

This novel is so colourless, so mild, so anodyne you could give it to your maiden aunt in 1933 and she wouldn’t spill a drop of her tea. By the half way point it had turned into a hate-read for me. I couldn’t stop! It was like a BBC Radio 4 comedy drama, and there are fewer worse things in life.

FLAP THOSE WINGS

Prior to composing this work, Dame Lively appears to have become fascinated by the butterfly effect, so she has her one incident (the mugging) cascade through the lives of these awful people in such a straightforward knee bone connected to the thigh bone way that you feel she is beating you over the head with her butterfly wings. She takes whole paragraphs to draw you the connecting diagrams. This is not subtle.

I see all my GR friends give this a lot of love. Perhaps they shrink from kicking an old lady when she’s down. But I don’t mind. Metaphorically speaking.

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another charming and erudite novel from Penelope Lively, whose books are always a pleasure to read.

This one was conceived as an illustration of the butterfly effect. Charlotte, an old widow, is mugged and falls, breaking her hip. This sets in chain a series of events that demonstrate the interconnected nature of modern lives and the way lives are derailed by random events.

This feels like a companion piece to her book Making it Up, in which she imagined alternative versions of her own life that might have followed different choices or events at key moments. Another of her novels is called Consequences so she is clearly interested in causality.

As so often in Lively's writing, the best things are the small details - it is full of wisdom, humour and perceptive observation, if a little lacking in drama.

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Around the 100 page mark I was wondering with a growing apathy what was at stake in this novel. All the characters seemed stuck at a red light. Then, of a sudden, the lights turned to green and it flourished into life and I grew immensely fond of all the characters.
The novel begins when an elderly widow, Charlotte, is mugged and injures her hip. As a result she is forced to live with her daughter until she recovers. This will precipitate small events that change the lives of a small cast of characters who are all connected in some peripheral way to Charlotte and her daughter. In this novel Lively has perfected her breezy sketchy style of writing which enables her to move so deftly and quickly between characters, between the present and the past. My favourite characters were the Serbian immigrant who aspires to be an accountant but is forced to work on a building site to whom Charlotte gives English lessons and the deluded musty aristocratic historian who is being duped by his ambitious assistant as he toils away at writing his memoirs. There’s lots of wise stuff about growing old, about the importance in our lives of stories and about how interconnected we all are.
Although it starts off slow, I didn’t want this novel to end so much was I enjoying it in the final third.

[Diane Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

I loved this book about how an event, in this case a mugging of an elderly lady, can have reverberating affects on so many other people. A light read on the surface, but touching on some serious subjects of life, aging, and adultery; throw in some of Penelope Lively's humor and you get a delightful book.

Charlotte, the mugged 77 year old was my favorite character. A retired English teacher, she was forced to go stay with her middle aged daughter because of a broken hip. Her remarks on reading and books and their role in her life was a treat. I loved the scene where she had a doctor's appt. and grabbed a book at the last minute to take to the waiting room. The book was "The DaVinci Code", and she knew after just a few pages that it would not do. So she was left holding the book, and worried that "now people will think I'm the type of person who reads The DaVinci Code." Book nerd problems!

Another quote from Charlotte: "She is as much a product of what she has read as of the way in which she has lived; she is like millions of others built by books, for whom books are essential foodstuff, who could starve without."

Oh, yes, my kind of book.

[B the BookAddict · Rating 5 out of 5]

In How it All Began, Penelope Lively proposes the butterfly effect in the small lives of ordinary people. When an elderly mother is mugged, her daughter cannot accompany her boss to an appointment. This mugging, this random event precipitates a series of life-altering events: an impending divorce, a new business affiliation, a budding romance, an out of control overdraft, a separation, a new business, an embarrassment and a controversial scholarly article. Penelope Lively is at her scintillating best in this ingenious, delicious and absorbing story.

From the book cover - “funny, humane, touching, sly and sympathetic, How It All Began is a brilliant sleight of hand from an author at the top of her game.”

But the Sunday Telegraph’s review on Lively's Family Album perhaps says it best about this author - “...Lively displays an economy and elegance that puts younger writers to shame.” This opinion I feel states best the true essence of this wonderful writer and can be found in all novels. Definitely 5★.

[Trish · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, I dearly loved this book about an event which spawned a series of follow-on events, some of which could be termed momentous, in the context of a life. The story was funny and true and ridiculous and painful and all those things that life can be. It was comforting to hear about folks whose lives had hit a major speed bump but who managed, by shuffling the deck, to usher in a new chapter in their lives, one that they liked even better. But it is lightly told, and not so painful for us, safely behind our reading glasses, sipping tea and considering just how awful divorce could be…for the characters of course.

