The house in Norham Gardens - the whole world in itself

“Hmm... in brief, it is about... it’s difficult to say. It’s about the Past and the Present, the Old and the Young, Life and Death, Reality and Fantasy about me and you ” I answer, “It’s a very wise book”.

Well, as we see, fourteen-year-old Clare lives with her two aunts at 40, Norham Gardens, a vast, eccentric Victorian house whose rooms are filled with old papers, old clothes and antiquated furniture. For Clare it is a shadowy, disturbing time. She has discovered a shield in the attic, brought back from New Guinea by her great-grandfather. Her dreams are haunted by images of New Guinea and it eventually falls to Clare to lay the ghost of an encounter between a Victorian anthropologist and a Stone Age tribe living in New Guinea seventy years ago.

The provincial greyness of wintertime Oxford stands in contrast to the vitality of New Guinea which gradually seems to infuse the house in Norham Gardens...

The Image of the House

From the first lines of the reading one can easily understand, that the main character of the novel is the House. The House. We feel its breath, its inner world, its scent, its soul. It is not inanimate. And it’s not animate. But it’s both full of life and feels tired. Sometimes it looks happy and sometimes upset. It depends on those, who live in it, it depends on many factors.

“... these are not houses but flights offancy. ” What a beautiful epithet! When we first read this line we can easily imagine the houses in Norham Gardens, because almost everyone has a talent to imagine. Imagination overcomes all bounds, obstacles and barriers.

Penelope Lively gives readers a wonderful opportunity to picture this House in their heads before reading the whole book till the end.

Silence in the House is one of the most important characteristic of it: “The House was silent”. The House is silent all the time, it seems as if it kept some secret, some history, something sacred: “The house squatted around them, vast, empty, unnecessary and indestructible.” Silence plays a very significant role while creating the idea of space and time.

It is full of old things, which “were not exactly up-to-date” and “need not have bothered”. This house is “like a museum where you ’re allowed to take everything out and mess about with it”. The house is like “a dinosaur, occupying too much air and ground”.

To understand this House, we should find out and interpret the most important symbols. There are a great number of things within the house, which symbolize something. They are not just things - some deep philosophical ideas are imprisoned in them.

Let’s look at some.

• -    The house first. We may say that it symbolizes eternity in the novel. It is indestructible, it just exists. It just IS, like eternity. It has everything within.

• -    The clock. It symbolizes time, the continuation of life, the approaching of the death, the course of life in time and space.

• -    The library in the House. The power of reading - this is what she means! Follow every page. Open. A lot in between. Close. Well, what do you feel? The whole set of peoples’ ideas,

thoughts, experiences, meditations, lives, reflections, conceptions, notes is represented here. Different worlds coincide in one place, at the same time. You can hardly remember some other place, which would remind you the Library. The power of literature, the power of books gives us power. It makes people live, fall in love, run countries, think, kill, help, go back and forward, stop in time and continue the way. Library is the heart of the house in Norham Gardens.

• -    Fireplace. The only thing in the house, which gives warmth. It symbolizes real love, devotion and family. Like this small fireplace is only cozy warmth in the huge cold dinosaurlike house, there is so little real sincere love and devotion in the whole world.

• -    The shield (tamburan). The past. The History. The Memory.

• -    Snow. It is the leitmotif of the novel. Snow is winter. Winter is the time of sleep. To sleep means to dye sometimes. Clare doesn’t like snow, she hates snow. It is dangerous for her and her aunts in all senses.

In conclusion, it’s important to notice, that almost all symbols (including all mentioned above) are connected with the idea of time. On the one hand time is invisible, on the other everything is entangled by web of time.

The Concepts of Time and Space.

Have you ever heard how time sounds? Would you like to listen to? Yes, it is possible. All you need to do is to open the novel “The House in Norham Gardens” and to read the following lines aloud - read aloud and slowly:

“The kitchen clock ticked and the pipes made the asthmatic wheezes and gurgles they always made, and water dripped from the crack in the sink into the bucket you had to remember to keep standing underneath. Outside the evening thickened and darkened and became night.”

Can you hear? Can you feel the rhythm? There is a special melody in this rhythm.

