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Going Back
On a visit to her childhood home a woman recalls the experiences she and her brother had while living there during World War II and especially the reasons they decided to run away.
128 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1975
1 person is currently reading
131 people want to read
About the author
Penelope Lively
126 books925 followersPenelope 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 35 reviews
March 18, 2018
This is only 128 pages. It is highly evocative as I felt what it was like to be a child with idyllic days spent with a beloved brother. The aroma of flowers, the sight of the mark your bikes make through the dew sprinkled grass, all the sights and feelings that are so magical when you are very young are present here. A strong sense of loss and homesickness permeates the book. As things progress, you begin to get a sense of the family dynamics and the class distinctions that prevailed so strongly then. There is much to say, but the most I can say is that everyone should experience this marvelous work.
October 30, 2022
I have been working my way through Penelope Lively’s oeuvre, rather slowly, over the last few years. My interest in her 1975 novella, Going Back, was piqued after I saw a brief but glittering review whilst scrolling through my Goodreads feed. Clearly easily influenced, I requested it from my library just moments afterward.
At just 125 pages long, with relatively large font, Going Back can be picked up and read in an afternoon. The entirety follows our protagonist, Jane, who reflects upon her wartime childhood spent at a farmhouse in a village named Medleycott, with her brother, Edward. She remembers days full of bliss, of ‘joyful indulgence’. Regardless, something seems to cast a ‘dark, chilling shadow over Jane’s remembrance, for the idyll came to an abrupt and painful end.’
In the first chapter, Jane tells us, with nostalgia: ‘It seems smaller, going back: the garden, the house, everything. But the garden, especially. When I was a small child it was infinite: lawns, paths, high hedges, the rose garden, the long reach of the kitchen garden, the spinney with the silver birches. It was a completed world; beyond lay nothingness. Space. Limbo.’ Jane goes on: ‘Remembering it like that. There’s what you know happened, and what you think happened… Things are fudged by time; years fuse together. The things that should matter – the stepping-stones that marked the way, the decisions that made one thing happen rather than another – they get forgotten. You are left with islands in a confused and layered landscape, like the random protrusions after a heavy snowfall… There is time past, and time to come, and time that is continuous, in the head for ever.’
Despite the brevity of Going Back, we learn a great deal about the siblings and their family life. The children’s mother passed away when they were toddlers; their father was largely absent. They are looked after largely by Betty, a woman ‘tethered to her kitchen.’ Jane and Edward spent a lot of time outdoors, amusing themselves: ‘The garden was our territory – the space within which we knew the arrangement of every leaf and stone and branch… and the world had stretched and stretched like elastic.’ Indeed, the outside world is alien to them, cocooned as they are within the vast garden: ‘There was a war on, people said… There was a war on, so you couldn’t have lots of sweets any more… and no more oranges or bananas. There was a war on, so we mustn’t waste things because there won’t be any more where that came from.’
I really admire Lively’s prose, and my experience with Going Back was no different. Lively consistently conjures up such specific imagery, seeing the beauty in almost everything. I particularly enjoy the way in which Lively captures the natural world, and the changing of the seasons in her writing: ‘Autumn. The hedge outside the gate has blossomed with spider-webs. All over, they are, from top to bottom, multi-faceted, strung between blackberry sprays or tacked to the dried heads of cow-parsley… We squat on our haunches, absorbed…’. Later, she writes: ‘And the year slid, somehow, into winter. The hot, harvest, blackberry days were gone and we were into November: white skies, dark spiny trees, hot toast for tea, cold hands, feet, noses. Darkness as we fed the chickens, the stable drive pale-fringed with grasses, the landscape huddled under a violet sky, the fields peppered with snow that fell this morning and melted too soon to be any use to us.’
I love the way in which the author views everything through the lens of a child, in a world at once enormous and tiny. Lively delivers complex topics filtered through the eyes of her young protagonist; when their father goes off to fight in the war, for instance, Jane and Edward are content, as they were able to make as much noise as they wanted in the garden, something not tolerated when their father was in residence. Instead, their farmhouse hosts land girls, and then evacuees from London, a period detail which works well, but which the children do not quite understand the reasoning behind.