I was also struck by parallels between the theme in this book by Lively and Kate Atkinson’s new offering Life After Life . It is almost as though the grande Dames of British Literature were given a writing assignment to mull over the possibility that Hitler had never been born or had died in early life, before the tragedy of World War II. The assignment might have specified that they didn’t have to focus on the 1940’s, they just had to mention Hitler and make their story relevant to a new reality. Consider Lively’s contribution, that she places in the mouth of Henry, retired University professor and a man sure of his talent to make history interesting and relevant:

I myself have a soft spot for what is known as the Cleopatra’s nose theory of history—the proposal that had the nose of Cleopatra been an inch longer the fortunes of Rome would have been different. A reductio ad absurdam, perhaps, but a reference to random causality that makes a lot of sense when we think about the erratic sequence of events that we call history. And we find that we home in on the catalysts—the intervention of those seminal figures who will direct events. Caesar himself. Charlemagne. Napoleon. Hitler. If this man or that—no, this person or that—had not existed, how differently could things have turned out? Focus upon a smaller canvas—England in the eighteenth century, of, indeed, any other century—and we find again that it is personalities that direct events, the human hand that steers the course of time…A decision is made in one place, and far away a thousand will die.”

Then, consider Kate Atkinson’s contemplation of this question, whom she gives to Ursula, her protagonist :

“Don’t you wonder sometimes, “ Ursula said. “If just one small thing had been changed, in the past, I mean. If Hitler had died at birth, or if someone had kidnapped him as a baby and brought him up in—I don’t know, say a Quaker household—surely things would be different.”

And it is a great theme to be going along with: eliminating those pesky outsized actors from our history. After all, isn’t life complicated enough with just our own mistakes to manage?

In any case, the thing that really caught my attention in this book, and that I loved above even the story (something which Lively spends some time considering—how a story can draw us in) is the discussion an older woman, a retired teacher of literature as it happens, has with a younger economic migrant to whom she is teaching the fundamentals of reading. They speak of language, words, and the passion the younger man has for stories. He’d had trouble learning English, both spoken and written, but he was passionate about stories. So she teaches him, rather than the language of commerce, the language of poetry. She gave him stories, and his passion for stories developed into a passion for words, which he collected assiduously and used ardently. He loved, and was loved though words. It was delightful.

[Margitte · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the blurb:
Charlotte is mugged and breaks her hip, her daughter Rose cannot accompany her employer Lord Peters to Manchester, which means his niece Marion has to go instead, which means she sends a text to her lover which is intercepted by his wife, which is . . . just the beginning in the ensuing chain of life-altering events...Funny, humane, touching, sly and sympathetic

There's nothing exciting or melodramatic about this novel. In fact, after a 100 pages, I was seriously considering calling it a day, being such a drama-afficionado myself.

Yet, in retrospect, I was amazed at the deeper dimensions of this story. The author wove a fine sense of humor through the tale of seven people who's lives were derailed by a mugging. Apart from the mugging, nothing unusual happened, it was just seven ordinary citizens trying to make sense of their dreary lives. The mugger became impervious, moved offstage, with the damage complete, and became superfluous as the beginning and end to the story.

Young people tried to move forward; old people were summarising their lives. In between relationships were tested, friendships scrutinised, partneships weighed. They were all dreamers and schemers with a common element bonding them together: ambition.

Brisk, self-important, retired professior of history, with a gammy-knee, querulous, Lord Henry Peters and retired English literature teacher Charlotte Rainsford were the elderly stars of the saga. Both had an ax to grind with old age:

Henri: Old age is an insult. Old age is a slap in the face. It sabotages a fine mind--though I say it myself--until you can appear as ignorant and inarticulate as some...

...It's like...like being thrown into the pitch dark and you can't find the bloody door but you know it's there...

It's a suffocation of the intellect. One's Mind--one's fine mind, if I may so--becomes incompetent. Impotent. Yes, impotent."...xOne cannot perform. One is emasculated...The long and the short of it is that you can't bloody well remember what you were going to say next when you know perfectly well what it was."

For the purpose I wanted to read this novel it was perfect. A feel-good touch of reality. As a novel it was dragging and a bit clichéd.

However, the author and I connected on Charlotte's character - the perpetual reader:

Forever, reading has been central, the necessary fix, the support system. Her life has been informed by reading. She has read not just for distraction, sustenance, to pass the time, but she has read in a state of primal innocence, reading for enlightenment, for instruction, even. She has read to find out how sex works, how babies are born, she has read to discover what it is to be good, or bad; she has read to find out if things are the same for others as they are for her—then, discovering that frequently they are not, she has read to find out what it is that other people experience that she is missing.

