January 23, 2007
The Third Age
I was interested to see Margaret Drabble cited in the recent Macleans article “The 27 Year Itch” regarding late-life divorce for having coined the phrase “The Third Age” in her The Seven Sisters. On the digitalization of reading. Jenny Diski on compacting the classics, which is horrifyingly awful.
I’m now reading The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches to put a little Canadienne in my CanLit. And it’s wonderful. I came home from the library this morn also bearing Things Fall Apart and Youth.
December 19, 2006
The Sea Lady by Margaret Drabble
The necessary disclosure is that I’m in no way qualified to review anything written by Margaret Drabble with objectivity. It’s no secret that she is my very favourite author, and that I would read a phone book so long as it was written by her. So it’s no surprise that I loved The Sea Lady. Which is not to say that The Sea Lady has anything in common with the phonebook at all (apart from some fine names), but I am not fully convinced that it might be everybody’s cup of tea.
I have determined three marked periods in the career of Ms. Drabble. From her first novel A Summer Bird Cage until Jerusalem The Golden, she wrote about very fashionable, fabulous, modern people. This continues to some extent into The Needle’s Eye and The Ice Age as well. Though the characters begin to engage more with the wider world, the world is telescopic. I love these books very much, but due to their 1960s modernity, they come across as a bit dated today.
With The Realms of Gold and The Middle Ground, Drabble begins to develop the style of her middle period which culminates with The Radiant Way Trilogy (which was how she and I fell in love, you see). These books, written from the late 1970s into the early 90s are concerned with vast themes and are sprawling projects, and here she invents her universe, the wonderful Drabble universe where I would love to take up residence and chat with Kate Armstrong and Alix Bowen, and meet Liz Headleand’s cat. Through this period, Drabble wrote the whole world, and captured contemporary England in a sad and desperate way. Rather than appearing dated, these works have managed to capture an era.
Since 1997’s The Witch of Exmoor, I get the impression Drabble has been bored by the confines of the novel, and has tried to push the form in different ways. She has also shifted her focus from “now” to “then”, delving much into the past– her own past in The Peppered Moth, or the life of a historical Korean Queen in 2004’s The Red Queen. Narratively speaking, she does funny things to her texts and leaves ends untied. I am not sure that critics universally love her later works, and I can’t begin to imagine how these novels might read to one who has never read Drabble before. But to me, who is so in love with Margaret Drabble’s writing, these works fit into a scheme whose development I understand by looking at the evolution of her work. I am not sure her intentions are always ultimately realized, but this is the same universe. Its writer is just looking in a different direction.
The Sea Lady is labelled “a late romance”. The story of Ailsa and Humphrey, who meet as children, meet again as adults and fall into a young love doomed to end badly, and the heart of this novel is their encounter in their sixties, after forty years apart. Humphrey is a marine biologist, and fish permeate the novel’s symbolism, but I didn’t find it tiresome. It seemed appropriate. The biological focus was particularly interesting, due to my interest in scientific literature. Ailsa is a media personality/feminist/art historian/sociologist, and a theme of the novel is the merging of science and the arts– if such a thing is possible, and what is that entity? The novel is structured around Ailsa and Humphrey’s return to the place of their original meeting, and their minds drift backward on their respective journeys. The ending of the novel is strange, twisting a bit shockingly/tidily, and the presence of the Public Orator, which many critics considered the novel’s real flaw, wasn’t troubling as much as it was weird.
But this is Margaret Drabble– her voice, her people, her universe. In some ways, this novel blends her three eras as much as any book she’s ever written. She is smart and the novel is bursting with facts– but not to prove her erudition, rather her passion for knowledge drives her to create a story from it. I think for the first time Drabbler, The Sea Lady would be perplexing in parts, but certainly not unenjoyable. And as a Drabble devotee, I will add it to the long line of Margaret Drabble novels on my bookshelf– a collection which means as much to me as all the other books in the whole library.
December 17, 2006
Easy Ave.
This weekend was notable for its lack of demands. Stuart’s office Christmas party, where we both behaved well and ducked out early. Britt for dinner last night, and I cooked roast chicken, squash and onions from our new cookbook, and we had a wonderful evening by the light of the Christmas tree. And then today we watched Curtis’s copy of A Muppets Family Christmas and ate sugar cookies. I continue to drabble. Later, I plan to do it in the tub.
November 30, 2006
Back to work then.
The next almost-three weeks will contain just about no fun. Except for one day off (for Christmas baking of course), I will be hard at work marking 5 papers a day, writing my own essay, writing my own creative stuff and tying up other odds and ends, and doing my shifts at the library. The prospect is dreadful, but the idea of a Christmas holiday with all that done is delicious. On December 15, I plan to sit down and finally crack open my copy of the latest Drabble. This all means that if I am here now, I really should be elsewhere. Back to work then.