Interestingly, Going Back was initially published as a children’s book. On reflection, Lively writes in her foreword of August 1990, ‘it is only tenuously so; the pitch, the voice, the focus are not really those of a true children’s book.’ Retrospect helped her to see this book differently. She calls it ‘a trial run for preoccupations with the nature of memory, with a certain kind of writing, with economy and allusion. I was flexing muscles… and it was only by accident that the result seemed to me and to others to be a book primarily for children.’
Despite being set during the Second World War, I found Going Back to be a very gentle, almost comforting, read. Lively has, yet again, managed to create a story which is at once brief, yet moving.
At just 125 pages long, with relatively large font, Going Back can be picked up and read in an afternoon. The entirety follows our protagonist, Jane, who reflects upon her wartime childhood spent at a farmhouse in a village named Medleycott, with her brother, Edward. She remembers days full of bliss, of ‘joyful indulgence’. Regardless, something seems to cast a ‘dark, chilling shadow over Jane’s remembrance, for the idyll came to an abrupt and painful end.’
In the first chapter, Jane tells us, with nostalgia: ‘It seems smaller, going back: the garden, the house, everything. But the garden, especially. When I was a small child it was infinite: lawns, paths, high hedges, the rose garden, the long reach of the kitchen garden, the spinney with the silver birches. It was a completed world; beyond lay nothingness. Space. Limbo.’ Jane goes on: ‘Remembering it like that. There’s what you know happened, and what you think happened… Things are fudged by time; years fuse together. The things that should matter – the stepping-stones that marked the way, the decisions that made one thing happen rather than another – they get forgotten. You are left with islands in a confused and layered landscape, like the random protrusions after a heavy snowfall… There is time past, and time to come, and time that is continuous, in the head for ever.’
Despite the brevity of Going Back, we learn a great deal about the siblings and their family life. The children’s mother passed away when they were toddlers; their father was largely absent. They are looked after largely by Betty, a woman ‘tethered to her kitchen.’ Jane and Edward spent a lot of time outdoors, amusing themselves: ‘The garden was our territory – the space within which we knew the arrangement of every leaf and stone and branch… and the world had stretched and stretched like elastic.’ Indeed, the outside world is alien to them, cocooned as they are within the vast garden: ‘There was a war on, people said… There was a war on, so you couldn’t have lots of sweets any more… and no more oranges or bananas. There was a war on, so we mustn’t waste things because there won’t be any more where that came from.’
I really admire Lively’s prose, and my experience with Going Back was no different. Lively consistently conjures up such specific imagery, seeing the beauty in almost everything. I particularly enjoy the way in which Lively captures the natural world, and the changing of the seasons in her writing: ‘Autumn. The hedge outside the gate has blossomed with spider-webs. All over, they are, from top to bottom, multi-faceted, strung between blackberry sprays or tacked to the dried heads of cow-parsley… We squat on our haunches, absorbed…’. Later, she writes: ‘And the year slid, somehow, into winter. The hot, harvest, blackberry days were gone and we were into November: white skies, dark spiny trees, hot toast for tea, cold hands, feet, noses. Darkness as we fed the chickens, the stable drive pale-fringed with grasses, the landscape huddled under a violet sky, the fields peppered with snow that fell this morning and melted too soon to be any use to us.’
I love the way in which the author views everything through the lens of a child, in a world at once enormous and tiny. Lively delivers complex topics filtered through the eyes of her young protagonist; when their father goes off to fight in the war, for instance, Jane and Edward are content, as they were able to make as much noise as they wanted in the garden, something not tolerated when their father was in residence. Instead, their farmhouse hosts land girls, and then evacuees from London, a period detail which works well, but which the children do not quite understand the reasoning behind.
Interestingly, Going Back was initially published as a children’s book. On reflection, Lively writes in her foreword of August 1990, ‘it is only tenuously so; the pitch, the voice, the focus are not really those of a true children’s book.’ Retrospect helped her to see this book differently. She calls it ‘a trial run for preoccupations with the nature of memory, with a certain kind of writing, with economy and allusion. I was flexing muscles… and it was only by accident that the result seemed to me and to others to be a book primarily for children.’
Despite being set during the Second World War, I found Going Back to be a very gentle, almost comforting, read. Lively has, yet again, managed to create a story which is at once brief, yet moving.
December 13, 2021
I picked this up at a bring and buy sale so had no idea about its content although I'd obviously heard of the author. It's marvellous, a fictionalised memoir (i guess) of growing up on a farm in Devon during the Second World War, full of wonderful description and images (i'll put a passage on tomorrow as I haven't got the book with me at the moment). It's not ground breaking, just a lovely read.
