Odd Jobs (87 page)

Though Liz, of the three, bulks largest in her complicated vitality, and in the closeness with which the author renders her thoughts and tears and panic and lust, Alix most plainly bears the novel’s political burden, moving from an undoubting Socialist activism to a political despair that finds comfort in sifting through the papers of an old avant-garde poet, a friend of Joyce and Pound, Duchamp and Man Ray. “It is, like all her jobs, a dead-end job, but at least it is not socially useful; in that, at least,
it is a new departure, and she takes some pleasure in this. She has had enough, for the time being, of trying to serve the community.… There is no hope, in the present social system, of putting anything right.” She is the child of old-fashioned Socialists—“not left-wing political extremists, not loony vegetarians (though they were vegetarians), but harmless, mild, Labour-voting, CND-supporting, Fabian-pamphlet-reading intellectuals.” Her father, called Dotty Doddridge, taught French at a Yorkshire boarding school whose history traces a revolution in reverse:

Alix’s first husband died young, and in her widowhood, in Islington, she got to know the London poor: “She discovered the art of sinking. She sank. Not very deep, but she sank.” She began to teach, moving from private tutorials to courses at a College for Further Education and a prison called Garfield Centre. Her second husband, Brian, is from the industrial city of Northam, “that figurative northern city,” where his father worked as a circular-saw polisher and his grandfather as a furnace-man in the mills. Brian once apprenticed at the plant and would have followed his father into saw polishing but for the Army, which discovered his intellectual aptitude and sponsored his education; now he teaches English literature at an Adult Education College in London. “Alix Bowen is a sentimentalist about class, it has been alleged.… Lying in your arms, Alix said once, not very seriously, to Brian, I am in the process of healing the wounds in my own body and in the body politic.” His working-class solidity and “firm grasp of the material world” warm her body; she thinks she is happy. But as the union strikes of the early Eighties grow more savage and desperate, Brian’s hard Labour line and emotional attachment to the bygone machine age begin to alienate Alix; a friend, the émigré Otto Werner, becomes a founding member of the
new, middle-of-the-road political party, the Social Democrats, and Alix finds herself drawn to Otto’s thinking, and to Otto as a man. Coming back on the bus from a romantic lunch with Otto, she sees her husband on a corner of Oxford and Bond Streets soliciting money, holding a yellow plastic bucket and a handwritten sign reading “
HELP THE WIVES AND FAMILIES OF THE MINERS”:

But England—the boy and girl running downhill, the reduction of Fabian visions to a yellow begging bucket on a hardbitten shopping street—is the site and background of
The Radiant Way
and not its essential theme. Miss Drabble is ever less a political theorist than an anthropologist, and the sprawling, dazzling pluralism of her novel is meant to illustrate the glimmering interconnectedness of all humanity. Alix “had been encouraged (in theory at least) by her education and by her reading to believe in the individual self, the individual soul, but as she grew older she increasingly questioned these concepts—seeing people perhaps more as flickering impermanent points of light irradiating stretches, intersections, threads, of a vast web, a vast network, which was humanity itself; a web of which much remained dark, apparently but not necessarily unpeopled; peopled by the dark, the unlit, the dim spirits, as yet unknown, the past and the future, the dead, the unborn.… We are all but a part of a whole which has its own, its distinct, its other meaning; we are not ourselves, we are crossroads, meeting places, points on a curve, we cannot exist independently for we are nothing but signs, conjunctions, aggregations.” The novel abounds with subtle connections, with names that recur after many pages, with coincidental meetings after many years, with semi-hidden threads between the South of England and the North, between the upper and the lower classes, between the public and the private realms, between individual lives and the great archaic rhythm of the national holidays. On New Year’s Eve, “all over Northam, all over Britain, ill-remembered, confused, shadowy vestigial rites were performed, rites with origins lost in antiquity; Celtic, Pict, Roman, Norse,
Anglo-Saxon, Norman, Elizabethan, Hanoverian, Judaic rites.” An old custom in Northam calls for a lump of coal to be brought into the house at midnight, so Steve Harper, a haulage contractor, “taking with him a jar of Marmite in a garden trowel as a substitute for coal in a shovel … stood outside alone for a grateful crisp smokeless moment of silence, and when they opened the door to him a strange shadow of the night sidled in with him from prehistory.… Something was absent, yet something was present. The shadow filled the corners of the broad bright hallway.”

