Margaret Drabble (1939 – )

Margaret Drabble's best work concerns a critical examination of new directions being taken by English society. Drabble's early novels established her as the representative voice of educated women of her generation. To some extent she has remained this, but her work has become much more ambitious, as it has moved away from the personal-anecdotal novels with which she made her name. Her true subject now is the moral condition of England.

She tackles this with zest and virtuosity in her most recent, and most ambitious, novel, The Radiant Way (1987). It opens brilliantly. Liz Headland, a successful psychotherapist, is giving a New Years's party to usher in the 1980s. At the same time she is celebrating twenty-one years of marriage to Charles, a television producer. The duration of their marriage is "unique in their circle of acquaintance. Battle and bloodshed and betrayal lay behind them, and now they met peacefully in this large house, and slept peacefully in their separate rooms, and met at weekends over the marmalade, and would continue to do so until Charles's new appointment took him, in a couple of months, to New York." Liz congratulates herself on their achievement in language which suggests to the reader that her complacency is about to be shattered, that it is not as easy as she supposes to solve the problems of modern living. The party, handled with an assurance that is both scintillating and significant, reveals the extent of her self-deception. Her acute perceptions are not so acute. She has misunderstood her own life.

It is a weakness of the novel that this misunderstanding is not apparently intended to discredit her as a guide to the way we live now. In fact her response to the contemporary world is confused. Despite this, The Radiant Way is an unusually persuasive novel. It celebrates the power of friendship and it is animated by Drabble's awareness of objects – landscape, food and drink – by her sense of the surging metropolis and the cold cities of the North. Yet it is also angry, sombre and pessimistic. Her analysis of contemporary England is harsh. She is alarmed by the sense that social obligation is being supplanted by compulsion and selfishness. Her puritanism is offended by the new individualism which flaunts wealth, is thrilled by power, and has no respect for what should bind people together. Despite the anger, she is a sufficiently subtle moralist to realize that this is, in part, the consequence of what people like herself, and those characters she admires, have successfully demanded: that is, the freedom to live their own way, by standards they have chosen for themselves. Moreover, she knows that right is rarely concentrated on one side. In a scene at the end of the novel, Liz is having dinner with her friends Alix and Esther; they discover that the police have surrounded the house, intending to arrest a young man on the top floor. Liz is hostile to the police; she calls them "a bloody disgrace ... thick as two planks ... incompetent fools"; she says "perhaps they're hoping he will take all three of us hostage and they can have a big shoot-out. They like that kind of thing." But Alix argues the cause of the police: "it wasn't their fault if they had learned confrontation, their position in urban society was increasingly untenable."

The strength of Drabble's fiction rests in its nine-teeth-century seriousness. She never doubts the importance of the social world in which we live and which she seeks to reflect. Like Byatt, she never doubts that the novel has a part to play in deepening and refining our understanding of society. She cares passionately about the way we live, and credits her readers with a similarly intense concern. If her novels sometimes lack imaginative illumination, for which she tries to compensate by writing in a torrential style, in which adjectives and tautologies are heaped up with all the exuberance of a Victorian painter assembling fruit, vegetables and the carcasses ofgamebirds for a still-life painting, she has a concomitant virtue: she never takes refuge from facts in elaborate fantasy. It is always here and now in her world; she has a respect for physical reality that is admirable and invigorating.