- Here's the promised passage:
..and on to the weed are latched tadpoles by the hundred, grazing away there an inch or two below the surface.. We lie on our faces, our bodies cold against the flagstones, and stare down at them, so close that our breath dents the water, and they chomp away unaware. We dip our hands in and scoop them out in ones and twos, and they skirmish in the pink ponds of our hands, round and round, frantic, tickling, their eyes and panting mouths revealed. We maroon them on lilypads, thrashing in a drop of water, and then relent: we dunk the pads and watch the tadpoles’ desperate plunge downwards to the concealing mud. They sound, miniature, tormented whales, and the pond is empty…
- Here's the promised passage:
..and on to the weed are latched tadpoles by the hundred, grazing away there an inch or two below the surface.. We lie on our faces, our bodies cold against the flagstones, and stare down at them, so close that our breath dents the water, and they chomp away unaware. We dip our hands in and scoop them out in ones and twos, and they skirmish in the pink ponds of our hands, round and round, frantic, tickling, their eyes and panting mouths revealed. We maroon them on lilypads, thrashing in a drop of water, and then relent: we dunk the pads and watch the tadpoles’ desperate plunge downwards to the concealing mud. They sound, miniature, tormented whales, and the pond is empty…
March 1, 2019
Complex and immensely moving, “Going Back” is the (deliberately) fuzzy remembering of two children’s relationship with each other, with their grand house Medleycott and its visitors, and most of all with their widower father, set mainly from 1939 to 45. It’s hard to call it a children’s story, although it is a story about childhood - but readable by a wide audience.
The story is really slow to unfold - and at only 120 or so pages, this is some feat of the author: to let the characters out piecemeal until the final, sad, simple storyline emerges.
I don’t think I’ve found a book so touchingly about place and time and memory since the (very different) work of Alan Garner, but - partly because of the period of the story- it reminds me most of the monumental Atonement. Similar themes of regret and unreliability, of the blurring lines of class and belonging are brought out, but with a frost-clear simplicity. As the narrator Jane explains, while introducing her memories of her childhood home as she packs it up as an adult, “Remembering is like that. There’s what you remember, and there are the things that have never stopped happening, because they are always there, in your head.”
The story is really slow to unfold - and at only 120 or so pages, this is some feat of the author: to let the characters out piecemeal until the final, sad, simple storyline emerges.
I don’t think I’ve found a book so touchingly about place and time and memory since the (very different) work of Alan Garner, but - partly because of the period of the story- it reminds me most of the monumental Atonement. Similar themes of regret and unreliability, of the blurring lines of class and belonging are brought out, but with a frost-clear simplicity. As the narrator Jane explains, while introducing her memories of her childhood home as she packs it up as an adult, “Remembering is like that. There’s what you remember, and there are the things that have never stopped happening, because they are always there, in your head.”
January 2, 2013
A haunting exploration of childhood recalled, and the nature of memory.
Powerful story, simply told, the writing beautifully crafted. And, bizarrely, as I read it now, I have a distinct recollection of being here before. Had I already read it, or was it done as a radio play, perhaps ?
Powerful story, simply told, the writing beautifully crafted. And, bizarrely, as I read it now, I have a distinct recollection of being here before. Had I already read it, or was it done as a radio play, perhaps ?
March 19, 2023
Interesting exploration of childhood memory but something just wasn’t all there for me = 2.5
December 18, 2019
In the preface, Penelope Lively explains that the novel originally was published as a book for children in 1975. With her approval, the book was republished on an adult list in 1990. This was good news because I might not have read a children's book and I am so happy that I got to read this beautifully written tale of a young brother and sister living in a country farmhouse during World War Two. Writing as an adult, the sister describes those years from the viewpoint of her younger self. Highly recommend. 4.70.
October 26, 2023
Penelope Lively: Going Back.
Going Back, by Penelope Lively, reconstructs the story of two children growing up on a farm, called Medleycott, in Somerset during World War II. Jane, one of the children who is now married and has children on her own, tells the story of her childhood to her husband, who drives with her to Medleycott, because the house she was born in is going to be sold.