Esther Breuer, petite and Jewish and Berlin-born, is the least English of the three central women, and the one about whom the most mystical lights glimmer in the vast human web. Her scholarship consists of flipping back and forth between books pursuing stray connections—e.g., “a connection between the nature of quattrocento pigmentation, and lichenology as a method of dating the antiquity of landscape”—and her lectures are known for “making startling, brilliant connections, for illuminating odd corners, for introducing implausible snippets of erudition.” Esther claims that “all knowledge must always be omnipresent in all things.” Her life as it develops bears witness to a connection between the Harrow Road Murders and the quiet young man above her flat in Ladbroke Grove, and to a link between her long-standing love for a married Italian anthropologist, Claudio Volpe, and the faltering vitality of a potted palm he has entrusted to her. Claudio, too, believes in a web, in an overarching world of spirit, in a hidden league of demonic powers: “He spoke … of the
spiritus mundi
, the
anima
, the
stella marina
, the
deus absconditus …
of Gorgon and the Medusa and Géricault and Demogorgon and Salome and the Bessi of Thrace.” He believes that Esther has powers she does not recognize, and, uncannily, on an airplane, she meets and befriends a handsome wild Dutchman with whom Liz, long ago, had sexual intercourse on a North Sea crossing, in a Force 9 gale. Esther is the spookiest of the three heroines, the most detached and exotic, the least heterosexual and, to this reader, real. She is a lovingly assembled bundle of bohemian costumes and odd facts about Italian painting but her charm is more ascribed than conveyed.

It is not easy to dramatize the comforting fascination that some women have for each other. The increasingly frequent novels about the friendship between three or four or five women (for instance, this year’s
Hot Flashes
, by Barbara Raskin) tend to be thin where thickness is alleged; the women, and the female author, keep
saying
how intense and
meaningful the companionship is, but few actions actually illustrate it. The contacts are intermittent, giddy, and chatty, and leave each woman, in the end, alone with her life—her love life and her family life. On the very morning in which I tentatively type out this male impression, the Boston
Globe
quotes Marlo Thomas, the wife of the talk-show host Phil Donahue, as proclaiming, “Women have … started trusting each other and they have found a mutuality and community.” That is good news; but novelists bent on illustrating it with a multiple heroine commit themselves to an effortful program of keeping a number of independent life-stories going, and of summing up the high moments of mutuality and community with word pictures like “They [Liz, Alix, and Esther] would eat, drink, and talk. They exchanged ideas” and “They eat, drink, talk, lie there in the sunshine.”

Another triangle of women exists in
The Radiant Way:
Liz Headleand; her sister, Shirley Harper; and their mother, Rita Ablewhite. Interest, psychological and narrative, so naturally gathers about this blood-related threesome that one suspects that Miss Drabble’s youthful instinct in her joyous, prattling first novel,
A Summer Bird-Cage
, was sound when she placed her sisters in the center of the narrative and let the female friendships be peripheral. In
The Radiant Way
, the unbreakable kinship between Liz and Shirley serves to connect the two Englands—the thriving, entrepreneurial south and the depressed, working-class north. Liz, the older sister, slaved at her schoolbooks, got a scholarship to Cambridge, and escaped to London and her radiant big house on Harley Street; Shirley, the more rebellious as a girl, “trusted sex,” seduced a boy and married him, and stayed in Northam, becoming “a middle-aged housewife, mother of three … with nothing before her but old age.” Yet Shirley, in the very constriction of her life, is somehow more vivid and sympathetic than Liz, who is half lost in her larger but more amorphous and shallow world; the London scenes are full of chatter asserted to be delightful, while the scenes of Northam have that stony authenticity of something loved in spite of itself. To Shirley, the rebellious child, has entirely fallen the task of caring for their peculiar mother, who for as long as the girls can remember almost never ventured out of her house in Northam, fed her daughters on stale bread and fish paste, and perpetrated a fictitious tale about their absent father. This father, of whom Liz, throughout most of the novel, has no conscious memory, and the strange round silver object, in the front room, engraved with the monogram SHO, are mysteries—connections not yet uncovered. They make
Rita Ablewhite, lying in her bed and listening to the radio and cutting up her newspapers, the most fascinating character in the book, the keeper of its secret.

