Not all Penelope Lively's books are genre fiction but her most renowned children's books tend to be, including 'A Stitch in Time', which won the Whitbread Children's Book Award, and 'The Ghost of Thomas Kempe', which won the Carnegie Medal. Both look at the passage of time and how things inevitably change, rather than unfolding through traditional plot strands. Lively is still with us at the age of 91 but this is an early book from her, released in 1973, so just over the threshold of fifty years that I set for my reviews of classic children's genre fiction.

You won't be surprised to find that the titular character, Thomas Kempe, is dead for the entirety of this novel, but then he's been dead for a very long time. The nominal lead, James Harrison, is very much alive but he triggers the attention of Kempe's ghost when his family move into a new house, one in which Kempe used to live back in the seventeenth century. Well, it's actually some workmen who trigger Kempe's ghost when they convert the attic into a new bedroom for James. It was previously nailed shut and may have been for a very long time, judging from the dust.

The house is East End Cottage and it sits at the edge of the town of Ledsham, a suitable place for Kempe, who plied his trade as a sorcerer. In fact, he's rather keen on picking that back up again, a sign to that effect being the first indication of his presence. James's mother put it up to hawk the produce weighing down their seventeen apple trees but, when they get back from a shopping trip, someone has added some other services: "Sorcerie. Astrologie. Geomancie. Alchemie. Recoverie of Goodes Loste. Physicke." And so it begins, with Kempe clearly not just a ghost but a poltergeist.

Being a children's novel, this doesn't go the route of the horror movie of that name. Nobody's in any real danger at any point, though James might suggest otherwise. He's a typical ten-year-old boy in that he's good at getting into trouble, which means that whatever Kempe does tends to be blamed on him. And Kempe does plenty, because, now he's been stirred up again, he wants to get back to business with James as his apprentice and lackey. James doesn't want to know, what with going to school and getting into trouble and all the things that ten-year-old boys do, so Kempe is increasingly frustrated and even angry with his new companion.

I last read this book when I wasn't much older than James, though I see from various inscriptions in my copy that it used to belong to my younger sister. I didn't remember a lot about it, only that Kempe was long dead and his ghost struggled to deal with the changes in pretty much everything since he was last paying attention, but I remembered that from another novel too, namely Louise Cooper's 'Crown of Horn', which tells a very similar story but with much darker consequences and with a more adult audience in mind. It was good to reacquaint myself with this one and see where I'd blurred the two together.

Where 'Crown of Horn' got very dark indeed in its depiction of a centuries-drift culture clash, 'The Ghost of Thomas Kempe' instead aims for light-hearted humour and a sense of whimsy. I enjoyed a host of little details, like the way that James is unable to find "wart charms and water diviners" in the 'Yellow Pages', a joke that would probably be lost on the youth of today in an ironic underline to the whole point of the novel. James soon decides that he wants to get rid of Kempe and so, in a rather limited way that a ten-year-old has to resort to, he hires the closest thing he can find to an exorcist, who turns out to be the local builder, Bert Ellison. I also loved Kempe's persecution of an elderly neighbour, Mrs. Verity, firmly believing that she's a witch.

Not everything is light-hearted, of course, because this isn't a comedy. At heart it's a drama that looks at the passage of time in a whole slew of ways. Most obviously, Kempe has the assumptions and experience of someone who hasn't ever left the seventeenth century, which clashes notably with the norms of the present day. However, he's not a particularly strong character, more of an opportunity for Lively to show us how James Harrison is changing as he reaches double digits and theoretically starts to grow up. He has an older sister, Helen, who has very different ideas about things than he does, or indeed their parents do.

What's more, Lively introduces another frame of reference when James starts to research East End Cottage and discovers the diary of another previous resident, Miss Fanny Spence, which she wrote in 1856. Suddenly, we're faced with the perspectives of three different people who lived in the same house in three different centuries and we can't help but compare them. As much as the lighthearted humour made me smile, it was sections dealing with James's growing connection to Miss Spence that connected with me most, a positive look back at time. The most sympathy I had for him at any point in the book is when her name comes up in class and he perks up and replies.

My least favourite part of the book is its ending, because the story at hand doesn't really receive any sort of resolution, at least not on the part of James or anyone who he brings into awareness of his annoying poltergeist. What resolution we get feels a little like a cheat, though I do get why Lively went that way. In fact, I believe it's much of her point, namely that, if enough time passes, enough change happens to prompt a cultural distance wide enough that it can't be crossed.

This is a concept that I've wondered about for years in vampire fiction and any other stories that feature an immortal as a primary character, even the movie 'Highlander'. Immortality is enticing enough to manifest over and over again but, to be able to survive, let alone thrive, it seems that you would have to change with the times enough to lose who you truly are. It's not just about the idea that your lovers and offspring will grow old and die while you never change; it's that it goes for everything else too.

I'm into my second half century now and I have ten grandkids. Most of the people alive today are younger than me and it often seems like they're living in a different world. What would that feel like if I was a hundred or three hundred or even a thousand years old? Would I be able to connect to anyone or anything? Well, Thomas Kempe, who's attempting to connect with the 20th century as if it's the 17th, eventually answers that question for himself and maybe there's an inevitability to it that makes the ending to this book entirely appropriate. Even if it feels a little like a cheat. ~~ Hal C F Astell