Jane and her brother Edward are inseparable. They do everything together and love living at Medleycott, which they call a paradise. Their mother died very early and now there is Betty looking after them. When the war starts, their father leaves for Scotland, but Jane and Edward do not really mind because they do not like him. Jane even hates him, because he is always extremely strict with Edward, who is not able to do anything right in his father’s opinion. One day Mike comes to Medleycott. As a conscientious objector and as a Quaker most people do not like him and he must leave Medleycott when the father, who comes home on an unannounced leave, finds out that he lives there. But Mike has a special relationship to Edward since he teaches him to play the violin. Both children have trust in him and that is why they decide to go to Chedzoy, where Mike lives in his own barn. They run away from Medleycott, because Edward does not want to go back to boarding school where his father sent him after half term. Betty comes to take the children home. They have another year together at their beloved place before Edward must go back to boarding school again.
Interestingly, Going Back was initially published as a children’s book. On reflection, Lively writes in her foreword of August 1990, ‘it is only tenuously so; the pitch, the voice, the focus are not really those of a true children’s book.’ Retrospect helped to see the book differently. Lively calls it ‘a trial run for preoccupations with the nature of memory, with a certain kind of writing, with economy and allusion. I was flexing muscles… and it was only by accident that the result seemed to me and to others to be a book primarily for children.’ Despite being set during the Second World War, Going Back is a very gentle, almost comforting, read. Lively has managed to create a story which is at once brief yet moving.
It is a story about remembering, about going back to the places of childhood and about changes that take place when somebody is growing up. And it is about the meaning of friendship between brother and sister, which lives on in the mind, even if, spoiler alert, one of them dies, who, in this case, is Edward who dies in the Korean War as a soldier.
Going Back, by Penelope Lively, reconstructs the story of two children growing up on a farm, called Medleycott, in Somerset during World War II. Jane, one of the children who is now married and has children on her own, tells the story of her childhood to her husband, who drives with her to Medleycott, because the house she was born in is going to be sold.
Jane and her brother Edward are inseparable. They do everything together and love living at Medleycott, which they call a paradise. Their mother died very early and now there is Betty looking after them. When the war starts, their father leaves for Scotland, but Jane and Edward do not really mind because they do not like him. Jane even hates him, because he is always extremely strict with Edward, who is not able to do anything right in his father’s opinion. One day Mike comes to Medleycott. As a conscientious objector and as a Quaker most people do not like him and he must leave Medleycott when the father, who comes home on an unannounced leave, finds out that he lives there. But Mike has a special relationship to Edward since he teaches him to play the violin. Both children have trust in him and that is why they decide to go to Chedzoy, where Mike lives in his own barn. They run away from Medleycott, because Edward does not want to go back to boarding school where his father sent him after half term. Betty comes to take the children home. They have another year together at their beloved place before Edward must go back to boarding school again.
Interestingly, Going Back was initially published as a children’s book. On reflection, Lively writes in her foreword of August 1990, ‘it is only tenuously so; the pitch, the voice, the focus are not really those of a true children’s book.’ Retrospect helped to see the book differently. Lively calls it ‘a trial run for preoccupations with the nature of memory, with a certain kind of writing, with economy and allusion. I was flexing muscles… and it was only by accident that the result seemed to me and to others to be a book primarily for children.’ Despite being set during the Second World War, Going Back is a very gentle, almost comforting, read. Lively has managed to create a story which is at once brief yet moving.
It is a story about remembering, about going back to the places of childhood and about changes that take place when somebody is growing up. And it is about the meaning of friendship between brother and sister, which lives on in the mind, even if, spoiler alert, one of them dies, who, in this case, is Edward who dies in the Korean War as a soldier.
January 24, 2018
Este libro ha sido una lectura obligatoria como parte de la evaluación de la asignatura de Inglés. Al principio pensé que iba a ser un libro muy tedioso y que no me iba gustar (de hecho estaba pensando en darle 1 sola estrella de lo mal que lo pasé): comienza con un inglés complejo y con multitud de descripciones cada cuatro palabras que lo hacen muy muy lento y difícil de leer. De la mitad en adelante mejora un poco, ya que el argumento se hace (ligeramente) más potente, aunque el final me sabió a poco. El lenguaje que utiliza me pareció difícil al principio, tanto por la toma de contacto como porque estaba plagado de descripciones muy pomposas. Después se hace algo más fácil de leer, aunque para una persona estudiante puede ser complicado seguir el hilo de la historia al 100%. Personalmente, la primera mitad no me gustó porque no contaba nada interesante, luego mejoró un poco. Por todo ello, le pondría una puntuación de entre 2,5-3.
