"A Summer Bird-cage" by Margaret Drabble (Penguin, 1967)

A book of its time, set in the early 60s I think - there are several instances of "being gay". I presume we're supposed to dislike Sarah, the main character, immediately. The voice isn't entirely convincing at the start. Would someone with a good Oxford first in literature use the word "time" quite so many times as is done in the following? Or maybe it's deliberate

I felt that it was time I stopped wasting time. I don't know why I hate wasting time so much. I hadn't really been doing anything in Paris. I had gone there immediately after coming down from Oxford with a lovely, shiny useless new degree, in a faute-de-mieux middle-class way, to fill in time. To fill in time till what? What indeed? (p.7)

She talks like this - "I met an absolutely wonderful man called Martin who worked in a bookshop, and he spoke such wonderful French that everyone thought he was, he could talk as quickly as they do and without thinking" (p.48). She sounds more convincing in dialogue (which on p.62 is laid out as in a script). She's in the year after Uni - just come down from "Ox". She's wary of the concept of marriage and doesn't want to have babies. Maybe that's how the New Woman thought then. She has firm views about herself -

• "How or why can a person appear so little to be what they are? I cannot understand it: how should I, when my every instinct is for self-revelation (p.126)"
• "I lack constancy to any image: I am constant only to effort" (p.161)
• "Whenever I think how utterly awful it must be to have a baby I think of her" (p.179)
• "You can't be a sexy don. It's all right for men, being learned and attractive, but for a women it's a mistake. It detracts from the essential seriousness of the business" (p.184-5)
• "I must confess, at the risk of sounding a fool which I am not, that when he said darling to me the word hit me in the stomach: it isn't a word he uses casually, and he had said it with real intimacy, which is so rare that it brings the tears to my stupid eyes whenever it is proffered" (p.47)
• "I feel like someone living in a paper house surrounded by predatory creatures. They believe the house is solid so they don't attack, but if I were to move they would see the walls flutter and collapse and they would be on me in no time" (p.80)
• "I've too much wit and too little beauty, so I lose" (p.186)

Each encounter provokes a self-reassessment. Of her sister Louise she says "the humiliating period after she had cast me off and before I learned to appear to have cast her off I remember very clearly" (p.101) and "In the end she taught me the art of competition, and this is what I really hold against her" (p.103). Rivalry turns eventually to sympathy, or at least a realisation that they think similarly about marriage and having babies. One day she meets her cousin Daphne by chance - "Daphne is somehow a threat to my existence. Whenever I see her, I feel weighted down to earth" (p.114). She meets a man called Jackie at a party

there was a time when I would have cried really, I suppose, for attention, but this time I simply couldn't help it. More honourable, in one way, but more degrading. 'Most girls cry after parties,' he said, suddenly, as the car started forward in the dark. 'Do they?' 'Most of the sort of girls that I take home.' 'What sort are they?' 'You would be offended, wouldn't you, if I said your sort?' (p.95)

then later in the discussion

to being high-powered I hoped I did belong, and he had caught me in a pattern of behaviour that I would like to hold to (p.96)

On p.93 we get the revelation about the nature of Louise's marriage. Around p.164 Louise reveals herself as a social snob - marge and Polytechnics are anathema. She says that her husband is "an articulate snob. He doesn't understand, he sneers" - not the first time in the book that a pot calls the kettle black. Towards the end, realisations come thick and fast.

• "I had the extraordinary conviction that my emancipation from her was drawing near" (p.167)
• Backstage, life seems more real - "Whatever it lacked, it had life in excess, dirty, exaggerated life" (p.176)
• "I saw for her what I could never see for myself - that this impulse to seize on one moment as the whole, one aspect as the total view, one attitude as a revelation, is the impulse that confounds both her and me, that confounds and impels us" (p.206)

I liked the bit at the end of chapter 10, when the hands of a three-year-old girl crept up her skirt. And I like the last image of the book.

