Six Lives
Six Lives gives you what it says on the cover, six short stories, each centred on a different character (3 men and 3 women, English, Irish, Russian, Italian and Egyptian) set in time from 1855 to 2012. The characters, villains and idealists, tricksters and victims, are all connected in different degrees by blood or circumstance to a fictitious British banking family called Feebes, but it is not a continuous narrative, and there is no attempt to tie up the loose ends.
The work is a tour de force, showcasing the author’s versatility in entering the heads of such disparate characters in such disparate settings in time and place. Each story is beautifully crafted, sometimes light-heated, often tragic. If there is a theme, it is the precariousness of human life and the vanity of human wishes; poverty is bad but wealth seldom brings happiness.
The author is very clever, and you will enjoy each of his six vignettes.