She read to find out what it was like to be French or Russian in the nineteenth century, to be a rich New Yorker then, or a midwestern pioneer. She read to discover how not to be Charlotte, how to escape the prison of her own mind, how to expand, and experience.

Thus has reading wound in with living, each a complement to the other. Charlotte knows herself to ride upon a great sea of words, of language, of stories and situations and information, of knowledge, some of which she can summon up, much of which is half lost, but is in there somewhere, and has had an effect on who she is and how she thinks. She is as much a product of what she has read as of the way in which she has lived; she is like millions of others built by books, for whom books are an essential foodstuff, who could starve without.

I loved spending time with the characters and the author in a faraway place I would never experience on this level.

What a coincidence: Charlotte got mugged on the 14th of April. I finished reading this novel on the 14th of April. Is karma at play here? :-)

RECOMMENDED as a chicken-soup-for-the-soul-read.

[Algernon (Darth Anyan) · Rating 4 out of 5]

[9/10]

It was on the fourteenth of April that Charlotte Rainsford was mugged. Seven lives have been derailed...

Chaos theory applied to the field to human interactions: a minor event that leads to unforeseen consequences, to change. Thornton Wilder in his 1927 Pulitzer winner: The Bridge of San Luis Rey, investigates several lives in order to discover if accident or fate led them to be in a certain place at a certain moment in time. Penelope Lively looks forward from the point of inflection, to see how one single event can change the lives of people six or less degrees of separation from the focal point.

‘There is an analogy, I understand, with a process that interests the physicists – chaos theory. The proposition that apparently random phenomena have underlying order – a very small perturbation can make things happen differently from the way they would have happened if the small disturbance had not been there. A butterfly in the Amazon forest flaps its wings and provokes a tornado in Texas.’

Seventy-seven years old Charlotte is mugged on a London street and breaks her hip. She is forced to move in with her daughter Rose for recovery. Rose works as private secretary for renowned historian Sir Henry Peters but, because she cannot accompany him for a speech in Manchester, his niece Marion Clark is forced to go instead. Henry makes a mess of his presentation and decides to publish something spectacular in order to regain his self-confidence, while Marion, a self-employed interior designer, meets a wealthy hedge fund manager at the official lunch. Because Marion is away from home, she sends a phone message to her casual lover Jeremy Dalton, an antique dealer, that is discovered by his wife Stella, who promptly asks for a divorce. The complications expand from this starting point into radical changes in the lives of these people not directly involved in the original mugging. The balance each of the actors has somehow found in their lives is revealed to be an illusion, but sometimes the push is needed for better clarity or for a change of priorities. Chaos theory postulates a new stage of equilibrium must follow a disturbance.

Old age is not for wimps.

Charlotte is the anchor of the story for me, not only the inflection point for the people around her. Her strength and her resilience is in sharp contrast with her fragile bones, her mind is sharp and her observations about life, memory and change are always pertinent and clearly expressed. Yet her main charm comes from Charlotte’s relationship with language, with the written word.

Her life has been informed by reading. She has read not just for distraction, sustenance, to pass the time, but she has read in a state of primal innocence, reading for enlightenment, for instruction, even. She has read to find out how sex works, how babies are born; she has read to discover what it is to be good, or bad; she has read to find out if things are the same for others as they are for her – then, discovering that frequently they are not, she has read to find out what it is that other people experience that she is missing.

Unable to go to the school where she teaches English as a foreign language to people with special needs, or to stand idle in her daughter’s house, Charlotte invites one of her students, Polish construction worker Anton, for private lessons.
Anton is struggling to learn a new language, but Charlotte manages to get him interested in storytelling, starting with the most basic tools we all had: fairy tales, legends and short stories. The need for a narrative thread as opposed to dry academic study is linked now to the earlier chaos theory and with historical concerns, as expressed by Henry: History is bedevilled by circumstance.

Contrivance versus circumstance could be defined as the backbone of this whole novel, at first glance just a random collection of sketches from private lives that are slowly coalescing into a pattern, ...demonstrating that no man is an island. and that we need to turn our accidental lives into some sort of coherent narration, with a starting point and a destination, a purpose to aim at. Literature, history, philosophy are offering us the tools we need to turn our lives into stories, but what we do with them is still up to each one of us.

Charlotte knows herself to ride upon a great sea of words, of language, of stories and situations and information, of knowledge, some of which she can summon up, much of which is half lost, but is in there somewhere, and has had an effect on who she is and how she thinks.