While reading the novel, we often meet, we often hear the ticking of clock:

“Silence reached away up to the house, up to the top of the house, up the well of the staircase past the first floor and up to the attic rooms, spiced only by the ticking of clocks: the kitchen one, loudly insensitive, the grandfather clock on the stairs, discreetly chiming since before the Boer War, Maureen’s Smith Alarm-o-matic, marking time by itself up there under the roof ”

“... and the kitchen clock had ticked loud and stupid. ”

“The library clock whirred, clicked, struck five. ”

“It was nine о ’clock. Wednesday. The third week in January. ” “... and the clock ticking. Ticking and ticking. ”

“The hall clock chimed twelve. ”

Time is everywhere. Time is mentioned on every page. There are different layers of time: the Past and the Present. And the Future. Remember an essay “Imagine a day in your own future and describe it, as though you are looking back.” Clare lives in the Present but touches the Past because of the Aunts and the house, and touches the Future because she is only fourteen and the whole world is opened for her.

Most of the girls of her age don’t think about time and death. But Clare does, because she lives with very old ladies. When you are young, like Clare, you think that you have much much time before getting old. You don’t think about what happened yesterday and not interested to know what will wait for you in future, you live today. But when you live with old Aunts, whom you love much, you think. You look at the clock and watches, you listen to the ticking in silence. You follow every minute: “There was a sensation of surging upward, through fathomless seas, which lasted for no time at all, and she was in her own bed, awake, and the clock said twenty past two. ”

The situation, when once the clock stopped, frightened Clare, because it could mean a lot for her. It was too symbolic, too strange to forget about time:

“Once, Aunt Susan, climbing the stairs, found her [Clare] standing in front of the grandfather clock. “What is the matter, my dear? You look quite panic - stricken. ”

“It’s stopped”.

“So it has. We forgot to wind it”.

“You never have before ”.

“Haven’tI?”... ”

What does it mean? What does usually happen when time stops?

This is why Clare escapes into the outer world, into the world of dreams, books, in the world beyond the world of the House in Norham Gardens.

Clare is overwhelmed by time. She likes the Past, because it was earlier, long before. A lot happened. When she found the shield, she felt the breath of the Past. It was a good time - many years ago.

To speak about time orientation is very reasonable now. I mean that time orientation refers to the value or importance placed on the passage of time. We may say that Clare is a past-oriented person. She regards previous experiences and events as most important. We feel that she places a primary emphasis on tradition and the wisdom passed down from the older generation - her aunts and grand-grand father. The aunts are the links to the past sources of knowledge for Clare. Events are circular. There is nothing more new in the world. Everything is based on past experiences.

All she has to do is to come back from the Past to the Present: to school, to aunts, to everyday business, which she must do to keep the house.

It is important to mention that the preposition “BEYOND” is often repeated in the novel. What could it mean? Beyond reality? Beyond time?

Clare travels. She is the link between different worlds. There is a peculiar world within the House in Norham Gardens, the world of the past, of the ancient times. There is an outer world - beyond the House, beyond the walls. They are parallel worlds. But there exist some others. Each room in the House is a separate world, full of fantastic, quaint things, pictures, clothes; where one can find a shield, at last. This is the world of things. The library is another universe. If s full of book, each containing its own little world. Clare used to read a book and to go somewhere far away from the House, from Aunts, from things, somewhere in New Guinea:

“They have no past, no history. The future is tomorrow and perhaps the next day. Their world is peopled with the ghosts of their tribe, and they live with spirits as easily as with tree and mountain and river. Their world is two-faced: what seems to be and what lies beyond appearance ”.

Clare’s dreams at night and thoughts create one more world, full of bright colours, butterflies and easiness. “Lost in thought” Aunt Susan once said about Clare. In fact, she is lost between numerous worlds, beyond time and reality. She hangs somewhere between Past and Present, childhood and adulthood, wintertime Oxford the vitality of New Guinea...

A good number of worlds coincide, interwoven closely, imprison one another and demonstrate to us, people, that everything is so relative. We should preserve the Past, like Aunts and Clare preserve the House, as we should grow up children, to teach them to preserve the experience of the past in order to be able to think. Our world is a puzzle, is a big mosaic, which consists of a great number of details - other parallel worlds. Its picture is time. We should remember: it’s difficult to put all the details together but so easy to confuse them again. Be careful! Don’t ruin what was created in the Past!