"A master of her craft."
I admired Margaret Drabble’s work so much that I read each of her novels, one after the other, through my late teenage years. Eventually, in 1972, the year The Needle’s Eye was first published, her sixth novel, I married and took myself off to the West Coast of Scotland, burying myself in the Highlands while I raised twins. I don’t think I have read anything from her since then. Then, last year on my birthday, one of those twins, my daughter, gave me The Needle’s Eye as a present. It took a while to reach the top of my reading pile but eventually it got there and I devoured it!
Reading her for the first time in fifty-odd years I was struck how different her writing is from my memory of it. In the 70’s I read each novel almost as a thriller. I couldn’t put them down. I had totally forgotten the reflective pace of her work, the many words used to set the scene. But then, this novel is a world away from our shiny, frenetic pace of life today. It is the world of my youth, of draughts, knitting children’s jumpers, coal dust, washing up at the sink, not possessing a car. It was a world where sexual equality was a toddler, constantly falling over. It was also a world where I was thirsty for literature.
Fifty years on, it took me a few pages to get into The Needle’s Eye. I found myself impatient for ‘something to happen’. Had I really galloped through her books in my twenties? If so, what a lot I had missed, and yet, I remember stopping to read a word, a phrase, a sentence several times, sometimes aloud to savour the taste of it, thrilled to read a master at work. The truth is, half a century on, one is not the same person. I couldn’t possibly read it as if I were twenty. But then I relaxed and decided to read with no prior expectations, as if I’d never read any of Margaret Drabble’s work. And the miracle happened. The long, slow unwinding of the plot that demands you attend to the depth of her writing. There it is, and it felt like coming home.
Rose marries against her parents wishes and renounces her inheritance. Her marriage is difficult and she eventually separates from Christopher. When she meets Simon, an unhappily married barrister, they become friends and he is able to give her legal advice. He can’t understand why she insists on living in a run down street. Is she simply stubborn? As he gets to know her better he admires her more. She fights for her children, distraught that she might lose them. She wishes to live a real life, as other people do, not a life of privilege. Her family and estranged husband might view her intransigence as stubborn foolishness but Simon eventually sees the real depth of her character.
Margaret Drabble is a master of her craft. I love the way she can paint a brief picture of something that will have little effect on the story but which lives with me, long after I have finished the book. The woman in a shop, telling of the pram cover she was knitting, rather than getting on with the purchase. The boat, seen out at sea, then glanced at again, closer in, and then, when only the author is left to see, it disembarks several disorientated men who scuttle away. We are left to wonder whether they are perhaps refugees, or illegal migrants of one sort or another. They are part of a different story, one that has not been told, at least not in this book. Each time, these glimpses of other lives enrich the novel, giving it a depth that remains unexpected, every time it happens.
In contrast, we get enough detail about Simon and Rose to feel we know them very well from their thoughts as well as their decisions, although there will always be things about them we will never know, things maybe they don’t know themselves.
There are a few later novels from this writer that I have never read. I now want to revisit The Millstone, one I have read before, but also I will find one that I can come to honestly fresh. Thank you, lovely daughter, for reintroducing me to a writer I didn’t know how much I had missed!
Reading her for the first time in fifty-odd years I was struck how different her writing is from my memory of it. In the 70’s I read each novel almost as a thriller. I couldn’t put them down. I had totally forgotten the reflective pace of her work, the many words used to set the scene. But then, this novel is a world away from our shiny, frenetic pace of life today. It is the world of my youth, of draughts, knitting children’s jumpers, coal dust, washing up at the sink, not possessing a car. It was a world where sexual equality was a toddler, constantly falling over. It was also a world where I was thirsty for literature.
Fifty years on, it took me a few pages to get into The Needle’s Eye. I found myself impatient for ‘something to happen’. Had I really galloped through her books in my twenties? If so, what a lot I had missed, and yet, I remember stopping to read a word, a phrase, a sentence several times, sometimes aloud to savour the taste of it, thrilled to read a master at work. The truth is, half a century on, one is not the same person. I couldn’t possibly read it as if I were twenty. But then I relaxed and decided to read with no prior expectations, as if I’d never read any of Margaret Drabble’s work. And the miracle happened. The long, slow unwinding of the plot that demands you attend to the depth of her writing. There it is, and it felt like coming home.
Rose marries against her parents wishes and renounces her inheritance. Her marriage is difficult and she eventually separates from Christopher. When she meets Simon, an unhappily married barrister, they become friends and he is able to give her legal advice. He can’t understand why she insists on living in a run down street. Is she simply stubborn? As he gets to know her better he admires her more. She fights for her children, distraught that she might lose them. She wishes to live a real life, as other people do, not a life of privilege. Her family and estranged husband might view her intransigence as stubborn foolishness but Simon eventually sees the real depth of her character.
Margaret Drabble is a master of her craft. I love the way she can paint a brief picture of something that will have little effect on the story but which lives with me, long after I have finished the book. The woman in a shop, telling of the pram cover she was knitting, rather than getting on with the purchase. The boat, seen out at sea, then glanced at again, closer in, and then, when only the author is left to see, it disembarks several disorientated men who scuttle away. We are left to wonder whether they are perhaps refugees, or illegal migrants of one sort or another. They are part of a different story, one that has not been told, at least not in this book. Each time, these glimpses of other lives enrich the novel, giving it a depth that remains unexpected, every time it happens.
In contrast, we get enough detail about Simon and Rose to feel we know them very well from their thoughts as well as their decisions, although there will always be things about them we will never know, things maybe they don’t know themselves.
There are a few later novels from this writer that I have never read. I now want to revisit The Millstone, one I have read before, but also I will find one that I can come to honestly fresh. Thank you, lovely daughter, for reintroducing me to a writer I didn’t know how much I had missed!
The Needle's Eye is published by Canongate.
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