Some of the characters in Jennifer Lash's novel Blood Ties (Bloomsbury USA, $13.95) would probably rather take their chances in the Arctic than face another day with each other. Lash, the mother of actors Ralph and Joseph Fiennes and their four siblings, died of cancer in 1993, but not before completing this, her fifth novel (she has two nonfiction books to her credit as well, including On Pilgrimage, an account of the solo trip she made to Santiago de Compostela, Spain, after she learned of her illness).

       Lash wrote Blood Ties under a virtual death sentence; it didn't appear until four years after she died. Some reviewers thought that Lash's illness contributed to the book's intensity of feeling. Whether or not they're right, this story about a deeply troubled family does have a fierceness about it, a refusal to let things go gently.

       Here's Violet, the unhappily married matriarch of the small Farr clan, thinking about Lumsden, her son and only child: "What a bitter irony his ensuing life had been to her. Dishonest. Sexually deviant. A parasite. A liar. When he left the country [Ireland] in a haze of dishonour soon after his seventeenth birthday she admitted it all to herself, and the bitter facts burnt some sour place in her mind where a great angry tethered pain seemed forever after to abide. She could not budge it. She could not disregard it. She could not take it or break it. It was the unseen centre of her life, a great black cauldron bubbling with anger and shrill pity. Pity for herself. Pity for this irredeemable injustice she had suffered. It was as if some unseen force had taken her body and heart and hope and had spread it like a stained hide, to be trampled and marred and generally disfigured forever."

       Then the narrative voice swoops low into a deceptive calm: "Of course they had sensed trouble early on. There had been signs . . . " Make no mistake, though; Violet's a storm and a fury, and if Lumsden went badly wrong it's not entirely his fault. The sins of the first two generations come home to roost when Lumsden sires an illegitimate son, Spencer, who's dumped on his grandparents' doorstep, disturbed and lumbering toward insanity. Lash's vision takes in the bitter and the bleak but also sees a place reserved for happiness, though it make take the Farrs another generation or two to find it.