>>><<<>>><<<

This is my second book by Penelope Lively, and the excellent impression left by Moon Tiger is confirmed now. Several themes are familiar from her earlier effort: the focus on history [ History is a slippery business; the past is not a constant, but a landscape that mutates according to argument and opinion. ], the careful mapping of the ways of the heart, the sharp knife the author uses to cut through the pretensions and the dissimulations we deploy around our souls, the tender renderings of doomed romance.

How can you feel happy, but also entirely sad? she wondered. Well, evidently you can.

Rose thought, When you are able to be with a person and there is no need to talk, something has happened.

There is a clarity, a directness in Penelope Lively that appeals strongly to me. Much as I like the intellectual dazzle of an A. S. Byatt or Iris Murdoch, I find myself more deeply immersed in the lives of these ordinary people going about their ordinary lives. To find beauty and meaning, walking hand in hand with pain and loneliness, in their stories is probably a greater achievement than to explore the careers of the movers and shakers of history and public life.

What we add up to, in the end, is a handful of images, apparently unrelated and unselected. Chaos, you would think, except that it is the chaos that makes each of us a person. Identity, it is called in professional speak.

Side note 1 : Charlotte has provided me with three new books/stories to add to my already daunting TBR stack. I am always tempted to check out the titles referenced by a character in a novel I am reading, and I am pretty sure Charlotte has good taste, even if it is an unconventional one: Fanny Hill, or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, Elizabeth Bowen – The Demon Lover and Henry James – What Maisie Knew are all mentioned in the novel.

[Chrissie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Friends whose opinions I highly value have enjoyed this book. I can only explain my personal reaction. Perhaps it is best you read other reviews too.

Please start by reading the short GR book description. The first paragraph tells you how the story unfolds. The idea is that one event leads to another and another and another. First of all, is this so strange that one event leads to another and another and another? Is it worth writing a whole book about such a rudimentary concept?! Secondly, it is not true “that entire lives become irrevocably changed”, at least not in this novel. It is how an individual reacts to events thrown at them that determines where one will stand at the end.

The story itself is tedious, uninteresting, insipid, quite simply boring.

The writing style is not to my taste either. Lots of words, but so very little said. I prefer a simpler, cleaner prose that reveals underlying emotions and thoughts. I want more of the essential and less of the superficial.

The characters fail to interest me. They are not people I am curious to know more about. They are not people I admire. It is not necessary to like a book’s characters if the author has been able to create in readers a feeling of sympathy for them, despite their weaknesses. This does not happen here. I am left totally indifferent to them. I am sure there do exist people such as those drawn here, but who cares?

It is certainly possible to distinguish between an author’s written words and the performance of an audiobook’s narrator. Separating the two does demand concentration. I always give two separate ratings--one for the written book and one for the narrator’s performance. Here the narrator was Anna Bentinck and she did a really good job. Her performance I have given four stars. The speed, the clarity of the words and the intonations for the different characters were all very well executed. It was the story itself I had problems with, not the narration.

[Deborah Markus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I went ahead and marked this five stars for "amazing," because it's rare that a contemporary novel is quotable. The main character is an educated British woman in her seventies, recovering from a mugging. First sentence:

The pavement rises up and hits her.

Terrific, right? Here's a bit from when she's ruminating on being in constant pain from the resultant broken hip:

Ah, old age. The twilight years -- that delicate phrase. Twilight my foot -- roaring dawn of a new life, more like, the one you didn't know about. We all avert our eyes, and then -- wham! you're in there too, wondering how the hell this can have happened, and maybe it is an early circle of hell and here come the gleeful devils with their pitchforks, stabbing and prodding.

The range of characters and voices Penelope Lively offers reminds me of George Eliot. Not all of the characters are likeable, but all of them are human, even the rotters. The tender romance that develops between a married woman and an immigrant man who's fluent in several languages but finds himself terrifyingly unable to learn to read in English -- well, I'm never going to forget it and it leaves an ache as deep as if I'd lived one of their lives.

The only thing I found unconvincing was the idea that a woman in her 40s is put off by rock music, thinking of it as something that belongs to her children. Hate to break it to Lively, but those of us in our 40s grew up with rock and roll. Now we're trying to get used to odd little offshoots like Melbourne bounce, which I only heard about last week when my son introduced me to it.

[Judith E · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely, character driven study in which life is impacted by Charlotte’s mugging and injury. Set in motion is a chain of events that require multiple characters to make thoughtful decisions and choices. Aging parents, romantic affairs, financial crises, and academian jealousies are human complications and worries.

A smoothly written reflection on aging, memories, books, immigrants, and love. A peaceful read with great insight into everyday life.

