Blood Ties
by Jennifer Lash
Bloomsbury, 15.99 pounds, pp 375
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A Review by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
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Sunday Times
20 April 1997
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                 Jennifer Lash's posthumous novel -- currently receiving additional publicity from readings by her son, Ralph Fiennes -- ends serenely, but begins with "disorder, drained belief and dire peculiar distress."  It is a dark chronicle of love withheld over three generations, yet has such vigour, such a powerful idiosyncratic voice, that it is exhilarating to read.

            Violet Farr, the owner of a great house in rural Ireland, sets the book's tone.  Tall, arrogant, a keen gardener, she is, superficially, a recognisable stock character, the domineering, eccentric country lady.  Her mind, though, expressed through Lash's galloping prose, has a driven energy, and her emotions are fierce.

            Violet's scraggy cat is called Shiva:  Anglo-Irish Violet abhors and despises the Catholicism of most of her neighbours, but she has a strong sense of numinous.  She loves her black labrador.  With him she might look like a caricature of settled gentility.  The dog is called Birkin, in honour of D. H. Lawrence, and her feelings for him are extreme to the point of deviance.

            This could be absurd, and in a way it is, wildly and enjoyably so.  Throughout this book, Lash shows her wise understanding that the ridiculous and the deeply felt are not mutually exclusive.  Violet's husband Cecil is characterized by his fussy insistence on routine and his total incapacity for rising to the big occasion.  His response to the news that an illegitimate and previously unheard-of grandson has been abandoned on the gravel sweep is to remark that in that case there'll be time to water the geraniums before supper, cook being busy with the newcomer.  Cecil is a joke, rather a good one, but the inescapable dreariness of Violet's marriage is something we are made to feel on a tragic as well as a farcical level.

            The plot traces Violet's relationship, or lack of relationships, with her son, her grandson and great-grandson.  Their stories take us out of the demesne, into England and lives and places whose variety and verisimilitude demonstrate the sharpness of Lash's observing eye.  With Lumsden, Violet's son, with Dolly, the mother of his child, and with their offspring, Spencer, we move from the upper-class ordeals of prep school, debt and sexual instability to those of the less privileged.

            Lash is even-handed.  When Lumsden is accused of child abuse by a choleric priest we are made aware of the priest's impure excitement, but at the same time know that he is right in considering Lumsden a person prone to deprave and corrupt.  When Dolly's father thrashes her ruthlessly after she arrives home distraught and newly deflowered we understand that he is failing her in an irrevocably damaging way, but we also know (as she does not) that he is frantic with grief.  Only the good, modest, kindly people are presented without ambiguity.  For Lash, caritas is a lucid, uncomplicated thing:  it is its absence which is tortuous.

            Lash's style is unconventional.  Every word, every association, every turn of the plot, has the strength of something first-hand.  She bends syntax to suit herself.  She piles up words:  her phrases come habitually in sets of three.  The effect is not of verbosity but of the exuberance of a mind with more to communicate than can easily be contained.

            The novel has fantastic elements (mostly passed through the consciousness of poor disturbed young Spencer).  But its strength lies in its vivid particularity, its fresh sardonic interplay of sharp wit and awful drama.  Readers will lament its author's death, while at the same time applauding her fiction's vitality.