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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Captures the quiddity of ordinary life and time passing, 8 Mar 2002
By A Customer
It's a mistake to bill this fine novel, as many reviews have, as being about supernatural forces. Like all of Livesey's previous work, the unexplainable enters into it at times, but I think you'll find that what you really enjoy is the story of an ordinary life, the passing of time, and the way our feelings change about people.
The story is of Eva, a child born in Scotland in 1920, who loses her mother at birth but gains two female "protectors" of some sort who periodically appear to save her from harm. As she grows up, their saving is often quite contrary to her desires, but she accepts them in the way we do all those things about ourselves that we feel we can neither clearly explain nor change.
Livesey's work is difficult to categorize. Her characters are sympathetic but somewhat minimal; not for them the pages-long analyses of dear self! She's never far from the get-up-and-fix-breakfast workaday world, either, which I find very refreshing. You get the idea that these characters are not only real and flawed but move in the same circles as the rest of us, perhaps even catching the same bus.
If you like Eva Moves the Furniture, speed right on to Criminals and Homework. (I'm not as fond of The Missing World.) Smaller scale, less passage of time, but more concentrated adventure.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
With friends like these, 5 Sep 2002
By A Customer
This beautifully written book tells the story of Eva, a lonely girl brought up in rural Scotland by her father and aunt after her mother dies shortly after Eva's birth. Throughout her life Eva is regularly visited by two mysterious companions, a woman and a young girl, who no one else can see. At times they appear to have her best interests at heart, saving her from dangerous situations and offering advice which changes her life for the better. But sometimes their intervention seems less positive and more possessive.
When she grows up Eva moves to Glasgow to become a nurse, working in a burns unit during the second world war. Away from her childhood home, she hopes to escape the companions' influence, but they continue to visit her and meddle in her affairs, even ruining her relationships.
This gripping story is both moving and heartwarming, and stays in the memory long after you finish reading it.
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2.0 out of 5 stars
"Seemingly random incidents of my life were in fact organised according to some hidden pattern.", 3 Feb 2010
It is Margot Livesey's contention in this book that some people find themselves with companions that are not of this world, in fact, dead people who are there to guide them down a path that is `right' for them. As a child, Eva often sees her companions, talks to them and allows them to influence her, and in later life even to the point where they guide her into a marriage, help her escape from a couple of threatening men, and even help her lift her sick father out of a river where he's been taken ill while fishing. They nudge her into jobs, then out of one into another. It turns out that they are people who have died before she was even born, but they are all her family members. Eva is guided out of one relationship with a man, and into another, though she has doubts about whether she really wants to forget the first man, a famous surgeon who is working with men who have been shot down and mutilated in battle. She is nudged towards a love affair with a young teacher instead, and marries him, mainly it appears because she wants a child.
I found this whole premise feeble and almost simple-minded. Many children have imaginary friends but they grow out of them; Eva seems not to want to and in the end it's hard not to see her as a perpetual child, her life managed for her to the point where she cannot take decisions or make choices on her own about any of the major developments of her life. Do people really enjoy being treated as if their own will must be bent away from any danger, excitement or real-life decisions? Livesey disappointed me in this book. She needs to return to the form of her wonderful book Banishing Verona and write about the real world again. I love her books as a rule, but this one is definitely not for me.
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