Rounded up from 3.75 stars.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

The idea behind this quirky read is how one event could have reverberating effects on so many other people.

It is...A light read on the surface, but touching on so many aspects of real life – aging, the good, bad, ugly of relationships.

And...The story had humor, was sometimes ridiculous, sometimes painful, and gave you an opportunity to be an armchair judge of multiple characters making thoughtful or not so thoughtful decisions and choices about their life.

But...Do you like them? Maybe. Maybe not.

We all have our moods and feelings about the books we pick up and read, right?

[Tamara Agha-Jaffar · Rating 4 out of 5]

How It All Began by Penelope Lively is a delightful novel that illustrates how a single incident sets off a series of ramifications on the lives of characters linked together in a tapestry of interlocking threads.

The catalyst that precipitates the butterfly effect is the mugging and subsequent injury of Charlotte Rainsford, an elderly widow. Because Charlotte has broken her hip, she is obliged to move in temporarily with her daughter Rose and son-in-law Gerry. Her injury sets off a chain of events which include the discovery of an illicit love affair; an on-again, off-again divorce; a pompous, deluded, elderly academic dabbling in a T.V. series; the disastrous consequences of an upscale interior designer’s meeting with an ostensibly wealthy client; and the blossoming of a tender romance between a married woman and an immigrant. Along the way are the backstories of each of the characters.

Charlotte, the central character, is a charming, independent, retired teacher of literature with a passion for reading. Her injury affords her the opportunity to keenly observe her daughter’s marriage, comparing it with her own. To fill up her time while recuperating, Charlotte volunteers to teach an immigrant the fundamentals of reading. She draws him in by introducing him first to children’s stories and gradually working him up to more advanced stories as his reading skills improve. Their conversations about reading and the passion they share for stories were some of the most delightful aspects of the novel. Charlotte is witty, engaging, sensitive, perceptive, and compassionate. Her observations about life, marriage, children, and aging are astute. These observations intermittently weave in and out of the novel sandwiched between the events unfolding in the lives of the other characters.

What makes the story so delightful is Penelope Lively’s narrative voice. The tone is informal and engaging. Her wide range of characters are sympathetically drawn and well-developed, each speaking with a unique voice. Particularly successful are Lord Henry’s ego-inflated, out of touch and out of time prognostications. Lively moves nimbly between characters and flips back and forth in time with great ease. She has an astute eye for physical and emotional detail. She knows what to say and what to leave unsaid, trusting her reader to fill in the blanks. Her asides and commentary reflect her perceptive observations and insights concerning the quirks and foibles of human behavior. She does it all with a delightful sense of humor and in a language that is informal, upbeat, and engaging.

An entertaining read that provides a light interlude to be sandwiched between more heavy reading.

Highly recommended.

You can find more of my book reviews at www.tamaraaghajaffar.com

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I should think there is a lot of the author in Charlotte, the main character of this novel. She is in her upper seventies when one day she gets mugged and breaks her hip. After the accident, she has to temporarily move in with her daughter. That minor shift in a domestic situation of one family has an unforeseen influence on others. What would have been done in one way, is done in another, someone who is supposed to be in a certain place is replaced by someone else. And so it goes, a chain of events produces consequences that like rings on the water, spread and touch a number of lives. Among the affected there is an elderly historian, for whom Charlotte’s daughter Rose works, his niece Marion entangled in a romance with a self centered married man, Rose herself, and the easturn European accountant temporarily acting construction worker. Their lives are due to change when Charlotte comes to live with Rose. Their paths unexpectedly intertwine or split up and diverge as indirect consequence of one ruthless action of a completely unaware teenage mugger.

Although the theme of this novel strikes me as something from a creative writing exercise (pick an event in your life, and imagine what life would be like, if you made a different choice) I loved it, and I loved all the brilliantly drawn characters.
That is my Penelope Lively number three… and counting.

[Lisa · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is how it all began:

While the premise of this book --the butterfly effect -- is intriguing, the execution was a real turn off. Incomplete sentences and a very British style (and I love England!!) kept me from getting into it. Take the first page:

"...A face is alongside hers. Woman. Nice woman." Or another sentence a few pages later: "So. Just what one didn't want. Being a burden and all that. What one had hoped to avoid." Ugh!

Sentences are filled with ellipses and narrations are changed abruptly. Like when Lively is in Jeremy's mind, and then suddenly starts describing him in a different way: "Jeremy may seem a somewhat contradictory figure. Here is someone..."

I feel so much better having decided to chuck this!

