'The Victorian Chaise-longue' by Penelope Lively

Novelist Penelope Lively recalls what first intrigued her about Marghanita Laski's novel and explains why she thinks it is still such a powerful book nearly fifty years later.

I forget when I first read The Victorian Chaise-longue, but I know that I was immediately gripped by this odd, powerful story. Re-reading it - maybe thirty years later - those qualities remain but the book takes on an interesting new significance, seen from the vantage point of the end of the century. It now becomes a period piece on two different levels. The fifties setting that was contemporary when it was written is superimposed upon the Victorian nightmare into which Melanie is plunged. For today's reader, both are distanced, and while this does nothing to diminish the impact, it adds a further dimension. There is a further twist to the time factor.

At its most basic, this is time-travel fiction. But it is time-travel with a difference, avoiding the usual pitfall and cliché of the genre, which is to make it into a form of adventure. What Marghanita Laski has done is to propose that such an experience would be the ultimate terror - not exploration and exhilaration but pure horror. And she is absolutely right. Deprived of their proper placing in time and space anyone would become unhinged, which is why Melanie has to cling to the belief that she is dreaming for as long as she possibly can. You can escape from a dream. The point at which she is forced to abandon this comfort and search for other explanations is her plunge into nightmare.

This is where the Victorian setting in which she finds herself is such a clever construct. It is familiar, in an eery way. She has fallen asleep in a nineteenth-century London house and wakes to find herself in another such, but claustrophobically transformed. The objects and decor that she sees are not entirely alien, but disturbing. The chaise-longue itself is of course the vehicle of her displacement. In the early nineteen fifties, when the book was written, Victoriana was not yet fashionable. I can remember buying just such a chaise-longue myself for £4 when I was an undergraduate - draped with an Indian cotton bedspread it nicely embellished a college room; in the same way, for Melanie, Victorian furnishings were not chic but emotive. They suggested a climate that was oppressive. They suggested a past that was not tantalising but ominous.

Melanie is recovering from tuberculosis. That central fact also distances the book. It is quite hard now to realise that the disease was still very much around here less than fifty years ago. I remember the chest X-rays compulsory for all students in the first year at university. I remember also contemporaries who suddenly disappeared in consequence, and re-appeared a year later, having been packed off to a sanatorium in Switzerland. It was an inconvenience rather than a death sentence. But the spectre of the nineteenth century pestilence still lurked. When Melanie in her nightmare finds herself coughing blood, she knows what this means. And of course she has the wisdoms of her own century - she wants to have the windows flung open, to breathe fresh air. Marghanita Laski is able here to focus on what is perhaps the ultimate horror of her situation - that Melanie with the enlightenment of the future is trapped among those to whom she can explain and justify nothing. To them she is simply disoriented by illness. Crazy - or perverse.

The twentieth century's release from tuberculosis is set against the spectre that stalked the Victorians. But in the stifling, menacing atmosphere in which Melanie finds herself there is another dark, unspoken theme. Sex. Milly - her alter ego - if that is what she is - has been in some way disgraced. But the matter is taboo and what has happened is apparent only through her sister Adelaide's asides and innuendos and the baffling behaviour of two male visitors. To the reader things are clear enough, although it is never certain if Melanie is entirely aware. Once again, the chaise-longue is the hinge between the two planes of existence. The site of rapture, of ecstacy - that is the implication. Sexual rapture and the rapturous response to life and a spring day felt by Melanie when she lies on it, released for the first time from her sick bed. The freedom and happiness of her own sexual life, married to a man she loves, is set in opposition to the inhibitions and frustrations of that other age.

The past is another country, and not one that anyone in their right mind would wish to visit. For our own sanity, we need to be firmly tethered to time and place. I think that this simple truth accounts for the success of the story. Most readers find it disturbing - and compulsive. You read with fascination and alarm because of course you identify with Melanie. The reader becomes enmeshed in her nightmare and her search for explanations and for escape. Its intense atmosphere haunts, long after the book has been laid aside. And Victorian furnishings will for ever after have a new resonance, above all the chaise-longue.

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