OLEANDER, JACARANDA

Lively's experience as an English child in Egypt (and briefly, Sudan, Palestine, and exotic en routes) is perceived and pursued through the stubborn opacity of adult memory, longing for ``the rainbow experience we all have lost but of which we occasionally retrieve a brilliant glimpse.'' It is novelist Lively's (Cleopatra's Sister, 1993, etc.) aim to discuss ``the nature of childhood perception and a view of Egypt in the 1930's and 1940's.'' She richly and elegantly succeeds. The child's vision of the world, declares Lively, is anarchistic, focusing on the moment; the child sees an unpredictable world in which anything is possible. The Egyptian landscape (bright green, gray/green, and tawny) held ``endless pilgrimages'' of animals and people, the smell of dust and dung. About the different ways of the natives, the intimate yet somewhat puzzling relationship with servants, Lively writes: ``This was the world. How could it be otherwise?'' To the young Penelope, her parents—career banker father, fashionably idle mother—were ``peripheral''; nanny Lucy was her whole emotional world. Like every child, Penelope was faced with the complex codes of adult society. Certainly English was best, but what about an English friend in the Brownies who shouldn't be invited to tea? (Lively recalls puzzled but quiet acquiescence.) Throughout the tumult of desert wars, Penelope and Lucy struggle to conquer math and history; in Cairo (the pyramids were after all just pyramids), they feed an elephant who accepts peanuts with a trunk ``warm and hairy and deft.'' There's an interesting ``collision'' between recovered perception and received history, however, in a nine-year-old's view of Charles de Gaulle, sponge in hand, on his way to the bath of a Jerusalem hotel. There is such strength in Lively's ``statements'' from the past—the long desert roads, sensuous Khartoum, Alexandria—that when she records the 1945 return to England—''the inconceivable cold, the perpetually leaking sky''—the reader feels the chill. A quite stunning meditation on the archaeology of memory and time's predations—persistent concerns in Lively's recent, superior fiction. (16 pages b&w photographs—not seen)