Strands of a life rewoven, artfully, into fiction

Making It Up
By Penelope Lively
Viking, 215 pp., $24.95

Any writer who shoves around words all day will tell you that order's the thing: All nouns and verbs must line up under the author's steely gaze, compliant as schoolchildren in a fire drill. Otherwise, where's the joy? One writes to impose the ego's scaffolding upon the messy business of life, and what chaos the ordinary life presents! Even the most rigorously truth-bound writers will bend and rearrange the facts, if only by where they choose to put them. Fiction writers, a wilder and sneakier bunch, get to sort through their rummage-sale findings and use them willy-nilly -- a friend's heartache becomes an antagonist's cross to bear, a stranger on a plane becomes the central character you needed to give your story life. Having elected to serve this god of the imagination, fiction writers must be ruthless in the hunt -- they haul their kill into the cave and hope it will help to feed the beast.

All of which may be more interesting to writers, perhaps, than to their audience, who are rightly concerned less with backstage mechanics and theatrics than with end results. But in a personality-crazed era where biographical facts are equated with fictional raw material, the eminently wise and amusing Penelope Lively -- winner of the Booker Prize, grande dame of emotionally resonant domestic novels -- has constructed what she considers an anti-memoir: her story of missed trains and paths neglected that instead wound their way into her fiction. The quest recorded in ''Making It Up" is a desultory and yet gratifying one, gathering meaning with each vignette until we glimpse the shimmering effects of the entire tapestry. Lively's may have been an abundant life -- a half-century of writing, a long marriage and children -- but the sensibility within is what laid the stone for every step she took.

Born in Egypt, Lively spent her first years in a cloistered life in Cairo; her father was a banker there, she was home-schooled until the age of 12, and so spent many hours reading in lush gardens, immersed in the classics. It was the early 1940s, a war was going on (sometimes within earshot), and Penelope was reading Homer and ''The Arabian Nights." She studied history at university, dabbled in anthropology, eventually fell into the labyrinths of English literature. Books defined her, in other words, and the conversation they provided became one she would embrace, then inherit: Writing her first book ''felt like a kind of neat reversal of what I had always done: reading had become writing."

And yet it is the stories themselves, independent of their tethers in the real world, that offer here the most intrigue and reward, displaying the natural ease of Lively's imaginative reach and the supple intelligence behind it. ''The Mozambique Channel" is the account of a British nanny and her young charge trying to make it to Cape Town during Rommel's advance; it is a simple love story with doom written all over it, delivering with exquisite intimacy the lives invented, then destroyed by history. ''The Temple of Mithras" concerns an archeological dig on a hill in southern England in 1973; the team includes a couple of male academics warring it out over turf and women, several students, and a faculty wife who heads for the hills with a feminist tribe. What makes this more than just a clever comedy of errors is the authorial vision, imposed upon a 20-year-old woman named Alice who lives in perpetual fear of the bomb. With the tragic certainty of the young, Alice knows that life is a tease and a gamble -- knows, too, that the very hillside where she digs is a sarcophagus of violence amid the wildflowers: ''Dig a few feet and you are into bloodshed. . . . This landscape is howling, if you listen." The howls give way to something softer, too, which makes tolerable and sometimes magnificent the life spent on your knees, digging tool in hand. ''She thinks about the language that should hang in the air up here, centuries of it, the reverberations of a million exchanges about love and war, birth and death, and what to have for supper."

Each story in ''Making It Up" is showcased by Lively's explanatory narrative: the nanny's desperate plight was a route Penelope and her mother and nanny avoided; the archeological dig was a fleeting passion of Penny the Younger. ''The Battle of the Imjin River," then, is a war story of a terrible battle in Korea that her own husband narrowly missed. But sometimes these autobiographical facts can be distracting, even intrusive, particularly the more dramatic the story. We don't mind knowing that Alice the anti-nuker is a young Penny Low; it's more jarring to be reminded that the young soldier under fire is a fabrication.

Intentionally nameless, he's been made an officer -- all that class and proper schooling -- and come now to this toxic darkness, where other young men wait for orders and he wonders, on stand-to, why the hell he's here: ''But he knew why. It was because that is what history does to people. It picks them up by the scruff of the neck and puts them where they do not want to be. It scuppers them; it condemns them to national service and then throws them this, as an extra treat."

Our fellow will not be rewarded for such realism -- happy endings are hardly guaranteed for the old enough and young in ''Making It Up," despite or because of the author's memory that ''when we are twenty, we are never going to get old." But aging makes its sweet arc in Lively's wanderings, and that turns out to be a gift of replenishment rather than despair. The 47-year-old conservator of ''Comet" has the chance to find out what happened to a half sister, long dead, an excavation into the past that will shape her own future. This generosity of possibility will extend to the couple in ''Transatlantic," where a woman transplanted to America goes back to her native England to see it has gone on merrily without her, ''impervious to her defection." Not every story is so abundant; a few, by nature of Lively's what-if blueprint, are whimsical and slightly gauzy. And despite the author's interweaving of fiction with autobiography, there's an odd dissonance that lingers between the two. I found myself intrigued by the facts but not very interested in how they shaped the fiction -- an insistent tugging, I suspect, of the reader's unconscious, which wants very much not to know. Tell me later where Dickens got Pip or how Faulkner saw Lena Grove walking down a road in the South. While I'm in the company of these inventions, I'd rather fancy them alive beyond the lexicon of space and time.

Gail Caldwell is chief book critic of the Globe. She can be reached at caldwell@globe.com.