The Gates of Ivory

Commonweal, August 14, 1992 by Suzanne Keen

In the gates of Ivory, Margaret Drabble brings to a satisfying close her three-volume diagnosis of England's contemporary conditions. The project began with Liz and Charles Headleand's New Year's party celebrating the end of the seventies in The Radiant Way (1987). In this novel of Thatcher's Britain, Drabble follows the fortunes of he Cambridge friends, Liz Headleand, Alix Bowen, and Esther Breuer, who make up the three-legged stool of perspective upon which she balances her investigative narrative. Of the second volume, A Natural Curiosity (1989), Drabble remarks, "I had not intended to write a sequel, but felt that the earlier novel was in some way unfinished, that it had asked questions, it had not answered, and introduced people who had hardly been allowed to speak." A Natural Curiosity nonetheless extends Drabble's relentless anatomy of Britain by means of her three major characters, Liz, Alix and Esther. "No," says Alix, the the end of the novel, "England's not a bad country. It's just a mean, cold, ugly, divided, tired, clapped-out, post-imperial, post-industrial slag-heap covered in polystyrene hamburger cartons. It's not a bad country at all. I love it."

The Gates of Ivory places England in a global context, decentering Drabble's familiar fictional world by tracing Stephen Cox, Liz's absent friend, to cambodia. In the process, Esther and Alix are relegated to minor subplots; the old triumvirate is reconfigured into Liz's story, Stephen's story, and Hattie Osborne's first-person narrative. Holding together these disparate, crisscrossing, and disconnected trajectories is an old-fashioned overt narrator with a voice and opinions, of her own.

This narrator announces the subject: "This is a novel - if it be - about Good Time and Bad Time." Cambodia stands for Bad Time in The Gates of Ivory and into Bad Time first Stephen and then Liz go, equipped with self-deprecation of and desire for the hearth of darkness. Drabble's Bangkok and Cambodia are departures for a novelist of the British middle-class experience. Her other travelers stick to airplanes, hotels, and restaurants, and in The Gates of Ivory she is still most at home in descriptions of tourists' venues. Yet she devises in the savvy Miss Porntip a credible guide for Stephen and later for Liz. Miss Porntip knows better than to enter the Bad Time of the Khmer Rouge and Stephen's further explorations feel rather researched, an impression strengthened by the presence of a bibliography at the end of the novel - if novel it be!

The book begins engagingly when a package containing a manuscript in Stephen's handwriting, papers, postcards, newspaper cuttings, and two joints of a human finger bone arrives in Liz's office and transforms Stephen's prolonged absence into a mystery. Despite the narrator's self-conscious declaration of the narrative options ("Some cross the bridge into the Bad Time, into the Underworld, and return to tell the tale. Some of deliberately. Some step into Bad Time suddenly. It may be waiting, there, in the next room"). the novel spills untidily in many directions. It proceeds by juxtaposing sequences and scenes, as Drabble's novels often do. In the beginning of The Radiant Way, for instance, we see Alix at her dressing table, Esther walking, and Liz daydreaming as she prepares for the evening's party. Drabble resorts to this technique of itemized simultaneity only at the end of The Gates of Ivory, when the characters come together for the party - a memorial - service - that closes the trilogy. Yet here the gesture of completion is undermined by the narrator's assertion that "There is no way that Konstantin and Rose Vassilou could have attended the reception in Dresden Road." Readers familiar with Drabble's earlier novels will have recognized these characters from The Needle's Eye (1972). In fact it is not at all necessary to have read any previous Drabble novel to enjoy this one, for the narrator generously explains that "They belong to a different world and a different density. They have wandered into this story from the old-fashioned, Freudian, psychological novel, and they cannot mix and mingle with the guests of Lix Headleand. The should never have been invited. There is not time for them here." In a fictional world governed by the simultaneity and proximity of Good Time and Bad Time, the amazing Miss Porntip's flowers can arrive by air mail for the memorial service of her deceased lover, but the certainties of the psychological novel may no longer fit.

In the Gates of Ivory, Drabble's characters are obsessed by Conrad, but the novel's strengths and weaknesses are Trollopian. Plot is not the strong suit here. Connections and coincidences abound, despite the dedication of this fictional world to lost information and the impossibility of conveying knowledge completely The strong presence of a commenting, judging, and sometimes lecturing narrator who breaks in to undermine the illusion mixes with a diverse cast of characters possessed of convincing talk, actions, and social relations to product a flavor familiar and delightful to those who enjoy Trollope.