December 18, 2022
This is a little gem of a book. I'm a huge Penelope Lively fan, so was taken as always with her writing. Her description of the English farmland was perfect reading as I lay out in my own very modest American garden. While the story is nothing the same, it still reminded me of "Elizabeth and Her German Garden" by Elizabeth Von Arnim. The actual story (which I also enjoyed) comes in second to idea of memory and what it holds for all of us. As I continue to slowly make my way through all of Ms. Lively's books (so thankful she wrote so many), I continue to smile and thoroughly enjoy.
April 23, 2023
This is a little gem of a book. I'm a huge Penelope Lively fan, so was taken as always with her writing. Her description of the English farmland was perfect reading as I lay out in my own very modest American garden. While the story is nothing the same, it still reminded me of "Elizabeth and Her German Garden" by Elizabeth Von Arnim. The actual story (which I also enjoyed) comes in second to idea of memory and what it holds for all of us. As I continue to slowly make my way through all of Ms. Lively's books (so thankful she wrote so many), I continue to smile and thoroughly enjoy.
February 10, 2024
I bought this book at a second hand book fair. I remember reading another of her books when I was about 10 years old which my sister had and I loved that. The Ghost of Thomas Kempe.
This book, Going Back, was a great read. Some passages reminded me of when I was the same age as the children in the book. I could relate to the references of reading Arthur Ransome books! Ultimately Going Back is one of those sad books that has left me feeling down. I need to shake this feeling off, so I will make a coffee and go out for a bit.
This book, Going Back, was a great read. Some passages reminded me of when I was the same age as the children in the book. I could relate to the references of reading Arthur Ransome books! Ultimately Going Back is one of those sad books that has left me feeling down. I need to shake this feeling off, so I will make a coffee and go out for a bit.
April 3, 2022
The narrator, Jane, recalls her childhood with her beloved brother, Edward, at Medleycott in Somerset during the war. The memories are muddled, some vivid, others out of focus, as memories of childhood always are - and the whole is tinged with a sense of melancholy. It’s wonderful writing, the descriptions reminding me somehow of Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie and even A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas.
August 5, 2023
This is yet another beautifully written book by Penelope Lively. I finished this novella in an afternoon--and I'm a slow reader. Her descriptions of how memories work--some dreamlike, others solidly implanted in our brains--are wonderfully evocative. And the way she writes about the simple joys of childhood is lovely. She's one of my all-time favorite authors. I don't think I've ever read anything she's written that I didn't love.
January 18, 2018
Deludente. 200 pagine in cui non succede assolutamente nulla. È ambientato in Inghilterra al tempo della Seconda Guerra Mondiale e racconta la vita quotidiana di due bambini, fratello e sorella. Il momento più emozionante è quando il fratellino decide di fuggire di casa per non dovere andare in collegio e la sorella lo segue. Peccato che poi finisce tutto in una bolla di sapone.
February 12, 2018
Written as a children’s book originally this is a beautiful story with wonderful characters. I eventually found this as it was not on the Amazon electric book list and I’m so pleased I found it. Definitely a book I will read again and again. As in all Penelope Lively novels she plays with time moving backwards and forwards with ease. Highly recommended.
June 14, 2019
A classic novel I thoroughly enjoyed reading. It was interesting to read from children's perspectives the joys and difficulties of living in the war. Lively also portrayed well the different relationships between the characters.
July 31, 2017
Beautiful prose, details vivid, luminous. She brings out so well the truth of recalling strong memories. Loved it.
April 26, 2018
beautiful little book, loved it
February 3, 2019
Short but beautifully written
April 23, 2020
Thought it was going to be like Cider with Rosie for kids but it was just dull.
April 28, 2020
A short but delightful bittersweet imagining of childrens' life in rural Somerset during the second world war.
March 12, 2021
A sweet story about a wonderful loving relationship between siblings and place. It felt so real I thought it was a memoir. It really touched me. Penelope Lively is a terrific storyteller.
August 12, 2022
Written as a children's book (more like YA), but reissued on Lively's adult list. I think it much more appropriate as an adult book. And very enjoyable.
September 15, 2024
A perfect gem.
