The Gates of Ivory
Keen, Suzanne
Miss Porntip sends flowers In The Gates of Ivory, Margaret Drabble brings to a satisfying close her three-volume diagnosis of England's contemporary condition. The project began with Liz and...
...It may be waiting, there, in the next room"), the novel spills untidily in many directions...
...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 memo30:14 August 1992 Commonweal rial service of her deceased lover, but the certainties of the psychological novel may no longer fit...
...No," says Alix, at the end of the novel, "England's not a bad country...
...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...
...In this novel of Thatcher's Britain, Drabble follows the fortunes of the Cambridge friends, Liz Headleand, Alix Bowen, and Esther Breuer, who make up the three-legged stool of perspectives upon which she balances her investigative narrative...
...There is not lime for them here...
...Some step into Bad Time suddenly...
...The scene in which Liz tries on six rings and buys the seventh, with Miss Porntip's expert approval, links the two overlapping and awkwardly fitting quests more convincingly than any intervention by the narrator...
...Cambodia stands for Bad Time in The Gates of Ivory THE GATES OF IVORY A Novel Margaret Drabble Viking, $22, 464 pp...
...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...
...Drabble's Bangkok and Cambodia are departures for a novelist of the British middle-class experience...
...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...
...A Natural Curiosity nonetheless extends Drabble's relentless anatomy of Britain by means of her three major characters, Liz, Alix, and Esther...
...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...
...Connections and coincidences abound, despite the dedication of this fictional world to lost information and the impossibility of conveying knowledge completely...
...Readers familiar with Drabble's earlier novels will have recognized these characters from The Needle's Eye (1972...
...Drabble is her own novelist, of course, with a distinctive tone...
...It's not a bad country at all...
...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...
...Suzanne Keen and into Bad Time first Stephen and then Liz go, equipped with self-deprecation of and desire for the heart of darkness...
...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 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...
...Yet she devises in the savvy Miss Porntip a credible guide for Stephen and, later, for Liz...
...I love it...
...I most enjoy the way she deploys objects in oblique metaphorical relation to one another...
...The project began with Liz and Charles Headleand's New Year's party celebrating the end of the seventies in The Radiant Way (1987...
...It's just a mean, cold, ugly, divided, tired, clapped-out, post-imperial, post-industrial slag-heap covered in polystyrene hamburger cartons...
...Toxic Shock Syndrome knocks Liz into the Bad Time of Dream Time, which brings her closer to Stephen Cox than will her search in the real world...
...In the process, Esther and Alix are relegated to minor subplots...
...They should never have been invited...
...This narrator announces the subject: "This is a novel—if novel it be—about Good Time and Bad Time...
...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...
...As the division between Liz's world and Stephen's closes when Liz finds Miss Porntip in Bangkok, Liz goes shopping for a charm of her own...
...Holding together these disparate, crisscrossing, and disconnected trajectories is an old-fashioned overt narrator with a voice, and opinions, of her own...
...It proceeds by juxtaposing sequences and scenes, as Drabble's novels often do...
...the old triumvirate is reconfigured into Liz's story, Stephen's story, and Hattie Osborne's first-person narrative...
...In The Gates of Ivory, Drabble's characters are obsessed by Conrad, but the novel's strengths and weaknesses are Trollopian...
...it acts as the marker of past and present narratives...
...Some go deliberately...
...Plot is not the strong suit here...
...When shopping fever gives way to the continuing search for Stephen, Liz finds herself beset in Saigon by an unexpected menstrual period with only two battered and ancient tampons...
...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...
...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...
...In this novel the finger bone that arrives in the mail reappears at later stages of the narrative...
...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 produce a flavor familiar and delightful to those who enjoy Trollope...
...This chain of objects—finger bone, ruby, tampon—solidifies the presence of these characters in impossibly coexisting worlds, in Bad Time and Good Time...
Vol. 119 • August 1992 • No. 14
