Broken Bonds

Blood Ties by Jennifer Lash
(Bloomsbury; 375 pages; $13.95; Amazon: $11.16)
 

          The writer Jennifer Lash did not live long enough to enjoy  the fame of her two sons, actors Rafe and Joseph Fiennes. She died of cancer in 1993, and her last novel, Blood Ties, was still unpublished. Since completing the manuscript in 1989, she had tried, without success, to convince a publisher to take it on.  Rafe Fiennes, through his connections, helped get the book into print two years ago, and with their sister Sophie, a documentary film maker, the two brothers have been actively promoting this new paperback edition. It is a fine family tribute to an unusual woman and mother. Lash, who endured a lonely and abusive childhood, suffered through breakdowns as a young art student and after marrying photographer Mark Fiennes struggled to carry on with her painting and writing  and at the same time to imbue her six children with her love of nature and all God's creatures, and instill in them a devotion to the magic spell that words can cast.

          Lash's  interests, and her own difficulties, thread through this sometimes troubling and ultimately rewarding book.  The novel is circular, beginning with a portrayal of an old woman named Violet Farr reflecting on a lost past and clutching in her hand a crumpled piece of paper from a child's notebook and the dry bones of a bird. Near the book's end, we see Violet again with the note and the bird's sad remains, and by then we have come to understand their significance and the bitter and horrifying story behind them. Violet, an impulsive and independent girl, had made all the wrong choices in her life. She married a weak man, and took charge of running their substantial farm in Ireland.  Only from the mountains and fields around her and from her beloved dog does she find strength and completeness.

          By and by, she and her husband have a child, a boy named Lumsden. Neglected by both parents,  he grows to be a mean-spirited, selfish young man, and when he is forced to leave Ireland because of a nasty incident with two children, Violet is glad to see the back of him. The despised Lumsden carelessly fathers a baby by a barmaid, and the hapless little boy, named Spencer, eventually ends up in his unloving grandmother's home. The child's strange and silent nature offends her and, after a gruesome death of an animal, she brutally sends him away.  In London, he descends from institutional care to living on the streets until he is taken in by the family of a kind young woman. Through her, Spencer is awakened to love, but at the moment when he experiences the fullness of freedom and hope, there is a fatal accident. Receiving the news, Violet, as Lash writes, "felt simply the great weight of flesh and age. Stagnant days stretching ahead into the gray struggle of winter months.''  Her pride and sense of her own rightness have finally been assaulted, and the memory of what has happened is past enduring.

           The author turns a last, bright light on that darkness, closing her book with a short and remarkable passage of redemption.  Throughout, Lash looks with scorn on the British class system with all its snobbery and petty humiliations, and in a Dickensian vein,   contrasts the goodness of nature and simple folk with the heartlessness of the city and its unfeeling strivers.  While Blood Ties often seems overheated and hallucinatory, like a waking vision by someone restless with fever,  Lash writes truthfully and with compelling urgency about the pain inflicted from generation to generation