[Friederike Knabe · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Old age is not for wimps"

Opening this Penelope Lively book I was from the start taken by the character of Charlotte and a feeling of familiarity and appreciation didn't leave for the rest of the novel. Set primarily in London, the scenario and the people felt to me like I could have met them and the mugging... well, I have had that experience too. Charlotte, a very independent-minded senior with her wits and sense of humour about her, endears herself immediately to the reader. The day-time mugging that makes Charlotte fall and break her hip is the trigger of the well-known 'butterfly effect' that will lead to a series of unexpected encounters. While not earth-shattering as such the incident will lead to unforeseen encounters that in turn can open up new or deeper feelings and understanding among a small group of people directly or indirectly connected to Charlotte.

Central to the novel are Charlotte's musings about her life, how her presence will impact the lives of her daughter Rose and her son-in-law while she is confined to their house to recuperate. How well does she know them? Can she get to know them better sharing their space? Do they do so willingly? Lively, not surprisingly, goes beyond Charlotte's perspective as she tells us more about the back-stories and current lives of Rose and husband Gerry, Lord Henry (Rose's boss) and Marion, his niece. Their stories and a few more encounters that become relevant over time are interleafed with Charlotte's ongoing efforts to regain her independence. Each has a role to play in the butterfly effect around Charlotte's mugging and together they build a mosaic of interconnected pieces that also becomes a portrait of a slice of modern English society. Lively does this often with tongue-in-cheek wit and humour while always also demonstrating her empathy with all of her characters. A wonderful, heart-warming story to enjoy and some pearls of wisdom to take away from it.

[Joy D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Charlotte, an intensely independent seventy-something widow, is mugged on the street, breaking her hip, and must live with her daughter, Rose, while she recovers. This book is a humorous and poignant character study of seven lives impacted by this single event. It is chaos theory in novel form, or a sequence of unintended consequences. The author employs an understated plot and well-developed characters. She brings the intertwined storylines together in a satisfying ending.

The characters are the highlight. In addition to Charlotte and Rose, we have:
- Lord Peters an aging historian with a rather pompous attitude that adds to the amusement
- Lord Peters’ niece, Marion, an interior designer having an affair with a married man
- Jeremy, the married man, and his wife, Ruth, whom he hopes to keep from divorcing him
- Anton, Charlotte’s student, an eastern European immigrant learning English to get a better job

Supporting characters augment the humor, such as the young academic who plays up to Lord Peters’ ego to further his own career. Each has a distinctive personality. I felt like I knew them personally by the end of the book. I am impressed by the author’s skill in deftly designing their interplay. This is the first book I have read by Penelope Lively. I enjoyed it tremendously and will be reading more of her works.

4.5

[Kim Fay · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have been a devoted Penelope Lively fan ever since I read "Moon Tiger" back in the early 1990s. In fact, I've reread that novel a few times since, and it holds up every time. I think it's because there is such authority in her writing. Not arrogance ... Lively writes from a place of genuine understanding of human nature. Better yet, she doesn't take herself too seriously. Her brilliance is in her ability with nuance, a talent that never fails to impress me. In this novel, Charlotte Rainsford is mugged, and with this one minor act, a domino effect occurs, one domino tipping another tipping another, until a seemingly unrelated cast of characters are all affected by this incident. I take great pleasure in Lively's attention to detail, not just in the physical world but in the emotional world. She knows what to describe, and just how important it can be to not describe something, but instead skip beyond it and let the reader put the pieces together. I have always felt trusted when I read her books, and "How It All Began" is no exception.

[Elinor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I ran across this book in a used bookstore, having almost forgotten about Penelope Lively. Now I want to read all her books again. She is so brilliant at characters and dialogue, and so observant about the human condition. This is one of those novels where you think: "Oh, goodie, it's almost bedtime and I have a delightful story waiting for me on the night table!"

[Malia · Rating 1 out of 5]

Maybe I shouldn't write a review for a book I couldn't finish, but here I am. The premise sounded quite intriguing, a sort of chain of events story that usual appeals to me. Also, the cover looked so light and friendly that I confess I was drawn to the book after all the seriously creepy mysteries I have been reading. Alas, I was disappointed. The story is all over the place and none of the characters really shine. There is a huge amount of narration and exposition and very little dialogue which can get quite tedious, in my opinion at least. After a good while, I had to abandon it, which I really hate doing.
This was just not for me. Writing a book is so much work, something I really appreciate, and for that alone I should give Lively more than one star, however, this book was so colorless and disappointing for me that I did not even finish it, so I cannot really rate it higher. I hope other readers find greater joy in the story and with her style.

