Blood Ties
by Jennifer Lash
Reviewed by Publisher's Weekly
Reed Business
Information
1998
Perhaps it is the sad
fact that Lash was dying as she wrote it that makes her sixth and last book so
thunderously powerful. Set in Tipperary, Ireland, and London, this tragic family
saga shimmers with a keen wisdom and resonates vividly with the details of
gentrified life in the countryside and with the contrast of the natural world to
so-called "respectable living."
Violet Farr, on the
rebound from a failed love affair, stubbornly enters into an inappropriate
marriage. Despite the conception of a child, there is no love between the
couple, and Violet's megalomania inevitably precludes a healthy mother-child
bond. The shunned son, Lumsden, grows up to become an amoral schemer and a con
artist. He is handsome, fascinating and dangerous, so self-centered that we
don't wonder when he rejects his own offspring, ill-conceived with lost soul
Dolly.
That child,
Spencer, burdened with insane genes and an alcoholic mother, is the most
pathetic of the family lineage. Only Spencer's own offspring, two generations
away from the soul-crushing negativity of Violet, will emerge whole and
uninjured, suggesting that healing and redemption can be achieved. This story
encompasses a broad range of emotional extremes, class issues, times and
locations.
The world Lash
creates is delivered forcefully into the reader's imagination in stark, resonant
language. Whether showing the shadowy heart of a vicious, destructive matriarch
or describing the pristine terrors of a disturbed child, Lash evokes the full
spectrum of human grace, folly and evil with dazzling perspicacity. One of the
most impressive contemporary novels to tackle that dubious, cliche-prone realm
of "the dysfunctional family," this is a moving, memorable work, which leaves us
mourning the early loss of the gifted writer who died in 1993. (Sept.) FYI: Lash
was the mother of actor Ralph Fiennes.
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