The short story form is highly confining for the writer. Each new story opens up a miniature world for the reader. Once in a while she tosses in the possibility of a ghost, to mix things up and bring the past into the present. For instance, she talks us through the emotions of an argument between a young husband and wife and takes us to Spain with a pair of penurious artists. Relationships are the overarching theme, and Lively presents couples in multiple circumstances, including falling in love, making a commitment, deciding on children, surviving divorce, taking revenge, and, of course, dying. The remaining stories are mostly set in Britain, in various decades of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The ancient Mediterranean setting of “The Purple Swamp Hen,” is, however, an outlier in this masterful collection of stories from the octogenarian British author. Lively’s use of the swamp hen as her narrator is clever when you consider that this creature is in an ideal position to observe human shenanigans taking place in the garden, as Lively enumerates: “fornication, incest, rape, child abuse, grievous bodily harm.” An excavated Pompeiian fresco depicts this decorative bird that was kept in walled Roman gardens. It’s a tale set in ancient Pompeii just before the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius that buried the city in lava, and it’s told from the viewpoint of, wait for it, a purple swamp hen.
“The Purple Swamp Hen” is the title story in Penelope Lively’s recent collection.
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