The initials SHO, we slowly discover, are those of three intertwined aristocratic families, the Stocklinches, the Hestercombes, and the Oxenholmes, members of which are dotted throughout the book. This glint of silver in the lowly, gloomy house, together with the many brisk socio-economic biographies offered in these pages, informs the novel’s noblest attempt at interconnection: the attempt to show, in the manner of, say,
Bleak House
, that no Englishman is an island, that the classes and regions are so woven together that manor house and palace impinge on rural hovel and urban slum, and the fates of a junkman like Krook and an orphaned street-sweeper like Jo can touch and alter those of Sir Leicester and Lady Dedlock. Alix Bowen gropes after a democratic unity when she reflects, “sometimes she had a sense … that there was a pattern, if only one could discern it, a pattern that linked these semi-detached houses of Wanley with those in Leeds and Northam, a pattern that linked Liz’s vast house in Harley Street with the Garfield Centre towards which she herself now drove.” But in the grand attempt to illustrate the pattern Miss Drabble labors under a certain artistic embarrassment, which has set in since Dickens, about melodramatic coincidence and two-dimensional psychologies. For all the talk of connection, her novel portrays disconnection—between husbands and wives, parents and children, government and governed.

The Radiant Way
is exasperatingly diffuse. Scores of characters are named and never recur; dozens of scenes we would like to witness are relayed second-hand or tersely alluded to; a modernist jumpiness and diffidence undermine the panoramic ambition. The novel feels both scattered and boiled-down—as if an editor had stepped in to speed things up when its first twenty-four hours took over eighty pages to recount. The marriage of Charles and the woman he leaves Liz for, the aristocratic Henrietta, is left almost entirely to our imagination. The Headleands’ adult children are evoked but not, as it were, set in motion. Charming lively apparitions like the bosomy Irish cook Deirdre Kavanagh are not followed into any further adventures. A number of London characters seem to exist for no more urgent reason than that Miss Drabble knows people like them. Liz and Alix have suitors who are carefully groomed for leaps that never come; Alix’s marriage heads for a crisis and veers away. Even Liz’s cunningly foreshadowed confrontation with her
mother’s secret, when it occurs, seems cursory, ambiguous, and sour: the long agony of Rita Ablewhite is laughed off as the bad smell from a jar of old pickles, while her daughters clean her house:

More than once in the novel, the banality of the human adventure, its every crisis so repeatedly charted and analyzed by novelists and psychoanalysts, dulls passion: “And as Liz spoke and listened she was aware of a simultaneous conviction that this was the most shocking, the most painful hour of her entire life, and also that it was profoundly dull, profoundly trivial, profoundly irrelevant, a mere routine.”

Well, a creatrix must be true to her bent, and Miss Drabble’s is for the deft hint, the impulsive surge, the shrugging surrender to shapeless life. Her novel has a luxurious texture and wears a thousand beauties of expression and insight. Charles’s relation to the British establishment is thus encapsulated: “First he had mocked it, then he had exposed it, then he had joined it, and now he represented it. A normal progression.” Progression of another sort afflicts the British soil: