A Tangled Bank
MATHEWSON, RUTH
A Tangled Bank The Realms of Gold By Margaret Drabble Knopf. 354 pp. $8.95. Reviewed by Ruth Mathewson Instructor in English, Barnard College "It is interesting," wrote Charles Darwin at the...
...Their father had been a cold man with a violent temper...
...Later, in The Needle's Eye, a dog show at London's Alexandra Palace becomes the obvious occasion for a woman's meditation on Malthus...
...Frances wears close to her breast two "poor relics,' teeth that her lover has had replaced...
...It is too muddy, we are told, to make out who the player is...
...Although Frances Wingate's standing among her colleagues has been well established by her work on African trade routes and discovery of a lost city on the Chad-Libyan border, it is her sheer phys-icality that conveys her true authority...
...The discussions of survival and adaptation, of Freud, of psychology in general, of the Woman Question, are generally trite, although Drabble captures down to the last crumb of the baby's Weetabix the damp life of a trapped young housewife...
...The cumbersome authorial interruptions ("So there you are...
...Traditions, received ideas, are not so much criticized here as simply assimilated into conventions of the novel and life...
...Arsenal...
...It was," he recalled long afterward, "an astonishing, a beautiful effect...
...Reviewed by Ruth Mathewson Instructor in English, Barnard College "It is interesting," wrote Charles Darwin at the end of The Origin of Species, "to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of all kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us...
...The pleasures to be found here and there in The Realms of Gold make me hope that in her next work she will forsake her reach and return to the grasp she has long secured...
...All the color had drained from her brown-yellow, face, turning it gray...
...She had hardened herself on him...
...She is a large woman, a "weathered monument," scratched and scarred, only in her mid-3Os but divorced and the mother of four conveniently independent children...
...The Realms of Gold includes, too, a case of anorexia nervosa (self-starvation), a mercy killing, a suicide, and even, when Karel becomes feverish after receiving a cholera shot, a touch of pestilence...
...And why is it that the presentment of the sour soil of an inherited Midlands landscape is so compelling and convincing, while High Table speculations about America?It's on too large a scale...
...Surely Frances could have resisted the impulse to describe the difficulties faced by the Minister of Culture of a developing African nation as problems of tradition and the individual talent...
...When the Vicar cannot find the right reference book for the "time-hallowed ritual" of consecrating a burial ground because his house is so untidy, so "subdued to the demands of small children," we wonder how long that interesting ceremony will be preserved...
...Not nature, but the contrivance of metaphor seems to me to direct that fall, and a Darwinian set-piece like this seems a literary obstacle in the way of finding out what happens...
...Drabble is far better when she shows than when she talks and tells...
...This particular disturbance has probably been caused by her self-imposed exile of many months from her lover Karel, a shabby, "once beautiful" historian of agriculture at a London polytechnic institute...
...She can "cry like a woman,' too (another talent of great interest to Darwin...
...The realms of gold in Keats' poems were literary of course, and so are they—too literary by half—in this novel...
...The card portrayed a rugby player in red and white gear...
...She has learned to read these storms?the very air darkens—as part of a possibly hereditary cycle...
...There is Oxford stability on the maternal side, but her mother is a "frigid" gynecologist, a celebrated advocate of birth control who, given our survival theme, is the least sympathetic character in the novel...
...Later, she and Karel slip and fall into it, covering themselves with mud and garbage...
...Given Drabble's rich descriptions of physical and social landscapes, and her capacity to entertain, it may be churlish to predict that The Realms of Gold will become dated before any of her earlier, smaller books...
...Drabble's women usually decide in the end not to act against their natures, but most of them take some time to discover just what their natures are...
...Perhaps naturally as well, the adult Frances, home on a visit, finds oily scum, a piece of polysty-rene and coke bottles in her ditch...
...When we first encounter her, in one of these rooms, she bends but refuses to break under the weight of a terrible despair...
...With the same fascination Darwin studied the natural history of female blushing: How far down the body, he wondered, could the blush be traced...
...How in the body she had been...
...Eliot, and Darwin himself with far too much EngLit facility—yet it is the invisible epigraph for an ambitious work whose theme is nothing less than the survival of the human species...
...The late Stanley Edgar Hyman saw The Origin as a tragedy, and found in the tangled bank a metaphor for the rich complexity of life, but to my knowledge no novelist, certainly no comic novelist, has taken the work and the image so explicitly for text as has Margaret Drabble...
