(1997 - Bloomsbury)
No dedication
About the book:
Violet Farr is Irish, married to the ineffectual Cecil, a repressed homosexual. In a moment of joyless union they conceive a son, the absurd Lumsden, but they are incapable of showing him love. He himself is a ne'er do well and fathers an illegitimate child, Spencer, by a lost soul named Dolly, herself a refugee from an unhappy upbringing in a Surrey village. When the severely neglected, traumatised boy is dumped on Violet, his grandmother, he becomes the focus for all the despair and disappointment that her son has loaded upon her.
Press voices:
"A very compelling novel which attempts, with unusual
honesty, to portray
complicated and uneasy emotions"
Scotsman
"Precise and vivid"
Penelope Lively, Daily Telegraph
"It is a maternal book but written with ferocity ...
sympathetic but never
sentimental"
The Observer
"Very elegant...dense with detail, minutely observed
and with flights of
beautiful writing and lush delicious prose; always a
pleasure to read"
Literary Review
"A novel which probes every exposed nerve of family
feeling and family hell.
Jennifer Lash shows with absolute certainty the ways
in which man hands misery
to man ... sharp and funny"
Independent
"Wild and enjoyable ... Its strength lies in its vivid
particularity, its
fresh sardonic interplay of sharp wit and awful drama.
Readers will lament
its author's death, while at the same time applauding
her fiction's vitality"
Sunday Times
"A novel about the healing power of love...The
powerful engine of the story,
astonishing insights into the human heart, the
richness of the theme fight
through to achieve a powerful consistency that makes
this, Jennifer Lash's
last novel, a moving memorial to her own life which
ended in 1993"
Financial Times
"A harrowing demanding book, but ultimately a
profoundly inspiring one...In
its elaborate and painstaking progress, "Blood Ties"
charts all the dreads
and demons of family indifference and discord. Yet its
final embracing theme
is of acceptance and redemption"
Daily Telegraph
Some reviews:
Ms. Lash has written a vivid, frightening story of cyclical neglect with
a delicate hand. Though her subject is harsh, her writing never is. She
is refreshingly restrained in judging her characters, allowing readers
to arrive at their own conclusions as they progress through this
powerful novel.
The Wall Street Journal, Kate Flatley
In a quest for the respect that would automatically be granted to the
mistress of his estate, Violet married weak-willed and closet homosexual
Cecil. Violet's subsequent discontent and bitterness combine with the
steely reserve of the upper-class English to foster generations of
emotionally scarred offspring. The story originates quite drearily in
the recent past at Violet and Cecil's estate in Ireland, then meanders
back through the lives of various characters, providing pieces of a
puzzle for the reader to assemble. What begins as Violet's indifference
and Cecil's submissiveness evolves into degeneracy in their son,
Lumsden, leading to unmitigated horror for the grandchild, Spencer.
After literally dragging the reader through the heart-breaking tragedy
of child neglect, the author provides a subtle, yet much appreciated
glimmer of hope. Lash's novel is a complicated and thought-provoking
look at the awful strength of apathy versus the redeeming qualities of
honor and integrity. For those able to weather a somewhat tedious start,
Blood Ties is an emotionally harrowing and intensely rewarding tale.
Toni Hyde
From Booklist , September 15, 1998
A Lawrentian richness of event and language mark this final novel by
Lash (From May to October, 1981, etc.), who died in 1993. Here, as in
Lash's five other novels, is a fascination with the often painful and
always complex dynamics of family life and the ways families can both
damn and save people. Dominating the story is the flinty, Anglo-Irish,
intensely proper Violet Farr, who lives with her odd, diffident husband
Cecil in Tipperary, where she struggles to keep up appearances and
maintain a ramshackle Mansion. Violet tolerates Cecil's presence as long
as he makes few demands ("the hall barometer was his only real
possession") and keeps his homosexuality hidden. Unsurprisingly, their
son Lumsden, the result of an infrequent coupling, is a disappointment
to Violet, both too needy and too quietly defiant. Hes sent off to
boarding school, and when he returns home at age 17, its no great shock
to Violet that he has an uncontrolled taste for alcohol and a
suspiciously intense interest in younger girls. Uncovered in
compromising circumstances by the local priest (himself uncomfortably
aroused by what he witnesses), Lumsden is packed off for good, and for
some years Violet's rigidly plotted life follows its usual courseuntil
its disrupted and then altered forever by the arrival of eight-year-old
Spencer, the profoundly unhappy offspring of Lumsden and a hapless
barmaid. Violet suspects the worstSpencer is, after all, his father's
childand when circumstances suggest his guilt in a disturbing incident,
she banishes him just as she had his father. Tragedy follows, but,
thanks to the efforts of some benign strangers, Spencer does gain a
slender chance at happiness. Lash's determination to plumb the wayward
psychology of her characters, and her belief in the pitiless influence
of will and appetite on life, turn an otherwise unsurprising story into
something strange and unsettling. Some may find the language rich and at
times too hectic, but the power and originality of Lash's vision
overrides the occasional rough spots.
From Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 1998
Set mainly in Ireland, Jennifer Lash's dark, exhilarating novel is about
the redemptive power of love. It tells of Violet Farr and her loveless
marriage, her wild, unfathomable son and his illegitimate son, all of
them bound together in a repeating pattern of exile and homecoming,
rejection and, finally, acknowledgement and love. As Elizabeth Buchan
wrote in the London Times, "Jennifer Lash is a Lawrentian in so far as
she mines her material for the blood and thunder roaring between
spouses, and between parents and children."
Book Description
Bred in the Bone
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.
Washington Post, October 10, 1999