5 engaging stories about connectedness, continuity, and what it means to be human. ( )

I should have guessed from the title that this book was in fact five short stories rather than just one. I did enjoy it but as someone who doesn't generally like short stories I was rather annoyed by the sudden separation. It has however persuaded me to read more of Mr Faulks' works. ( )

Short stories about ordinary people keeping silent about their extraordinary lives:

A quiet schoolteacher who aids the Resistance and is imprisoned in a Nazi deathcamp.

A servant who doesn’t want to learn, barely feels, and offers to work without pay to belong somewhere.

A man living in a workhouse, his wife put in an institution, he starts a family with her sister, & after 19 years wife is released and they all share the same house. His gift to his children is never to talk of his harsh upbringing.

Elena, a lonely scientist researching into human awareness. Loving the boy her father fostered, then becoming aware he is probably her half-brother.

A musician falls in love with a singer-songwriter. She leaves & he feels she paid a heavy price ‘to feel your heart beat in someone else’s life’. He feels he is like an actor, playing a part he has never mastered.

The stories confirm that we can at times know someone else’s experiences, perhaps through reading or love step for a moment in their shoes, feel your heart beat in someone else’s life, imagine playing that part, but can never truly know that person. ( )

A Possible Life is described by its author and its publishers as 'a novel in five parts'.

And they are welcome to describe it as that if it pleases them. But in reality, it's 5 short stories that have been tweaked to give them some hint of a connection.

The 'theme' of the book, in so far as there is one, is that the life we live is just one of many possible lives, that a combination of luck and conscious decision leads us on a path that is but one of many; but that ultimately, to quote from the final story in the book, "if any of those bits of luck had fallen out a different way and I had had another life, it would in some odd way have been the same - my heart existing by another name." Each of the main characters in the five stories experiences a life-changing event that steers their lives one way, leaving us to ponder what might have been if those events had not happened.

The links, though, are tenuous, and the stories are perhaps read better five separate stories, where the reader can have fun picking up the references in each story to any or all of the other 4, rather than trying to work out how the book is supposed to work as a 'novel'.

Individually, the stories are all, in their own way, good; well-written, using a variety of styles, variously moving, amusing, touching. Group discussions show that everyone has their own favourite of the five, and their own view of which worked least well; none of the five is universally adored, nor are any universally disliked.

The opener, A Different Man, tells the story of Geoffrey, a junior officer in the army inept enough to lose a man on a training mission. Faulks draws on his vast amount of research on military history to describe events in a World War II prisoner of war camp. The writing style is lean, covering much ground in a few pages, while also finding room for some humour. The lost man, Hill from Norfolk, an English county renowned for its flatness, is described as 'quite possibly the last Hill in Norfolk'.

The Second Sister is written in the first person, from the point of view of a young boy sent to a Victorian workhouse, who pulls himself up from his poor start to become a property developer.

Everything Can Be Explained, set in the near-future, followers Elena as she becomes a scientist seeking the answer to what makes us human, what synapse in our brains allows us the conscious thought that separates us from are simian relatives.

A Door Into Heaven describes Jeanne's life as a servant in early 19th Century France.

The book wraps up with You Next Time, another first-person story, this time of a 1970s musician and his affair with a famous folk singer.

I found both A Different Man and Everything Can Be Explained enjoyable, well- written, moving, humorous at times. The Second Sister I could take or leave. A Door Into Heaven I did nothing for me. You Next Time I need to read again, in a few weeks. Reading it in the context if trying to find the connections that supposedly form the 'novel' resulted in me feeling frustrated and annoyed halfway though this one. I think it's probably a better story than I can give it credit for at the moment, and I will give it a re-read ( )

A Possible Life is a collection of five uneven stories of varying length that take place in varying places and varying times. Faulks attempts to bind them together with common threads about life, fate/chance, and memory. Unfortunately, all but the first story, "Geoffrey," about a cricketer and boarding school school teacher who enlists during World War 2 and ends up in a concentration camp, were, well, rather dull. I suspect Faulks may be trying to play on collective reader memory, too, drawing on archetypes and typical characters and plot twits, but the collection just didn't work for me.

(There's more on my blog about A Possible Life here.) ( )