...T. S. Eliot in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" wrote that the term tradition "could hardly be made agreeable to English ears without comfortable reference to the reassuring science of archeology...
...Totemism is one more "natural" response...
...Still, Drabble is a natural-born storyteller, always delivering the party after the preparations, the reunion after the separation, the funeral after the death...
...She does not quote the passage directly in her eighth book —remarkable restraint for someone who calls on Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Arnold, Clare, Shaw, T.S...
...Obstinate to the last she had pursued her career, her interests, her own self, in his despite...
...Frances and David travel around the world and far back in time, but it is at home in the ancestral East Midlands, where Frances had spent her childhood summers, that the past finds its truest expression...
...The novel itself is a case in point, for the great Arsenal soccer players are mistakenly identified as rugby men...
...Now Eliot turns up, another comfortable archeological reference agreeable to English ears...
...again, tomorrow's researchers may find it hard to make out today's artifacts...
...Frances Wingate, the much traveled archeologist in The Realms of Gold, already knows hers, and it is a formidable force: She has "amazing qualities of survival and adaptation...
...He had been brought as a child from his native Czechoslovakia to London, and was the only one of his family to escape death in the concentration camps...
...may be an attempt to serve the same end as the lost histories: a homely warning that accident, error and wish can distort the record while it is being written...
...The losers in the Darwinian world of adaptation are the Ollerenshaws, Frances' father's family, who have produced a crazy, often suicidal line...
...Invent a more suitable end if you can...
...And just as the uncertainties of prehistory and history are the background of the present, so our present may be seen by future archeologists as an elusive past...
...Her father was a cold and remote zoologist, sprung out of rural obscurity to be knighted for his work on that newt...
...It drives people mad...
...The confrontations between people become formulaic, as when the gentle Karel, the male of the species, is forced to comply with the wishes of his exasperating wife Joy, to have him take her by the hair and bang her head on the floor...
...Besides, the point had been made better earlier, when the two made love in a muddy Italian estuary, thrashing around in the primal slime while hundreds and hundreds of frogs croaked out a joyful music...
...Naturally, the child pondered the origin of species...
...Great Aunt Con dies alone of starvation, neglected by relatives and neighbors, her stomach full of the only food she was able to scavenge, paper...
...He and Frances are different kinds of survivors...
...Frances is given to drinking rather too much in the solitary hotel rooms around the world where her professional commitments often take her...
...It is not the mod extensions of '70s London—where people "chat people up"—but the book's earnest received wisdom, its academi-oism, that makes it old before its time...
...Karel had fallen in love with her one night when she believed (mistakenly) that one of her children was endangered...
...A crucial postcard delayed for months by postal strikes and telegrams delivered with "darling" spelled "harling" and "scandal" as "candal" further suggest that our most routine inscriptions may present to posterity a strange and obscure hieroglyphic...
...The archeologist's brother turns up an old cigarette card in the dirt at Aunt Con's funeral, "(Or was it a bubblegum card...
...The whole nation is suffering from collective agoraphobia"—are so foregone, so vapid, so dated, and so dreary...
...And her cousin David Ollerenshaw, the truest scientist in this novel of scientists, a rock-hard geologist for whom man was "just another agent of natural change, like wind and water," always carries with him a few small stones...
...the recent past is sometimes harder to reconstruct than a lost city...
...Drabble has been preoccupied with the subject ever since the heroine of her second novel, The Gar-rick Year, concluded: "I, being different, and being what I am, am made for survival...
...As a young girl, Frances had liked the newts best, "the small ancient survivors from the world of pre-history, remembering in their tiny bones the great bones of the stenosaurus...
...he is a "hopeless rationalist," while she is "addicted to living...
...cigarette cards must be period pieces by now...
...The Fijians, Darwin wrote, buried alive their old or ailing parents...
...Luckily, "naturally," Joy has been a lesbian all along, and the true lovers can get together when she finds her niche in a women's commune...
...With the intrusive narrative voice, another natural law seems to be in effect: The wider the range and the longer the perspective, the greater the chance, of banality...
...At a funeral, he closes his hand around the topaz in his pocket, a talisman against the corruptible...
...Our origins as well as hers are there, for the ditch on her grandparents' farm was full of flora and fauna, "a whole unnecessary and teeming world of creation...
...The odd relatives permit Drabble to return repeatedly to the law of natural selection...
...the Fuegians, when winter starvation pressed, killed their old women, then their dogs...
...Poring over old letters, Frances tries to unravel Aunt Con's life but must settle for mysteries...
Vol. 59 • April 1976 • No. 9
