'The House on Fortune Street' by Margot Livesey
BOOK REVIEW
Two cohabiting couples, four interlocking narratives and the vicissitudes of love and luck.
THE EPONYMOUS London house is not only the locus for the events quotidian and life-altering that take place within its walls but also a nexus for the myriad strings of this uncommonly attractive novel.
At its outset, the story seems deceptively simple: Two young women, close friends since college, occupy its two apartments. Abigail, who owns the house, runs a small theatrical company; Dara, her tenant in a garden flat, is a psychologist at a counseling center. Dara is having a difficult time getting her lover to extricate himself from his former girlfriend and their child and commit himself fully to her. Abigail, though, seems blissfully happy with Sean, having succeeded in luring him away from his marriage and erstwhile soul mate.
Pretty ordinary stuff, you might think -- not exactly unexplored territory. Yet in the hands of Scots-born novelist Margot Livesey, this seemingly mundane story has such substance and freshness that it draws the reader right in. Her style -- vibrant, evocative, irresistible -- has a lot to do with it: "In the silent aftermath Sean couldn't help noticing that his familiar surroundings had taken on a new intensity; the sage-colored walls were more vivid, the stove shone more brightly, the refrigerator purred more insistently, the glasses gleamed. His home here was in danger."
At this point, what endangers Sean's idyll with Abigail is nothing more than a modest overdraft on his bank account. But as the novel gathers steam -- moving back and forth across time, and from London to Scotland and even across the Atlantic -- threats more insidious and perfidious rear up to threaten him and the other characters. Very little in the world of this book is as it first appears to be. So a novel that begins well only gets better as Livesey plumbs and elucidates its depths.
This novelist does not shy away from risk, taking on such hot-button topics as child abandonment and pedophilia, while, to boot, making one of her protagonists a psychologist, a choice that might have led to pat explanation and obvious plotting. That is not the case here; the psychological foundations revealed are never overplayed, never reductive. The truths in this novel are deep, and the conclusions Livesey draws from them are subtle. Her control of her complex plot is manifest throughout.