Find more reviews and bookish fun at http://www.princessandpen.com

[Carol · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 for me - A book group book, we found this one perfect for December. Though not all light and fluffy, it was just enough an easy read and nice story not to depress us in the holiday season.

Myself, I really loved the opening pages when Charlotte, age 77, the main character, really finds life coming from the ground up to smack her in the face. From here, it's sort of a serendipitous story where life offers surprises, the cause and effect (or is that affect, I hate this word!) that can change the way a life will go.

The group was surprised that we liked most all the characters, not the usual for our discussions and that as a whole we enjoyed the story and were glad to have read it.

We have read other Lively books over the years and though this was not my favorite, I do like her style of writing and can recommend this as well as The Photograph and Moon Tiger.

[Nora · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gosh I so enjoyed this book…as soon as I started it I loved the premise and the characters and the style. 2023 has been a difficult, and frustrating, reading year for me. Finding the ‘right’ book has been a struggle and I often start and stop several before finding it. This one has me excited knowing the search may be harder but there are gems out there.

[Beth Bonini · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book when it first came out (2011) and remembered the central idea of it - if not all of the individual characters - because it’s something I’ve often thought about it: “the butterfly effect,” or how one small and seemingly random action or occurrence can set off a whole chain of reactions.

This is late Penelope Lively, and I feel like it could be described as “essence” of Penelope Lively. The writing is spare, laconic even - but she has a very unshowy way of choosing just the right word. The storyline blends the quotidian with the philosophical in such an accessible and enjoyable way. Most of the dialogue is mundanely realistic, while the philosophical bits tend to be Charlotte’s internal musings. Charlotte is a 77 year old former English teacher, and when she is mugged - and breaks her hip, being shoved to the ground - that event triggers all of the other events in the novel.

It’s a contemporary slice-of-life set in London; mostly a white middle-class London, although there are a few exceptions. It takes place not long after the financial crisis of 2008, and that lurks in the background to some extent, but the general tone of it reminds me of the Joanna Trollope novels I read in the 1990s. Despite the urban violence which kicks off the action, it feels like a safe world in which people are mostly sensible, despite a variety of emotional and financial problems. Many cups of tea are drunk in the course of the novel.

Henry has lived in London for years, or, rather, he has existed on a particular one of London’s planes. He lives in his white stucco house in an expensive postcode, and goes forth to his club in Pall Mall, to Wiltons or Rules, to Covent Garden (a couple of times a year), to the Royal Academy and the Tate and the British Library and the British Museums.

Unsurprisingly, considering that Lively was the same age as her character Charlotte when she wrote the book, the book gives far more than the usual weight or emphasis to the older characters. Charlotte is given to thinking about the role of reading in her life, which I found appealing (of course!). There is also a wonderful summing up of the nature of time, experience, memory and identity on the part of Charlotte, although Henry - who is, ironically, a historian - is far too preoccupied and self-important to be self-reflective.

Just one of the many musings I enjoyed:

You are on the edge of things now, clinging on to life’s outer rim. You have this comet trail of your own lived life, sparks from which arrive in the head all the time, whether you want them or not - life has been lived, but it is all still going on, in the mind, for better and for worse.

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

How It All Began kept me engaged enough to keep reading, but I was not always enthralled. An annoyance was the author's need to tell me the point of the book, which is how relatively small, random events can cast a wide circle of consequences. I might not have minded if she'd told me once. She seemed, however, to think I might be slow, so she repeated the point several times to be sure I got it. Toward the end of the book, she began to lecture about how we like stories to have decisive endings, but that that's not the way life is. Duh! Who would have had such insight without being told? And, surprise! Already a character had made this point.

In order to show the wider circle impacted by a random event, the author had to introduce and maintain the stories of nine characters in some detail. The switching back and forth among characters kept me from the satisfying, deep involvement with any one of them that I so enjoy. For example, I know that Mark is very good at reading people, knowing whom he can "work" and getting them to volunteer to give him what he wants or needs. But I have no clue how he learned these skills or if dire necessity in his past required him to develop them.

In the end, the author supplies nice end-points for the various stories, as she has said was necessary for a good story. And in the final chapter, she tell us what's coming in the lives after the "ends" of each one's story. This fit the pattern of her leaving nothing to the reader's imagination or intellect.

After re-reading my review, I'm wondering if I should have given this book fewer stars or a better review. Maybe I'm just in a bad mood. I may have overstated the negatives. Had the author not a generally engaging style and interesting characters, I would have returned the book to the library mostly unread.