Sarah did a degree about books, and her sister married an author. She writes "Only a real idiot would use the thought of a library as an image of the womb" (p.185), says "Beyond anything I'd like to write a funny book. I'd like to write a book like Lucky Jim" and also says "I think you're the only person I know who married for money. I know they're always doing it in books but I thought it was just a novelist's convention." (p.195). The writing's wobbly in places, though that can usually be blamed on the narrator. In "I didn't hear much about it either. I was rowing at Henley. But Daphne told me there was a great row" (p.158) I wonder if the repetition of "row" is deliberate. "literally" is used quite often by the narrator - "I felt, literally, small" (p.91). "I had never, literally never, heard such words" (p.165); ... "could you literally buy everything you see?" (p.173)

Early on we're told the other characters' names, ages and connections. A few of these characters provide insights

• Tony says "All really selfish people think they're tender-hearted, because they get hurt so often. They mistake the pangs of wounded pride for the real thing" (p.46)
• "She lacked an instinct for kitchens and gas-meters and draughts under the door and tiresome quarrels: and, lacking instinct, she had to live on will. Willing to get up, willing to go to bed, willing to eat or sleep or love" (p.71)

The narrator makes brief appearances - "I still remember the way she said that". Chapter 5 begins "I now find myself compelled to relate a piece of information which I decided to withhold, on the grounds that it was irrelevant, but I realize increasingly that nothing is irrelevant." On the next page it says "It is only now, at the time of writing (or rather, indeed, rewriting) that it occurs to me ...". On p.207 the narrator arrives and stays - "As I sit here, typing this last page". At the end I still wasn't sure whether the narrator thought she was older and wiser than the girl in the story.

"Jerusalem the Golden" by Margaret Drabble (Penguin, 1969)

I'm struggling again. The heroine, Clara, is affected by words that are "phrased with some beauty" (p.31). I wonder what she'd feel about the start of this book. Early on she uses big words in conversation - "And now you can see that I can substantiate my disadvantage" (p.24) The following extracts of narration (3rd person privileged though they are, and interpretable as expressions of Clara's personality) are too wordy to me.

• Sometimes she wondered what would have happened if she had missed them, and whether a conjunction so fateful and fruitful could have been, by some accidental obtuseness on her part, avoided: she did not like to think so, she liked to think that inevitability had had her in its grip, but at the same time she uneasily knew that it had in some ways, been a near thing (p.9)
• In the following, the repetition of "although" and "quite" seem accidental - Although she was quite ignorant of the etiquette of such occasions, she rightly took this to be her duty; she could tell that she was right by the way that Peter, after introducing her, politely echoed her sentiments, although he had expressed quite other sentiments whilst sitting beside her in the auditorium (p.10). How about this rewrite? - Though ignorant of the appropriate etiquette, she took this to be her duty; she could tell she was right by how Peter, after introducing her, politely echoed her sentiments, contradicting what he'd said during the performance
• Clelia was a name with which she had no acquaintance. She did not think it likely that she would ever need to use it, so she was not unduly uneasy about her ignorance. How about this instead? Again, it reduces the word-count by at least a third - She hadn't heard the name Clelia before, which didn't worry her because she didn't think she'd use it

The paragraph starting near the bottom of p.10 begins with a sentence containing "but". Subsequent sentences hinge about "but", "but", "but", "but", "but" and "nevertheless", "however, though", "though", "and yet" until the pattern's broken by the none too elegant "She liked to like things, if at all, for the right reasons. And all in all, she was glad".

Once the text has something to narrate and more dialogue interjects, the style loosens up. Naive, Clara emerges into a mileau she's longed for - the "Jerusalem the Golden" hymn elevated the heroine, Clara, "to a state of rapt and ferocious ambition and desire ... where beautiful people in beautiful houses spoke of beautiful things" (p.32). She trusts the first interesting family she meets - "Clara was impressed by the way they all managed to talk intelligently, yet without strain, without intensity, without affection" (p.136); "She took them on trust so completely, the Denhams, for as far as she could see they were never wrong" (p.156). She identifies with Clelia - when Clelia was 8 or 9 she once "confessed that she was weeping because she feared she would never be an artist" (p.137). Later, finding some of her own dying mother's letters, Clara identifies with her as she was in her 20s. In chapter 7 we have Gabriel's point-of-view. Later, Clara's and Gabriel's points-of-view alternate. At the end, events happen rapidly, and Clara, without experience, perhaps oversteps the mark. Coincidences play in her favour. I like the last hundred or so pages.

