CLEOPATRA’S SISTER by Penelope Lively (HarperPerennial:...

CLEOPATRA’S SISTER by Penelope Lively (HarperPerennial: $11; 282 pp.). In this clever novel, Lively brings together paleontologist Howard Beamish and free-lance journalist Lucy Faulkner, two repressed characters who discover love when a mechanical failure forces their airplane to land in the fictional North African country of Callimbia. Although characters are seldom more than mildly engaging, Lively’s account of the history of Callimbia (which was once ruled by Berenice, the sister of the famous the Cleopatra) includes droll pastiches of Plutarch and Flaubert. Reflecting on the weird biological dead-ends of the Burgess Shale that Howard studies, this odd couple discovers that life is “both remarkable and precarious. An accident of contingency.”