Book Review: "Oleander, Jacaranda" by Penelope Lively

“When you do not know what to expect of the world—when everything is astonishing— then anything is possible and acceptable. Children are aliens in a landscape that is entirely unpredictable; they are required to conform to the dictation of a mysterious code while finding their way around a world which is both dazzling and perverse. I wanted to see if it was possible to uncover something of this experience”.

- "Oleander, Jacaranda" by Penelope Lively

I have to admit, I looked up what the title meant though I vaguely already thought they were plants. My plant knowledge is terrible. Penelope Lively is perhaps one of the better writers of atmosphere and so, to read a book about her childhood in Egypt was a real treat to say the least. She starts the book by looking at the trees going 'jacaranda and oleander' in that order, but knows that they must go the opposite way on the journey back, something deeply symbolic when it comes to returning and remembering the order of which things happened. Littered with memory, politics and philosophy, this book makes for a perfect short-read to lodge into your day.

When I first heard about this book the one thing that people kept talking about was the atmosphere. Even on the back of the book in the review by The Times, it says you can 'smell the dust' - and so, I was immediately sold on the whole thing because you all know how much I love a book with a ton of atmosphere. The atmosphere we get is one of Egypt during the period that it was being colonised. We are given notes about the narrator's childhood and the way she noticed the cultural differences.

However, we also become receivers of intense scrutiny by the author - she goes off on these tangents about child developmental psychology and sometimes, she can treat the reader like they're stupid. But I'll forgive her as she does address the nature of Colonial Egypt and learning about the ways in which she was taught that she was 'better' than the natives in their own country. She definitely found it strange and unusual that these native people were treated as subservient to the British and the writing ebbs and flows from atmospheric to analytical in this way for a while.

As we see the narrator grow, we start to lose the atmospheric storytelling a little for the way of the analytical. I'm not complaining because at least it doesn't feel as jarring and now, there are wars involved. But I do have to say that losing the atmosphere for the sake of the political structure means that the book definitely feels different to the beginning. I don't know whether this is done on purpose because the author wanted us to feel the same loss of innocence and childlike wonder. We no longer look at the oleander and jacaranda, we no longer smell the air and see the beauty - but now we are subjected to growing up in isolation and witnessing a political decline, or at least a shift into something regarded as dangerous.

The one reason that I say she could be doing this on purpose is because as the Second World War gets into swing, our narrator is sent to England to go to boarding school and loses a number of close things and people from her time in Egypt which she refers to as 'trauma'. These include not only the atmospheric beauty of the country but also her beloved governess. She doesn't care too much for her parents as they barely gave a care about her. But the governess, the nanny, the woman who looked after her, seems to be the greatest loss and then many things in the book atmospherically turn grey. It's a great feature of the writing but I'm not sure I enjoyed it all that much upon first read.

All in all, this book may have been quite short but it does cover all the major themes in terms of how a child would be thrown about during the midst of war. They are stripped of all agency and innocence and everything fades to grey and black. It is sad and more than often you just want to wrap the narrator in a hug - and I'm not a hugger.