Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgement
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations and References
- 1 Margaret Drabble: Career and Critics
- 2 Narrative Structure in Drabble's Works
- 3 Spots of Time: Managing a Focused Narrative
- 4 An Event Seen from an Angle
- 5 What Was the Point of Knowing What Was Right (If One Didn't Then Do It)?
- 6 I Do Not Care Very Much for Plots Myself (But I Do Like a Sequence of Events)
- 7 Reading the Plot of the Past
- 8 Mothers and Others
- 9 Conclusion
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
7 - Reading the Plot of the Past
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgement
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations and References
- 1 Margaret Drabble: Career and Critics
- 2 Narrative Structure in Drabble's Works
- 3 Spots of Time: Managing a Focused Narrative
- 4 An Event Seen from an Angle
- 5 What Was the Point of Knowing What Was Right (If One Didn't Then Do It)?
- 6 I Do Not Care Very Much for Plots Myself (But I Do Like a Sequence of Events)
- 7 Reading the Plot of the Past
- 8 Mothers and Others
- 9 Conclusion
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
Summary
The Radiant Way is the first of three linked novels (the others being A Natural Curiosity and The Gates of Ivory) which together, unusually for Margaret Drabble, cover the whole decade of the 1980s and incorporate extensive time lapses in their unfolding - unlike the tight time-schemes of the early novels.
Although the narrator calls her narrative ‘this non-story’ (RW 301), in fact there are far more dramatic plot events in The Radiant Way than in The Middle Ground. The central characters are Liz Headleand, Alix Bowen and Esther Breuer, who met as undergraduates at Cambridge: the main focus is on Liz and Alix, while Esther, an art historian of solitary and eccentric private life, is less fully developed, and indeed the character of Liz's sister Shirley is at least as well established as Esther's. Expanding outward from this nucleus is a vast range of characters, almost all of a comfortable middle-class status, and including a number of people active in the media, not only because of the trio's Cambridge friends who have gone into theatre and television, but because Liz's husband Charles is a television producer. This is a novel which exploits its huge cast of characters to point to coincidences and links, as seen in The Realms of Gold and The Ice Age, sometimes ironically, sometimes with more serious intent.
The sense of connections between different strands of life, emphasized in earlier novels, is particularly felt by Alix, who works, as many women do, at insecure, underpaid part-time jobs in education and administration. As she travels across the suburbs of London, she reflects upon the multiplicity of human lives lived cheek by jowl across the city and across the country, much as Kate Armstrong had recognized the intricate proximity of lives packed together in her part of London:
She aspired to a more comprehensive vision. She aspired to make connections. She and Liz, over supper together, often spoke of such things. Their own stories had strangely interlocked, and sometimes she had a sense that such interlockings were part of a vaster network, 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 on Harley Street with the Garfield Centre towards which she now herself drove. The social structure greatly interested Alix.
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- Margaret Drabble , pp. 73 - 92Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2004