Heat Wave, Penelope Lively

So I will speak about a book, Heat Wave. It was published in 1996. Everybody knows in this class this book, because we studied it. Remind you, when he came back at his house Harry found Pauline burning his book.

I will start with a short presentation of the author, Penelope Lively.

After that, I will present the book in its integrality.

Finally, I will try to explain you, why Pauline burnt Harry’s book, thanks to some quotations.

I.                  Presentation

1.    The author: Penelope Lively

Penelope Lively was born in cairo, egypt, on March 17, 1933. She began writing prolifically in 1970. Her work is generally concerned with the flow of time, the continuity of past and present, and the relation between history and personal memory. More, she wrote for children too.

2.    The characters

So, I will present you the most important characters, the characters with ‘Heat Wave’ begins. Voluntarily I will omit certain details not to reveal the suspense of the history immediately.

♣ The story begins with a woman, Pauline Carter, who is looking out of her study at World’s End. She is the most important character because she is the woman who sees and understands everything. She always knows the truth before her own daughter, Teresa. At the beginning of the text, she is fifty-five years old. More, we learn she is a publisher, and that she will spend her summer editing a novel about romantic love. Pauline is a woman alone.

♣ Pauline has got a daughter, Teresa. Teresa is a ‘kind girl’ who is in love with Maurice since three years. A sentence describes very well her love: ‘Her eyes on Maurice far gone in love snared, committed, lost.’  With the wire of the pages, we understand that Teresa is incandescent with happiness, and, like she says ‘You can’t think when you’re in love.’ She looks so vulnerable. She has a baby with Maurice, Luke.

♣ Maurice is her husband. He is forty-four. He is an ambitious writer and works on a history of tourism, about the myth of the British countryside. At the difference of Teresa, he never uses endearments like ’Darling’, or ‘Sweetie’. He looks egotist and he is terrified of age. He loves being pleasant.

3.    The story

If you want to read this book, do not listen, because it will have scoops.

Proofreader in the edition, Pauline spends her summers in a row of cottage lost to the north of england, baptized World’s End. A curious name. This summer, the adjoining cottage is occupied by Teresa, Maurice and Luke. When Pauline is copyediting an allegory of romantic love, she tries not to observe that the seemingly idyllic marriage of her daughter, Teresa, to ambitious writer Maurice, is treading rough water. But it looks like an evidence. From the thirty-fifth page, Maurice goes out during the night, and at the thirty-ninth, he lays his hand for an instant on a girl’s knee... Pauline is not long understanding, she soon realizes that he is involved in an affair with his editor's girlfriend, Carol, conducted when the couple visits World's End on weekends and during Maurice's sudden. Trips of Maurice in london are increasingly frequent…

It could be the simple history of an outgoing husband, but, it is a more subtle version. To Pauline, it is her own story which reproduces, the situation carries the echoes of her own betrayal by Teresa's father, Harry, also in his time an unscrupulous writer, like Maurice. And to her, it is so difficult, she doesn’t know what she must do. 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.

II.               Why Pauline burnt Harry’s book?

So as you could notice it, this book is not very happy. When Harry left Pauline, she had a discussion with her own mother. And she said: ‘If he were dead, I would be unhappy. Pure and simple _ just unhappy. That would be straightforward, compared with this.’ And in the extract we studied in class, we saw that the act of burning a book was like to kill someone. To writers, their books are like their souls. They can’t live deprived of that. We can imagine Pauline wanted to soften her suffering and by burning this book she killed him, she tried to forget him.

Which is so strange is the Maurice’s death at the end of the book. Maurice was unfaithful to Teresa and he died, just after a discussion with Pauline. We can’t say that justice is done, but when Teresa’s father, Harry, called her, he says that she seems ‘well, fairly calm, considering’. Like Teresa’s mother said, the sort oh her husband seems less painful compared to infidelity.

III.            My point of view

In conclusion I found this book not easy. In fact, everything is implicit, no words, lots of silences, long on looks… The ambiance becomes quickly a startling climax with heat and tension. More, there are lots of flash-back. Pauline sees her own stepson and she thinks about Teresa’s father, she is always thinking ‘infidelities’ and ‘sadness’, and it is distressing to the reader who shares the faintness. 

I want to add that this novel is not a good thing for people who are happy in couple because the conclusion of this book is the impossibility of compatibility and it is so sad. In my opinion, in the world there is more happiness than deception. But let us not reproach anything to Penelope Lively, there is always more to say on misfortune.