January 10, 2023

The Radiant Way, Again.

The case against rereading The Radiant Way, by Margaret Drabble, was that my copy was a battered paperback with a tiny faded font, the cover stuck on with Scotch tape, that the novel was nearly 400 pages long, and that my ambition to reread Drabble’s entire ouvre in order a few years back had fizzled into nothing. That I’d just spent an entire fortnight on holiday reading one splendid back list book after another, and perhaps this one wouldn’t measure up. That I have a small mountain of brand new books to be read and if I fail to tackle it, the pile could possibly overwhelm me.

The case for it, however: that this was, perhaps, one of the most pivotal novels of my life. A novel that helped me come into my own as a reader and to begin to come into my own as a writer, after years of having my reading selections determined by course lists and ideas about what the classics were. In 2004, I picked up The Radiant Way in a Japanese bookshop (Wantage Books in Kobe, though there is a stamp for something called Juso Academy Used English Bookstore on the inside cover), the first Margaret Drabble novel I’d ever read, and I fell in love with this work, and decided that this was kind of book I’d like to read and write forever. And yes, in 2020, I’d decided to read through all her novels again (I have them all—secondhand copies until The Red Queen, at which point I began to read her as new hardbacks instead of battered old Penguins) but it never worked out. The early Margaret Drabbles were never so resonant for me anyway, too dated by the time I read them, preoccupied by once-provocative ideas that had ceased to be so. Too fixed in the first person, shallow in their grasp—but then perhaps I was expecting too much from novels written by someone in their early 20s more than 60 years ago.

I preferred Drabble’s novels published in the 1970s to the early ones anyway, but 1987’s The Radiant Way was where it really starts for me, possibly because it’s where it DID start for me. And I wanted to read it again, to see if it would measure up to my first experience of it almost twenty years ago when I was twenty-five and on the cusp of so many things, idealistic and yet disbelieving that real life could ever happen. When I didn’t know the stakes of things.

So I picked it up. And then closed it—the tape! That font! And then I opened it again, and started reading: “New Year’s Eve, and the end of a decade. A portentous moment, for those who pay attention to portents.” And I do pay attention to portents, so kept reading, supposing this a most fitting book for early January, and immediately captured by the incredible omniscience of this story, and the Dalloway-esque preparations for the Headleand’s New Year’s Party, except that Liz is hardly going to buy the flowers herself. Wife, mother of five, prominent psychiatrist to the upper classes—she is far too busy for that.

And that was it, I was hooked, and I read this book with butterflies in my stomach, as giddy as the first time I’d ever picked it up, moved because everything I’d loved so much about it twenty years ago was still remarkable—that omniscience, the novel’s consciousness of its form, the playfulness, postmodernism, the blurry line between fact and fiction (there is a part about the advent of a new political party which “also attracted the support of a good many of the characters in, and potential readers of, this novel…”), how Drabble is attempting to use the novel as a container for society, for the universe:

“Liz, Esther, and Alix were talking, with much animation and many an apparent non sequitur, about London districts, property prices, houses, the police, no-go areas, rape, violence, murder, robbery, Tennyson and Arthur Hallam, Leslie Stephen and Virginia Woolf… There was, perhaps, a thread linking this rambling, discursive, allusive, exclusive, jumbled topographical discourse…”

But even more remarkable was what I hadn’t noticed the first time—the attendance of characters at the Headleand’s party, for instance, who appear in previous Drabble novels, which I hadn’t yet read in 2004. I was reading this time too as a contemporary of the three protagonists, Liz, Alix and Esther, friends from Cambridge who’d found themselves in very different milieus by middle age, whereas before I’d been twenty years younger—and this is very much a novel about middle age, about middle grounds (Alix, a longtime socialist who’s now disillusioned, wonders if “making up one’s mind involves internalizing lies.)

Mostly, what blew my mind about rereading The Radiant Way was how familiar it all was, and not just because I’ve finally become the age its characters are. But instead how much England in 1980 feels like here and now, the same preoccupations, fears and instability. Rising inflation, right-wing governments, people losing their faith in any wing governments, labour unrest, budget cuts, a sense that the old ways and allegiances don’t apply anymore, disruptive technologies, how the working people pay for this change while the wealthy profit. Crime rates, an obsession with crime rates, and grisly murders, and an unwillingness to address the causes of such crime, and (for the labour types) to address just how difficult people can be—Tories are bad, but also (“wanted, idle, pointless, awful”) people wreck stuff just because they can. The tension between notions of the individual and society, which becomes especially fraught in the Thatcher years and and is so again in our current age of a new-new-Right (“What I can’t see, said Esther to Alix, is what any of this has got to do with you. Or with me. It’s simply not our problem. We didn’t make it, and that’s that. I’ve never met a miner, and I’m sure a miner wouldn’t want to meet me./ It’s not as simple as that, said Alix.)

A book full of questions that we’ve still not yet begun to answer…and yet it gives me some comfort to know that it was ever thus?

Anyway, I absolutely couldn’t get enough of this timely, artful, remarkable novel…but thankfully Drabble followed it up with two more books to make a trilogy, and I’ll be rereading both of these soon.