August 3, 2020
"Going Back" is a compact little novella about the experiences of two siblings living in the British countryside during WW2. While the story itself is pretty unexceptional, Lively's prose brings the setting and the children's feelings to life so vividly that you're transported back to being a child yourself: the way your home and immediate surroundings feel like the whole world; the magnitude of everyday, mundane events; the apparently inexplicable actions of adults around you, whose choices you only understand later in life.
The story is bound by a framing narrative from the adult perspective of one of the children, introducing a layer of memory and nostalgia which seem to be common themes in Lively's work. "Going Back" was apparently originally published as a children's book, before being released as part of her adult catalogue - but for me, this frame narrative elevates it from a story that young adult readers would enjoy to a more ruminative reflection on childhood aimed at adults.
Not a book I'd go out of my way to read, but a pleasant book to lose yourself in for a couple of hours.
The story is bound by a framing narrative from the adult perspective of one of the children, introducing a layer of memory and nostalgia which seem to be common themes in Lively's work. "Going Back" was apparently originally published as a children's book, before being released as part of her adult catalogue - but for me, this frame narrative elevates it from a story that young adult readers would enjoy to a more ruminative reflection on childhood aimed at adults.
Not a book I'd go out of my way to read, but a pleasant book to lose yourself in for a couple of hours.
January 23, 2019
To be honest, I don't really see this appealing to children at all, even smart ones. But as a beautifully written novella for an adult audience, it works well. Lively gives an evocative rendering of childhood and the nature of time and memory in this story of a brother and sister in wartime Somerset. Nothing much happens for most of the book, but that's just fine, because it's a pleasure to be immersed in the lovely landscape Lively so masterfully evokes.
3.5 stars
3.5 stars
November 17, 2021
Beautiful and poetic without being dense, pompous, nor sentimental. I don't know that I've read a better childhood memoir since Cider With Rosie.
Originally conceived as a children's story, Lively later accepted that it didn't read like one, recognizing it instead as a trial run for (her) preoccupations with the nature of memory.
Originally conceived as a children's story, Lively later accepted that it didn't read like one, recognizing it instead as a trial run for (her) preoccupations with the nature of memory.
July 11, 2016
Behind the gentle, pastel children's cover and between the slim pages of this little book lies a story that is at once small and personal and yet enormous in impact - but enormous is the wrong word, completely the wrong sort of language, there is nothing crude or outsize in this. It is written with elegance and feeling, delicate yet exact, from the opening walk through a garden that mingles childhood memories with adult distance and unspoken experience lost in the mysteries and difficulties of memory.
Edward and Jane grow up in the idyllic house and gardens of Medleycott at the outbreak of the Second World War. Their mother is dead, and their father is distant and difficult, and soon is mostly gone altogether, leaving them to run wild, playing together in their private world, cared for by the housekeeper, with the gardener, the farmer, the land girls and the Conscientious Objector billeted in the attic, their own perfect world. Every now and then their father intrudes, and it is his exasperation with Edward that will threaten their idyll.
Written with extraordinary beauty and intensity, evoking the Somerset countryside and the childish emotions and the adult regrets. It is warm, funny, fierce and ultimately heartbreaking. A brilliant, beautiful book, gorgeous to read, rich in feeling and vivid in setting and time.
Edward and Jane grow up in the idyllic house and gardens of Medleycott at the outbreak of the Second World War. Their mother is dead, and their father is distant and difficult, and soon is mostly gone altogether, leaving them to run wild, playing together in their private world, cared for by the housekeeper, with the gardener, the farmer, the land girls and the Conscientious Objector billeted in the attic, their own perfect world. Every now and then their father intrudes, and it is his exasperation with Edward that will threaten their idyll.
Written with extraordinary beauty and intensity, evoking the Somerset countryside and the childish emotions and the adult regrets. It is warm, funny, fierce and ultimately heartbreaking. A brilliant, beautiful book, gorgeous to read, rich in feeling and vivid in setting and time.
November 15, 2015
Going Back is a beautifully simple book that adds up to so much more than the sum of its parts. Jane returns to her childhood home on a Somerset farm following the death of her father and is instantly taken back to the life she spent there with her brother during the war, and of the domestic stresses and strains following her mother's death that lead the children to take refuge with the domestic staff rather than face their distant and mercurial father, and eventually to take rash action that has long-term consequences. Like Carrie's War this is a book about how adults experience the memories of their childhood, how some elements remain crystal clear while others blur and become merged with others. It's a novel painted on a small canvas, but certainly none the worse for that.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 35 reviews