What Book to Read?

The Seven Sisters (2002) is the fifteenth of Margaret Drabble’s nineteen novels. I’ve only read one other of her books, The Red Queen (2004), which I quite enjoyed (here is my somewhat underwhelmed review) so I can’t say how far The Seven Sisters compares to her other work. But she is clearly a major and revered figure in the English literary landscape, so maybe she’s allowed a few minor efforts like this one.

Candida Walton has found herself in late middle age divorced and alone. She has moved from Suffolk to London and bought a flat in Ladbroke Grove in north-west London; she describes the area as run down (though it must have had a renaissance since 2002). She determines to write a diary, and this makes up the first, and the much longest section of the book. In it she chronicles the small events of her life such as her visits to a health club, shopping, her prison visiting, her dental appointment or entertaining a friend. There is information about her previous life and her hopes and fears about the situation she finds herself in. The second section, which is told in the third person, describes a visit to North Africa and Italy she makes with some friends and a tour guide – the Seven Sisters of the title. Several of the friends are from an evening class she attended on Virgil’s Aeneid; this fires her enthusiasm to trace Aeneas’s legendary route from Carthage to Naples. The third section is from the point of view of Candida’s daughter Ellen, and the final section is told by Candida back in London.

When I first started reading, I was very attracted to Candida’s self-awareness – and her tendency to play too much solitaire, a weakness I suffer from myself. The reflections of a middle aged and middle class woman are bound to be of interest to a similar (if somewhat older) sort of reader. At times it seems that Drabble must have had direct access to my thoughts and feelings. ’Self-pity is a seductive emotion … It deludes as well as seduces.’ Well yes. And if at the beginning of a novel you find the words ‘Nothing much happens to me now, nor ever will again’, you experience the wry enjoyment of recognising an unreliable narrator, because of course something is going to happen – there’s a whole book ahead. A reader might expect it to be about Candida reinventing herself, and this is the main theme. However as a character she is undoubtedly passive; unfortunately it makes her rather boring. She doesn’t have the gumption to go out and get a job; the thing that shakes her out of her passivity is an unexpected financial windfall. By the end of the diary section I was beginning to wonder if I really liked Candida, or whether in her own words, she is ‘mean, self-righteous, self-pitying’. As one critic says, ‘Drabble has managed to capture this sensation of insignificant life, but without forging it into significant fiction.’

The story is actually a bit frustrating too. I don’t really mind that nothing much happens; it’s more that there are so many lose ends, events that seem about to lead somewhere but end up petering out. This may be true to life, but it’s hard to turn it into ‘significant fiction’. One example is the audio tapes that Candida is given, but can only hear noise on, when the friend that gave them to her obviously thought they would be meaningful. And what is the mystery surrounding what Anaïs is purchasing? Other linkages seem artificial, like the man Candida visits in gaol for murdering a woman by drowning her; he is presumably only in the story to contribute in some vague way to the theme of water and drowning that runs through it. (Though if we are following the Aeneid, Dido self-immolated, she didn’t drown.) I’m don’t know the classical references well enough to really comment, but it’s not clear to me that they add much to the story.

It’s true that the story line isn’t completely linear, and that there is a bit of postmodern fictional playfulness, though I’m not going to spoil the twist by saying what it is (more than I’ve already done). Drabble is playing with the idea of ‘voice’ – in more ways than one. She is probing the limits of the fictional voice when she attributes to Candida doubt about her ability to render the speech of others: ‘yet again’, Candida says, ‘I seem, relentlessly, inescapably, to have given the other person my own syntax and vocabulary’, and ‘I probably shouldn’t attempt dialogue’. Yet this is precisely what Drabble the author does all the time. The narrative twist is quite clever, but for me it fell a bit flat. Maybe I was already disengaged by the time I got to it.

Friends have pointed out to me the psychological depth of the story; Candida must be reborn to transform herself, and get outside herself to do this. Their insights did add gravitas to the book, though I could ask if we all need to be psychologists to appreciate it? But I guess getting different perspectives is the whole point of having a discussion.

I have one other quite unfair but inescapable reaction to the story. Published in 2002, it is of course set well before the Arab Spring made travel such as Candida and her friends undertake difficult and dangerous. Tunis, the site of Carthage (more or less) has escaped most of the worst of the violence, though a lone gunman killed a number of tourists at a nearby resort in 2015. And the passage across the Mediterranean is now a life and death affair for thousands of refugees, with Naples an uncertain refuge. I know this has nothing to do with Drabble’s book, but I can’t help but see today’s reality in contrast to the well-meaning, well-to-do English tourists of the story.

Margaret Drabble doesn’t seem to have a web-site, but you can read a bit about her here or here. And you can read her version of her famous feud with her sister A.S. Byatt here.