(1997 - Bloomsbury)

No dedication

About the book:

Violet Farr is Irish, married to the ineffectual Cecil, a repressed homosexual. In a moment of joyless union they conceive a son, the absurd Lumsden, but they are incapable of showing him love. He himself is a ne'er do well and fathers an illegitimate child, Spencer, by a lost soul named Dolly, herself a refugee from an unhappy upbringing in a Surrey village. When the severely neglected, traumatised boy is dumped on Violet, his grandmother, he becomes the focus for all the despair and disappointment that her son has loaded upon her.

Press voices:

"A very compelling novel which attempts, with unusual honesty, to portray complicated and uneasy emotions"
Scotsman

"Precise and vivid"
Penelope Lively, Daily Telegraph

"It is a maternal book but written with ferocity ... sympathetic but never sentimental"
The Observer

"Very elegant...dense with detail, minutely observed and with flights of beautiful writing and lush delicious prose; always a pleasure to read"
Literary Review

"A novel which probes every exposed nerve of family feeling and family hell. Jennifer Lash shows with absolute certainty the ways in which man hands misery to man ... sharp and funny"
Independent

"Wild and enjoyable ... Its strength lies in its vivid particularity, its fresh sardonic interplay of sharp wit and awful drama. Readers will lament its author's death, while at the same time applauding her fiction's vitality"
Sunday Times

"A novel about the healing power of love...The powerful engine of the story, astonishing insights into the human heart, the richness of the theme fight through to achieve a powerful consistency that makes this, Jennifer Lash's last novel, a moving memorial to her own life which ended in 1993"
Financial Times

"A harrowing demanding book, but ultimately a profoundly inspiring one...In its elaborate and painstaking progress, "Blood Ties" charts all the dreads and demons of family indifference and discord. Yet its final embracing theme is of acceptance and redemption"
Daily Telegraph

Some reviews:

Ms. Lash has written a vivid, frightening story of cyclical neglect with a delicate hand. Though her subject is harsh, her writing never is. She is refreshingly restrained in judging her characters, allowing readers to arrive at their own conclusions as they progress through this powerful novel. The Wall Street Journal, Kate Flatley

In a quest for the respect that would automatically be granted to the mistress of his estate, Violet married weak-willed and closet homosexual Cecil. Violet's subsequent discontent and bitterness combine with the steely reserve of the upper-class English to foster generations of emotionally scarred offspring. The story originates quite drearily in the recent past at Violet and Cecil's estate in Ireland, then meanders back through the lives of various characters, providing pieces of a puzzle for the reader to assemble. What begins as Violet's indifference and Cecil's submissiveness evolves into degeneracy in their son, Lumsden, leading to unmitigated horror for the grandchild, Spencer. After literally dragging the reader through the heart-breaking tragedy of child neglect, the author provides a subtle, yet much appreciated glimmer of hope. Lash's novel is a complicated and thought-provoking look at the awful strength of apathy versus the redeeming qualities of honor and integrity. For those able to weather a somewhat tedious start, Blood Ties is an emotionally harrowing and intensely rewarding tale.
Toni Hyde
From Booklist , September 15, 1998

A Lawrentian richness of event and language mark this final novel by Lash (From May to October, 1981, etc.), who died in 1993. Here, as in Lash's five other novels, is a fascination with the often painful and always complex dynamics of family life and the ways families can both damn and save people. Dominating the story is the flinty, Anglo-Irish, intensely proper Violet Farr, who lives with her odd, diffident husband Cecil in Tipperary, where she struggles to keep up appearances and maintain a ramshackle Mansion. Violet tolerates Cecil's presence as long as he makes few demands ("the hall barometer was his only real possession") and keeps his homosexuality hidden. Unsurprisingly, their son Lumsden, the result of an infrequent coupling, is a disappointment to Violet, both too needy and too quietly defiant. Hes sent off to boarding school, and when he returns home at age 17, its no great shock to Violet that he has an uncontrolled taste for alcohol and a suspiciously intense interest in younger girls. Uncovered in compromising circumstances by the local priest (himself uncomfortably aroused by what he witnesses), Lumsden is packed off for good, and for some years Violet's rigidly plotted life follows its usual courseuntil its disrupted and then altered forever by the arrival of eight-year-old Spencer, the profoundly unhappy offspring of Lumsden and a hapless barmaid. Violet suspects the worstSpencer is, after all, his father's childand when circumstances suggest his guilt in a disturbing incident, she banishes him just as she had his father. Tragedy follows, but, thanks to the efforts of some benign strangers, Spencer does gain a slender chance at happiness. Lash's determination to plumb the wayward psychology of her characters, and her belief in the pitiless influence of will and appetite on life, turn an otherwise unsurprising story into something strange and unsettling. Some may find the language rich and at times too hectic, but the power and originality of Lash's vision overrides the occasional rough spots.
From Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 1998

Set mainly in Ireland, Jennifer Lash's dark, exhilarating novel is about the redemptive power of love. It tells of Violet Farr and her loveless marriage, her wild, unfathomable son and his illegitimate son, all of them bound together in a repeating pattern of exile and homecoming, rejection and, finally, acknowledgement and love. As Elizabeth Buchan wrote in the London Times, "Jennifer Lash is a Lawrentian in so far as she mines her material for the blood and thunder roaring between spouses, and between parents and children."
Book Description

Bred in the Bone
Some of the characters in Jennifer Lash's novel Blood Ties (Bloomsbury USA, $13.95) would probably rather take their chances in the Arctic than face another day with each other. Lash, the mother of actors Ralph and Joseph Fiennes and their four siblings, died of cancer in 1993, but not before completing this, her fifth novel (she has two nonfiction books to her credit as well, including On Pilgrimage, an account of the solo trip she made to Santiago de Compostela, Spain, after she learned of her illness).

Lash wrote Blood Ties under a virtual death sentence; it didn't appear until four years after she died. Some reviewers thought that Lash's illness contributed to the book's intensity of feeling. Whether or not they're right, this story about a deeply troubled family does have a fierceness about it, a refusal to let things go gently.

Here's Violet, the unhappily married matriarch of the small Farr clan, thinking about Lumsden, her son and only child: "What a bitter irony his ensuing life had been to her. Dishonest. Sexually deviant. A parasite. A liar. When he left the country [Ireland] in a haze of dishonour soon after his seventeenth birthday she admitted it all to herself, and the bitter facts burnt some sour place in her mind where a great angry tethered pain seemed forever after to abide. She could not budge it. She could not disregard it. She could not take it or break it. It was the unseen centre of her life, a great black cauldron bubbling with anger and shrill pity. Pity for herself. Pity for this irredeemable injustice she had suffered. It was as if some unseen force had taken her body and heart and hope and had spread it like a stained hide, to be trampled and marred and generally disfigured forever."

Then the narrative voice swoops low into a deceptive calm: "Of course they had sensed trouble early on. There had been signs..." Make no mistake, though; Violet's a storm and a fury, and if Lumsden went badly wrong it's not entirely his fault. The sins of the first two generations come home to roost when Lumsden sires an illegitimate son, Spencer, who's dumped on his grandparents' doorstep, disturbed and lumbering toward insanity. Lash's vision takes in the bitter and the bleak but also sees a place reserved for happiness, though it make take the Farrs another generation or two to find it.
Washington Post, October 10, 1999