The Middle Ground:

...Nearly all of Drabble's characters are burdened by her concern to engage the full spectrum of contemporary life, which comes close to diminishing them as individuals...

...The exterior world of this novel, the London metro-scape, is a world that seems to consume and digest itself so rapidly that man can no longer dispose of the overwhelming effulgence that he produces...

...But as women entered the mainstream of life in the late sixties and early seventies, her themes and concerns became larger, more topical and sociological...

...She began her career by writing of the trials and pitfalls of women, but she has become bored with the subject...

...The major metaphor of The Middle Ground, on the other hand, is a remarkable construction, the sewer system, the subterranean network that carries away the waste of civilization...

...Through Kate and a small group of qjher characters whose lives are very close to hers, Drabble attempts to locate the general malaise of the present from the prospect of the middle ground of early middle age where one cannot turn exclusively to the past for clarity or look with illusions to the future...

...She is still, however, deeply interested in her individual characters, and The Middle Ground reflects a struggle for form, an attempt to accommodate the the author's impulse to probe deeply the individual consciousness and at the same time look more broadly at the pulse of society at large...

...The seams of The Middle Ground are not so well sewn as in Drabble's earlier novels, but this is a work of far more technical ambition and a larger orchestration of more complex and subtle themes...

...All of Drabble's novels reflect her intense interest in contemporary themes and subject matter, for she writes in the tradition of English realists like Arnold Bennett...

...Drabble is still, however, in search for a form that can accommodate her two impulses...

...Kate remembers how eloquently her father used to speak of the efficiency of the London sewer system...

...Kate's personal life bears the cumulative scars of Drabble's earlier heroines...

...While its characters explore their past and present and seek to assess their lives from the vantage point of early middle age, the novel more generally expresses a sustained commentary on the complex social and moral world they inhabit...

...Thomas F. Staley The Middle Ground is Margaret Drabble's ninth novel and her most complex and technically ambitious work...

...It is as though at times the author cannot make up her mind just how she wishes to render reality in the novel, through the individual consciousness or with a broad panoramic sweep...

...But now we seem to have progressed beyond our efficiency-the implications are both comic and horrifying...

...The risks are worth taking, but only marginally successful...

...Through Kate she is able to extend past and present and broaden the themes of the novel and at the same time create a character of wit, intelligence, and deep sympathy...

...Kate Armstrong, the central figure of The Middle Ground, is a widely read journalist, a well paid observer of the chaos of contemporary life...

...The sewer's incapacity is only a symptom of a growing inability to cope...

...The novel demonstrates not only Drabble's acute observations of the representative artifacts of contemporary civilizations, of which we knew, but her willingness to struggle for a more complex form that her subject matter and themes demand...

...But she sees both in herself and in Hugo and in her ex-lover, Ted, that professional success and recognition has little to do one way or the other with personal and domestic stability...

...The Middle Ground, as its title suggests, is a novel of temporal and spatial perspective...

...But the narrative shifting between the individual consciousness and the wide range of social issues in The Middle Ground is not well fused, even jarring...

...she looks back on a broken marriage, an abortion, a succession of lovers, with guilt and wonder...

...It is both an extension and an elaboration of her sustained chronicle of urban life over the past two decades-a period for women of hope, freedom, and challenge amid enormous tension and struggle...

...As a trope the sewer is effective in its humor, irony, and thematic implications...

...Her earlier novels, however, were narrow in scope, close psychological portraits of bright and promising young women down from university who were coming of age in the heady atmosphere of rising expectations that characterized the early sixties in England...

...This is an ambitious challenge that Drabble has set for herself, for she runs the risk of having her characters become fragmentary and even dissolve into the dismal exterior landscape she paints...

...she yearns in a way to command more substantial, more interesting subjects like her friend and fellow journalist, Hugo, who is an expert on the Middle East...

...Because Drabble attempts to raise such large questions and touch on so many topics, Kate comes dangerously close to becoming a type rather than an individual...

...THE MIDDLE GROUND A larger orchestration Margaret Drabble Alfred A. Knopf, $10.95, 277 pp...

...themes demand...

...She is the woman who has made it on her own terms, but as she looks around her and at her past she is not sure of its triumph...

...To entertain this prospect Drabble borrows a page or two from the techniques of Virginia Woolf, and they are well used...

...This tendency is saved, sometimes just barely, by her remarkable skill in drawing characters with short adroit brush strokes, by creating brief imaginative scenes that give life to a character...