Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/051892/05189938.000

Text File | 1992-09-10 | 4KB | 80 lines

                                                                                REVIEWS, Page 78

BOOKS

Bent Out Of Shape


By PAUL GRAY

    TITLE: The Gates of Ivory
    AUTHOR: Margaret Drabble
    PUBLISHER: Viking; 464 pages; $22

    THE BOTTOM LINE: A final installment in a fictional
trilogy on the way we live now.


    This novel, Margaret Drabble's 12th, concludes an
ambitious project that the author began with The Radiant Way
(1987) and continued in A Natural Curiosity (1989). Essentially,
Drabble has been trying to counter the solipsistic bent of so
much contemporary fiction, that wan parade of heroes and
heroines talking to themselves -- usually about themselves --
and deaf to anything beyond the echoes of self-consciousness.
Novels, particularly Victorian triple-deckers, once made room
for the outside world, for the ways that history, politics,
economics, etc., impinged on the lives of ordinary people. Are
such narratives impossible now, or have most novelists simply
quit paying attention to current events?

    Like its two predecessors, The Gates of Ivory offers
fascinating answers to such questions. For one thing,
incorporating raw reality tends to bend a novel out of artistic
shape. Drabble's principal narrator, who sometimes seems
omniscient and at other times just as confused as the characters
in the story, wonders at one point whether it is even
justifiable to extract a novel from the chaos of modern life.
"A queasiness, a moral scruple overcomes the writer at the
prospect of selecting individuals from the mass of history, from
the human soup. Why this one, why not another?"

    Without such choices, of course, a novel is inconceivable;
no book can include everything. So Drabble's central characters
again include the three women, friends since their days at
Cambridge, who have dominated the trilogy -- Liz Headleand, Alix
Bowen and Esther Breuer. But this time, most of the story
belongs to Liz, a twice-divorced psychotherapist who lives
comfortably in London's St. John's Wood. It is she who receives
by mail an odd package containing notebooks, scrambled
manuscript pages and what appears to be the skeletal remains of
a human finger. She assumes that all this has something to do
with her friend Stephen Cox, a respected novelist who set off
some two years earlier, hoping to get into Cambodia and gather
material for a play about Pol Pot. And it is she who finally
decides to go to Cambodia herself to find out whether Stephen
is alive or dead.

    Liz may not know Stephen's fate, but the reader is left in
little doubt. Scarcely a third of the way into the story,
Drabble's narrator remarks, "But he will not die for a while
yet." Instead of suspense, the emphasis of this novel falls on
what it feels like to be alive and aware at a specific
historical period, in this case the first six months of 1988.
And Drabble's rather disjointed panorama of diverse characters
caught in the amber of time produces an eerily convincing sense
of life in a technologically advanced society, of the horrors
that are reported electronically -- say, from the killing fields
of Cambodia -- and those that may erupt immediately down the
street or in the next room.

    The Gates of Ivory can be read profitably with no knowledge
of the novels that lead up to it. But Drabble's trilogy, now
complete, stands as an ungainly, brave and penetrating attempt
to find a place for fiction in the matter-of-fact way we live
now.