Lively, Penelope. The Purple Swamp Hen and Other Stories. Penguin Random Host, New York. 2016. F;6/17.

This English author is quite the grande dame (literally; she carries the prefix Dame) of English lit, having published dozens of books and stories, long a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Commander of the Order of the British Empire, etc. etc. She’s still going strong at 84. It wasn’t until about the fifth or sixth story of this collection that I started to wonder if she was a bit preoccupied: there was a big difference between the first (title) story and most of the rest of them.

That first story Purple Swamp Hen is just a dazzling little gem. The narrator is the hen, who escapes, possibly along with a young female slave, from Pompeii when Vesuvius erupts in the year 79 A.D. It’s from a donnish erudite but necessarily humble point of view that she describes the viciousness, venality, greed, sexual abuse of slaves, lying, and general selfish arrogance of the family in whose backyard she lives, trying to stay out of physical trouble.

The climate of the Bay of Naples was warm (and going to get a lot warmer, but we’ll come to that), and they liked to be out of doors as much as possible. Eat out, sleep out, wash the dishes, pluck a pigeon, gossip, quarrel, wallop an old slave, fuck that pretty new one, plot, scheme, bribe, threaten.

The father, a grasping wine merchant, and his son “theoretically employed in the family winery but spend(ing) most of his time hanging out downtown with his friends” both regularly have their way with the 14-year-old slave girl Servilia. At one point a gang of children get their hands around our narrator’s neck (“Pull its feathers off!” “Kill it!”) and Servilia rescues the hen. They have a quick conspiratorial communication: “No language passed, but perfect understanding. Something I had not come across before with that species” says the bird.

A couple of days following a bacchanalia at which the lord of the manor catches his wife with her lover, there develops what at first seems to be an earthquake, but which our astute Hen senses is something a lot more profound. Able to fly, she and her mate get up in the air and escape, and her relationships with Servilia and the whole dreadful family and city conclude appropriately.

The other stories held my interest but weren’t on the same level. They featured realistic but mostly doomed romantic relationships that seemed to start out just fine but gradually cracked and fell apart. The writing continued to be engaging, but there wasn’t quite the same bite of enthusiasm.

I love that this enormously entitled grandmotherly writer who you might suspect couldn’t avoid being a haughty old bitch delivers this wonderfully humble but clever hen. She’s an ironic autobiographical old bird who, after years of flapping around in the chaos of unforgivably bad human behaviour (forever immortalized en croute volcanique) soars into the sky and leaves it all behind. Every writer has to envy and bless the roll old Penelope Lively was on when she turned this one out. 9.2/9.4 the first story, 7.9/8.5 for the rest.