The Trouble with England

...Kitty for being good to the point of blinding herself to the existence of evil...

...Present, too, is her eye for detail and nuance, possibly the novelist's most precious tool: From the supper of cheese toast with egg enjoyed by Maureen to Alison's shapely Milanese shoe, everything in the book is observed...

...As depicted here, the country is in a mess from which neither the deus ex machina of North Sea oil nor the marginally improved fortunes of the pound sterling offers much of an escape...

...The condition of religion is indicated by Anthony's churchman-father, who "accepted Anthony's rejection of the church without a murmur...

...The words belong to William Wordsworth, who in his sonnet "London, 1802" apostrophized the author of Paradise Lose as someone capable of rescuing an England that had become "a fen of stagnant water...

...now, like Anthony, it must follow a strict regimen...

...The strongest hint of the consensus is a question raised by Alison: "Was it true that the English had ransacked their riches for two centuries, had spent like lords, and were now bankrupt, living in the ruins of their own past grandiose excesses...

...Wallacia, for example, has little physical reality—it is merely a convenient foil to England...

...Kitty, the most egregious instance of this, has virtually nothing to do except stand for mindless goodness in the face of adversity...

...Their central concern—and by extension, that of the author—is why they have been afflicted...

...If the crown manages to emerge relatively untarnished, that is probably because no one pays it much attention these days anyway...

...Drabble's previous novel, The Realms of Gold, posited the importance of coincidence and accident...

...Margaret Drabble uses several lines from the poem as an epigraph to her new novel, but the England of the mid-'70s that she is describing is in need of more than a mere poet...

...But Drabble refuses to openly commit herself on what she thinks, heeding her caution in The Realms of Gold that "omniscience has its limits...

...Similarly, the only fully convincing characters are Anthony and the delightful Maureen...

...they still bear the marks of the stick figures Drabble might have placed in a diagram before starting to write...

...At first blush, Len's misfortune alone seems wholly deserved: Anthony played squash and never smoked...

...Instead, they have given us thematic settings—broad areas of concern that serve as structure for the meditations of narrator and characters, and as nexus of events...

...That future—a trip to Wallacia to rescue Jane and its alarming aftermath?regrettably takes up the novel's last 50 pages and is implausible as well as a bit tedious...

...The absence of dimension makes the book overly schematic, overly concerned with its own form, too...

...It is Drabble's design to portray the public plight of her country through the personal tribulations of a handful of characters, almost all of whom have experienced a catastrophe of one form or another as the novel opens...

...Margaret Drabble may not be the equal of the bard Wordsworth invoked, but she convinces one that whatever England's destiny, it will have a chronicler of the highest quality...

...It is consistent with the admirable method exhibited by the writer in her recent works: While assuredly novels of ideas (they are distinctly short on plot), they have steadfastly refrained from offering messages or morals...

...of commerce by Anthony and Len's go-go speculations...

...That is indeed the hope of some of the characters—of Len, especially, as he concocts ambitious real-estate schemes while still in jail...

...This, almost perversely, has heightened the author's unfortunate tendency toward narrative artifice and playfulness...

...Assuming this conception of causality applies to nations as well, England must have committed a pretty grave offense...

...That The Ice Age is the least satisfying of the three is largely due to its spareness (three quarters as many words as Gold, half as many as Eye...

...One does not really regret the absence of a definitive interpretation...

...Everyone else is feeling the effects of the chill, both physical and spiritual, that pervades this wintry tale...

...Perhaps they are being tested, like Job, or are simply the innocent victims of what Len's crazy prisonmate believes to be the reason for all the trouble—that nuclear waste has suddenly thrown the laws of chance out of whack...

...What, after all, did Milton or Wordsworth know of energy crises, currency devaluations, urban squatters, or punk rock...

...Musing on their own fates and their country's in The Ice Age, they give the impression that at least England will not sink for lack of self-reflection...

...Thus at times the book lacks the fidelity to the texture of life we have come to expect from Drabble, giving us unneeded ironic generalizations, along with such sentences as "It ought now to be necessary to imagine a future for Anthony Keating...

...Thou shouldst be living at this hour" is not, as one might suppose, the plaint of a Miami Beach widow...

...She remains a master of what might be called the roving interior monologue...

...and Alison, who suffers a severe depression in the course of the novel, appeared to be a perfect mother...

...The younger daughter, Molly, has been brain-damaged since birth...

...The Ice Age suggests the opposite...

...Alison for ignoring Jane in favor of Molly...

...Implicit in this view, of course, is the probability that eventually the tide will turn once more, and Britain will again rise to its feet...

...Anthony Keating, a BBC producer turned land developer and the central figure, has not only had a mild heart attack, he has sunk his assets into property rendered unsellable by a collapse in the market...

...Anthony "could rationalize his own misfortunes, but there was no rational explanation for the sense of alarm, panic and despondency which seemed to flow loose in the atmosphere of England...

...of the family by Anthony and Alison each being divorced and reluctant to remarry...

...Kitty Friedmann, a friend of Anthony and Alison's, lost her foot when an IRA-planted bomb exploded in the restaurant where she was eating...

...Why all this has happened to Milton's "noble and puissant Nation" is difficult to say, and Drabble does not ease the way...

...In The Needle's Eye Drabble took up wealth and the law, in The Realms of Gold archeology and the family, and in this latest book she turns to England and buildings (at one critical point Anthony thinks, "By their buildings shall ye know them...

...The state of the arts is represented not by legitimate successors to Milton and Wordsworth but by two ex-classmates of Anthony's—one a highly successful nightclub performer whose act consists of a continual stream of insults directed at his appreciative audience...

...His mentor in real estate is even worse off...

...and of government by a closet transvestite in the foreign service...

...England, the author seems to be telling us, had taken too much on itself, had eaten too richly...

...Alison is probably nearer the truth, though, and certainly closer to the spirit of a Freudian era, in thinking "There is no such thing as an accident," and glimpsing "for a moment, in the dark night, a primitive causality so shocking, so uncanny" that she shivers...

...Alison Murray, Anthony's woman friend, has been hit by the news that her elder daughter, Jane, was arrested following a fatal hit-and-run accident in an imaginary Iron Curtain country, Wallacia...

...Anthony may be undergoing punishment for what he has done to the land or for a form of hubris...

...her husband was killed...

...Len Win-cobank is behind bars for trying to bail himself out of hot water illegally...

...no other writer I know dares to enter the minds of so many characters, significant and insignificant, in succession...

...Since Drabble's outstanding quality is intelligence, moreover, her characters usually have something interesting to think...

...Alison, in sickness or in health, is at turns unbelievable and tiresome...

...Nevertheless, the qualities that have earned Drabble her standing as a major novelist do surface...

...In fact, nearly every facet of mid-'70s British life comes under fire...

...Kitty, an unreservedly good person, "had nothing whatsoever to do with the Irish...

...the other a once promising poet-scholar grown fat, disillusioned and reactionary in his middle age...

...The single remotely happy person we encounter is Len's irrepressible secretary/companion, Maureen Kir-by...

...Anthony's spiritual awakening in the last pages of the novel is also a promising sign for the future...

...The rest often seem more abstract principles than fleshed-out people...