In The Temple of Mithras Alice a student on an archeological dig in 1973 does

In “The Temple of Mithras”, Alice, a student on an archeological dig in 1973, does not expect to live very long as she is waiting for the bomb to drop. The bookends of each section are what really happened – it’s a kind of alternative memoir.”The characters often share Lively’s preoccupations of the era. Then again, it’s more interesting for me as a novelist to be dealing with different characters rather than trying to think of an alternative me for each section… You may be someone in their lives who has loomed largely as a parent or as a wife, or you may have been just a passing ship.

Naturally, Chloe’s own children rebel.There were two reasons for Lively’s decision to shunt herself aside as a character. “I was thinking about the artificiality of the perception of one’s own life as being the central figure,” she says “No one else sees it like this For others, you are peripheral, a bit player. For her, the night of the Arts Ball was just a heady rite of passage – but suppose, in those pre-pill days, she had become pregnant, and faced social disgrace as a single mother, or death through a backstreet abortion? Here again, the fictional story is told from the viewpoint of the illegitimate daughter, Chloe, ashamed of her freewheeling mother and determined to lead an orderly life, with job, mortgage and husband. In real life, her mother, nanny and herself were evacuated to Palestine. The fictional family – the child re-named Jean, and younger than Penelope – take a boat to South Africa via the Mozambique Channel.

As happened with a number of boats, it is torpedoed by a German submarine, and the child dies. The story is told from the viewpoint of a nanny, whose character is based on her own nanny, Lucy.The foreword to the second story, “The Albert Hall”, describes the young Penelope at the Chelsea Arts Ball in 1951, wearing calf-length blue jeans, a checked shirt with its tails knotted so that her midriff is bare, and vast hooped gold earrings. She was in love with the older man who had brought her and, in the small hours, they left for his flat. In the “bookends” at the beginning and end of each story, Lively begins with an introduction to the real circumstances, and ends with an afterword as to the actual outcome. Why am I who I am rather than somebody completely different?The Jhabvala alternative selves are at the centre of each narrative, whereas the Lively alter ego is usually at the edge of her stories. Thus, in the first, “The Mozambique Channel”, a British family is fleeing Egypt in 1941 as the Germans advance towards Cairo. Real life is quite out of control, and the paths not taken look like an evolutionary tree that spreads off in all directions.

What I tried to do was look at one possible alternative at different stages of my life and turn it into a fictional road not taken.”Curiously enough, another Booker-winning novelist, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, had a similar idea for a semi-memoir My Nine Lives, published a year ago. Lively had just sent her manuscript to the publisher when Jhabvala’s book came out. Her first thought was that there “must be something in the air,” but then she realised that as Jhabvala was of a similar age, she too may have been thinking in the same way. Choice and contingency land you where you are, and the whole process seems so precarious, you look back at those moments when things might have gone entirely differently, when life might have spun off in some other direction.
“For a fiction writer,” she notes, “this gets very interesting, because in fiction you’re making choices all the time – nothing is left to contingency, or shouldn’t be Every sentence is a question of choice The writer is able to impose a pattern. The road not taken, the opportunity lost, prompt nostalgia or regret.

Penelope Lively, in her new fictional “memoir” Making It Up (Viking, £14.99), takes alternative lives as the theme, re-making her past life as it might have been, but for chance. The re-making seems the result of curiosity rather than regret, for she is a successful novelist, a Booker Prize winner for Moon Tiger in 1987. She had a long and happy marriage until the death of her husband, Professor Jack Lively, in 1998, and has two children who have been, she says, “the light of her life”. She lives in a pleasant house in a garden square in Islington. There should be nothing to regret, but story-telling is an ingrained habit. Just as her earliest fictions, as an isolated and bored child growing up in Egypt in the early 1940s, were fables about herself drawn from Greek mythology, so at the other end of life, the mythology that intrigues her is of imagined alternatives.”When you’re making climactic decisions, they do all cluster in younger life.