Lively's 'Making It Up' is intriguing

MAKING IT UP, by Penelope Lively, Viking, 215 pages, $24.95.

Penelope Lively is the highly sophisticated and creative British author of some 16 critically acclaimed novels, including "Moon Tiger," winner of the Booker Prize — and most recently "The Photograph," a splendid novel about the power of memory as suggested in photographs.

Lively has reached the age when many artists write their memoirs. In "Making It Up," she has actually written the very antithesis of a memoir — focusing instead on the imaginary "alternatives" in her own life.

Everyone has asked themselves such questions as "What if I had married someone else? Or chosen another profession? Or lived in a different place?"

In Lively's case, she asks, "What if I hadn't escaped from Cairo, Egypt (her actual birthplace), at the outbreak of World War II?" What would her life have been like had she become pregnant at 18? Is life a question of destiny or merely a series of choices that can propel you in many different directions — with different friends, jobs, goals, experiences, education?

As she looks at the alternatives to her life, Lively gives the reader a hint of how real life can inspire fiction. In her case, World War II came to Egypt in 1941 when Rommel's army arrived at Sollum, on the west- ern edge of Egypt. When the Germans arrived at El Alamein, they were only 70 miles from Alexandria.

As everyone anticipated a German assault on Cairo, questions arose as to what city or country would be best to receive the oppressed. Palestine? Kenya? Aden? Cape Town? South Africa would be an interesting place to see!

Lively didn't really go to Cape Town, but her alternative story takes her character in that direction. Shirley Manners seems a stand-in for Lively — a nanny whom everyone calls "Film Star" because she is pretty.

She is on a troop ship, and the stewards in white are really naval officers. There are no deck chairs, and the rooms are too basic and small. There are four beds in each room, "and they'd got a retired teacher from the English School in with them, a bit of an old prune-face, to be honest."

Shirley becomes infatuated with Alan Baker, a medical orderly who is looking forward to a week's leave in South Africa. When he asks Shirley why people call her "Film Star," she blushes. But he thinks a Hollywood type would be covered up with makeup and she isn't. "You're prettier by far!" he tells her.