November 15, 2006
What I Found
~She is always delighted by the arrival of the post, though it ought to be routine by now because the postman comes each day at three. But no, she anticipates the tip tap of his shoes, the thunk in through the letterbox and the footsteps’ retreat. A bundle of ephemera waiting on the floor. There is always something, a stack of something.~
Oh, and what a stack. A package full of bookish goodness (stay tuned for reviews). A thank you note from Katie’s shower. Confirmation of our flights to England. And my penpal letter from Bronwyn, who wrote the letter just after learning we’d just booked our flights and so it all feels terribly real time. And my text-based treat from her: a clipping from the Sunday Times Magazine by Margaret Drabble about Sheffield, where she used to stomp (and in the Cathedral of which I once felt the presence of God while on a cheap daytrip).
October 21, 2006
Saint Drabble
Am OUTRAGED by this sorry excuse for a review of The Sea Lady in today’s G&M. All right, not that I’ve actually read the novel in question, because as I explained previously, I am waiting to savour it. But I’ve still got a right to outrage. My two main points are these: that the review gets the main character’s name wrong throughout, and that the “review” is mainly composed of excerpts of Drabble’s prose out of context. The scant criticism seems mainly to do with too many facts and too many mermaids, and little consideration of what Drabble might have intended of her devices. This review seemed unfair to me, though I will admit I’m perhaps a bit protective.
October 15, 2006
One Good Turn
I’ve raved about Kate Atkinson before, when I read Case Histories last summer and when I reread Behind The Scenes at the Museum in August. She writes with the social and historical awareness of Margaret Drabble, but with the dark edge of Hilary Mantel, though of course her works are also startlingly original (and challenge genres). Kate Atkinson has yet to fail me, and in her new novel One Good Turn, she has truly crafted what her subtitle suggests: “a jolly good mystery”.
Yes, indeed, a mystery. I have spoken to fans of early-Atkinson who’ve gone off her a bit since her characters took up sleuthing, but none of them had actually read the books in question (Case Histories, and now its companion One Good Turn [though the two books both stand up alone]). I am no mystery fan (my interest sort of waned with Nate the Great) but I’ll read anything by Kate Atkinson, and moreover Behind the Scenes… really had a mystery at its heart. The genre suits Atkinson well, and she writes with her signature wit and brilliance.
In One Good Turn, Atkinson expects her readers to hang on tight, because the ride goes so fast. Jackson Brodie from Case Histories has stumbled onto a whole new batch of mystery at the Edinburgh Festival, but he is just one character in an excellent ensemble which includes a suburban housewife with a trick up her sleeve, a ruthless Russian call-girl, a fourteen year-old shoplifter and has-been comedian. Atkinson’s tongue-in-cheek depiction of the publishing world is particularly humourous, as seen by a writer of a particularly bad mystery series, and the book’s subtle CSI references indicate that Atkinson is very aware of the world she’s writing in. The story itself is so tight, admirable considering how many pieces had to be tied together in the end. The pace is quick, twists are so surprising, the end was a stunner. One Good Turn was simply a delight.
October 4, 2006
Such is the life
The book people outdid themselves and my copy of The Sea Lady arrived yesterday, but I can’t bring myself to read it. I remember finishing The Red Queen last winter, and the terror of having all the Margaret Drabbles behind me, and I don’t want to face that again. I will savour the prospect of this novel for a while I think, seeing as I am up to my elbows in CanLit and won’t have the time to savour the actual reading anytime soon. But I am so looking forward to reading it, and inevitably adoring it. And don’t think my expectations are set too high; Ms. Drabble has never failed to meet them.
I am writing this entry on a break from writing, which today is devoted to. I have been reasonably successful at resisting the urge to google Tina Yothers and other relevant pop culture figures (this is a lie; this morning I watched Family Ties clips on YouTube, but such acts have been kept to the minimum. Damn wireless internet) and I am being pretty productive. Laundry has just been installed in our basement, so no more trips to the laundrette for me, though there is a rumour that the dryer is broken already we shall see. Am a bit tired, as thunderstorms awoke us and ours at 6:30 this morning for the second day in a row. Now reading Green Grass Running Water by Thomas King, and I’m really enjoying it. I’ve never read anything by him before.
Plenty of book news: The Giller Shortlist is announced. Coverage at CBC. Book City’s founder’s favourite books. Top ten fictional poets. The problem with literary how-to guides.
Must go wash dishes and then investigate dryer situation. Such is the life of a student/housewife.
September 27, 2006
Swing Low
I’ve been feeling a bit crap the last couple of days, worrying about absolutely everything which led to my being put to bed with a migraine last night, my computer has gone haywire, and I’ve become an emotional idiot, bawling upon finishing Swing Low and reading As For Me and My House, despairing I was Mrs. Bentley. I tend towards dramatics, much as I attempt otherwise. I really can be a pain in the ass. I am going to stop reading books about the prairies though, or I will definitely require defenestration.
And so Hilary Mantel is up next with Every Day is Mother’s Day. We are having a very small party-like gathering on Saturday, which I’m looking forward to. My new Margaret Drabble arrives in just about a week. Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow…