I probably used to identify with her characters - heroines from a sheltered upbringing who have the basic brain power but lack cultural conversation and challenges to their beliefs. They meet someone who opens the door onto a new life, shows them London. They're not ready for it, they idealize their new friend, they run before they can walk, feeling there's so much time to make up.

In a Paris Review interview by Barbara Milton, Drabble says "Most people have a rival figure or model figure while some of us have lots of both. I suppose in my case this was either my older sister, or my best woman friend whom I've used again and again in my novels. The friend was very much a Celia figure to me in that she came from a more sophisticated background." and "The problem in my early novels was that I simply hadn't the ability to express the range of my feeling. I couldn't technically do it. When I wrote my first novel I didn't know how to write a novel at all. ... In the fourth [Jerusalem the Golden], I tried to write (not very successfully) in the third person". On enotes it says that "The Millstone, and Jerusalem the Golden are semi-autobiographical". So maybe my doubts about this book match her own doubts, and the reasons I liked the books were to do with the reasons she wrote them.

In the Paris Review she says she finds it difficult writing "about very stupid people. I'm aware that my characters tend to be not only intelligent, but intelligent about themselves." The characters do all seem equally self-literate, plot turns tending to happen when a character becomes suddenly more or less self-aware than usual. Jon Self on his The Asylum blog says "Drabble’s style remains similar through many of the stories: a subjective third person narrative which comes close to stream of consciousness in its detail and absorption of the characters’ thoughts (at times I was reminded of Mrs Dalloway). This enables her to impart her characters’ histories and impressions together, in a way which can tip from showing to telling". Maybe, but the initial style in this book still seems too stilted.

"The Millstone" by Margaret Drabble (Penguin 1968)

Long ago I read a few Drabble books. I knew about students then, but I didn't know how graduates lived, or how the middle classes lived. In Drabble's books I encountered emotionally articulate women, London lifestyles, and people who were interested in literature. I saw dramatizations starring Sandy Dennis.

I know I read "The Millstone" but now I've re-read it I feel it couldn't have contributed to my abiding impression of Drabble books. I finished it, but only just. The quality of the writing didn't propel me along. Is the main character supposed to come over as snobby? Maybe. When she found out that her lodger has been writing a novel about her, she was more annoyed by the novel's attack on scholarship than the invasion of privacy. But maybe it's just that times have changed. No longer do mothers stay 9 days in a maternity ward, neither do unmarried mothers have a "U" at the foot of their bed.

The character has a Ph.D so we should expect some elevated, controlled writing - "Lydia, who had hitherto been accepting our devious comfort, suddenly turned on us with a wail of despondency", (p.9); "she wore her grief well: she spared herself and her associates the additional infliction of ugliness, which so often accompanies much pain", (p.135)

The baby's nameless more often than I'd have expected - "I remember, however, the night before it was born with some clarity", (p.87); "And so the summer wore away, and autumn set in, and the baby started to sit up", (p.112)

I think the plot is that she becomes more self-assured. At the start she thinks of the father that "He must be one of these bisexual people, I thought, or perhaps even he's no more queer than I am promiscuous, or whatever the word is for what I pretend to be. Perhaps we appeal to each other because we're rivals in hypocrisy", (p.27). When the child is born she has a funny feeling - "Love, I suppose one might call it, and the first of my life", (p.98). Later she's brave enough to talk to neighbours, she realises that "If I asked more favours of people, I would find people more kind", (p.156). At the end she invites home the unknowing father having not met him for 2 years. She likes him. He asks if she'd like to travel the world with him. She turns him down, sort of - "I asked him if he would have another drink. But I asked him in such as way that he would refuse, and he refused.
'I can't help worrying,' I said. 'It's my nature. There's nothing I can do about my nature, is there?'
'No,' said George" (p.167). We're left wondering whether motherhood has changed her much. Before, she loved no-one and had a career planned. After, she has someone to worry about and has a career planned.