[Vonia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sometimes, I feel like there can be too many characters in a book. This is one of those times. That being said, Lively, as always, delivered on characters the reader can easily identify with. The characters, although leading different lives, were (sometimes fortunately, other times not so fortunately) linked by the book's opening scene: Charlotte being seriously injured in a mugging. Reminiscent of Mitch Albom's The Five People You Meet In Heaven The Five People You Meet in Heaven, it explores a kind of seven degrees of separation- how one event can set off a chain reaction and each of us can affect so many other lives in ways we cannot imagine and will probably never know.
My favorite story was that of Rose & Anton. It was sweet, redeeming, and certainly something many of us who have trouble in the love and/or relationship category. My least favorite was that of Henry, not least because I could not understand most of the research and references to his field in academia.

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I usually love Lively and her writing, but even though the writing was still very good, I just couldn't identify with any of the characters. I really did not like them. The story is a play on the Butterfly effect and fate, how all our actions cause chain reactions. Yet at times I almost found this book tedious.

[Felice · Rating 5 out of 5]

How It All Began is Penelope Lively’s marvelous new book about the Chaos Theory or if it’s more understandable you (And me too!) could use the science behind If You Give A Mouse A Cookie as your template. No she hasn’t become James Gleick on us. How It All Began is a novel, a fabulous novel. The title is the kind that tells you the whole story and none of the story at the same time I always like that.



Lively’s chaos starts with Charlotte Rainsford’s mugging. When Charlotte gets mugged her hip is broken, when her hip is broken she has to stay with daughter Rose and family to recover. This chain of events stretches into other households unknown to Charlotte revealing among other things: an adulterous affair, the opportunity for an affair, career opportunities for advancement and failure.


The chapters alternate between all of the lives that Charlotte’s fall impacts. This technique has two potential pitfalls. In some authors’ hands this method often creates a short story collection rather than a cohesive novel. The more common problem with this strict back and forth between characters lives is the authors’ inability to build the same level of interest between each character. Inevitably you are spellbound by one or two characters and the rest? Ho-hum. Not to worry with Penelope Lively. This is a novel where each life is individual and a part of the whole AND you are happily invested in each character.


Each of lives in How It All Began is beset in some way by the problem of aging. As the most senior characters in the book Charlotte and Lord Peter have the most straight forward aging issues. They are edging their way toward the loss of independence and mental sharpness. The rest of the main characters in the novel are years younger than Charlotte and Peter but age has them all by the throat. The clock is ticking away and there are past, present and future choices to evaluate.


How It All Began, like Lively’s other novels, is a disarmingly gentle story keenly observed. These are characters with recognizable problems, good and bad habits who all live in the same world that you and I do. How does Penelope Lively make a novel so accessible so interesting? She imbues her characters and storylines with a complexity, a richness that despite their familiarity keeps them intriguing. All this is accomplished without sacrificing Livelys’ satirical wit. How It All Began was reading love for me from beginning to end.

[Laurie Larson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ever since I turned the last page of Penelope Lively's Booker Prize winning novel Moon Tiger nearly 25 years ago, I was hooked. Her peek inside modern British culture was a look at a world that probably no longer exists. Lively's characters are complex--especially her women--and drive the story; I've often envisioned the conversations we'd share. And so The Road to Lichtfield, The Photograph, and Moon Tiger remain some of my favorite reading memories. The author is now eighty and I'd thought she was no longer writing--so imagine my delight when I discovered How it All Began written in 2011.


I loved the concept--one event sets off a series of events ala the butterfly effect--when I read the blurb. The elderly Charlotte Rainsford is mugged and must move in with her daughter and son-in-law after her release from the hospital. The web of characters affected by this event move outward from there: Charlotte's daughter Rose, Rose's employer Lord Henry, Henry's niece Marion and her lover Jeremy, Anton, the eastern European immigrant Charlotte tutors.

The makings of a satisfying read ... except it's not. The characters are not interesting enough to carry a plot and by the end, I simply didn't care what happened to them. To make matters worse, the last chapter was six pages of disappointing epilogue. How sad that this will be my last impression of Lively's work.

[Jill · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like the concept of the book, and I was hopeful throughout the first half. The second half fell apart for me though. Anton and Ruth's conversations were hard to get through, and I lost interest. I did add the second star for the description of Anton's eyes - "the forest eyes. the lakes. the castles. that elsewhere."

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Penelope Lively is quickly becoming one of my favorites. Her book are smart but readable, insightful and entertaining. This one shows the reader the ripple effects of one random incident. But it's also contains a wonderful homage to books and reading when Charlotte misses her library at home and struggles to find something to read that fits her mental state. Lively's characters are not all likable but I recognize them and felt their struggles and enjoyed their foibles.