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 18, 2006
Pests
On Saturday we received phone calls throughout the day from a recorded voice claiming to have a sniper rifle aimed at us. Since early this morning, there has been a clawed creature of some sort trapped in the ceiling above my bed. I do look forward to seeing what the future holds.
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.
December 17, 2006
Because I had time to read newspapers
Zoe Heller on the film adaptation of Notes on a Scandal. Oprah brings up Heller’s favourite books (via Maud Newton). From around the world, the best fiction of 06. Fannie Flagg, whose writing has always delighted me, has a new book out. On translating Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The Guardian Books Blog continues to bud. I loved Heather Mallick’s Triumph of the Eggheads. And Joan Didion’s collected nonfiction reviewed in the Globe.
December 15, 2006
Drabbling Again
In our house we have a verb called “drabbling”. It’s like reading, only much much better. I haven’t actually drabbled since I read the wonderful The Red Queen last Christmas. I drabbled a bit in the summer when I reread The Radiant Way and The Middle Ground, but true drabbling is always a first time encounter. And now I’m reading The Sea Lady, I’m drabbling again. I really can only read a few pages at a time because the delight is just too much.
December 15, 2006
The Ledbetter Serial Arsonist
Before we left Toronto, I had promised postcards home— to Caroline, my friends and even to my mother. But there were no postcards of Ledbetter in existence. You could buy postcards in Ledbetter, at the old train depot museum, but they were actually postcards of the Grantville Town Hall and the Grantville Floral Clock. They used to sell Ledbetter postcards some years ago, I learned from the woman in the conductor’s cap who staffed the museum. But then the postcards ran out and they never restocked, and so many buildings had burnt down by then anyway.
“Have you heard about our arsonist?” the woman asked me.
She led me over to the display in the corner which told the story of serial arsonist Randall Hicks who had destroyed over fifty buildings in Ledbetter over a more than twenty-year spree— from garages and sheds to the Town Hall and Public Library. Hicks was an accountant and a careful arsonist. Only one person was ever injured in one of his fires; a clear case of wrong place at the wrong time, he had been robbing a store Hicks had targeted. And no one had ever managed to catch Randall Hicks either. He’d turned himself in in 1966, one day after his father died, saying he would have done this years ago if it weren’t for the shame it would have brought his dad.
“And that’s why we don’t have postcards anymore,” the woman told me, so I picked up five of the Grantville Floral Clock.
December 15, 2006
Half of a Yellow Sun
I can’t imagine what a writer must be fighting with when she sits down to write about a war. How do you fashion a narrative that is not simply an excuse for the backdrop? How can you have characters in all their multiplicity? How do you write about brutality and deprivation, and love, and beauty, all within the same book? In Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has crafted an extraordinary tale, and craft is truly the word. This novel tells the story of Biafra, an independent state formed within Nigeria in 1967, and the civil war that followed before the Republic’s fall in 1970. I’d never heard of Biafra before, and the reason I will never forget it is Ugwu, Olanna and Richard, for this book is their story as much as it is Biafra’s. And this is Adichie’s feat, for it is their stories which awoke Biafra to my ignorant mind. The brutality within this book would have been unrelenting, were it not for broken chronology and alternating narrators with every chapter. The result is a structure which accomodates the vastness of this project, but also facilitates the reader’s engagement with the narrative and each character. What I found most incredible was Adichie’s capacity to generate sympathy for characters who did terrible things, which is essential, in that broken couples had to go on together, and that Biafrans and Nigerians had to learn to live together again once the war was over.
I come away from this book with a similar impression to that I had after reading Sweetness in the Belly— that I had gained an education as much as a story. I remain startlingly ignorant about Africa, and I don’t claim that a novel is any sort of tool toward substantial identification, but I still think that fiction is the best place to go for knowledge. It’s not about empathy, but it’s about learning. That this happened in the world, but I never knew. And thanks to Adichie, I don’t think I’ll ever forget.
December 14, 2006
World's Tallest Man Saves Choking Dolphins
The prize goes to Jennie for alerting me to this news story: World’s Tallest Man Saves Choking Dolphins. Can that possibly be true? But if it is, do we not live in the best world ever?
Half of a Yellow Sun continues to be extraordinary. Does the fact that my cup runneth over for every book I read make you think I love books lightly? Because I don’t. I just choose the books I read very very carefully. Anyway, I’ll write more about this one tomorrow. Today, I am rewriting one of my chapters and listening to Zero 7’s “Destiny” on repeat and I am in a very good state of mind.
December 13, 2006
Results
I just finished my marking and printed out my own essay! And so the toiling is over. Which is not to say that I get to reenter the world as yet, as I’ve been neglecting my creative project for the last five days, and have a mess of short stories to write over the holiday. It just means my seclusion becomes less intensive and much more pleasant. I am now reading Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, which I chose because I never saw a review for it short of raving. And it is an amazing novel so far, but so brutal. I can’t read too much at once.
December 13, 2006
Long Live the BauMaus
Though I require no excuse to rave about my husband, it’s always nice to have one. It was four years today that he came into my life, and ever since I’ve been happier than I ever thought was possible.
