Margaret Drabble has been writing novels for about twenty-five years, and she has produced enough work to prove beyond doubt that she is a smart and talented writer. This said, it must be acknowledged that her novels, read together, are rather a tedious lot. Her protagonists practice different professions, are of different ages and temperaments, respond differently to their circumstances. But her novels suffer from a constraining sameness which keeps Drabble as a writer wandering around the same circle, treading the same ground. The fact has been clear and becomes clearer with the publication of her newest effort, The Radiant Way: Margaret Drabble stays where she is as a novelist because she has no place else to go.
The Radiant Way shares with Drabble’s other fiction a central ambivalence toward her London world: on one hand, she echoes the ingrained, tiresome notion that modern life in England is an industrialized night¬mare, breeding a universally crushing de¬spair. On the other, her characters manage to live quite nicely in this allegedly doomed society. Their houses are comfortable, their children go to good schools, they themselves have enjoyed fine educations, and their pocketbooks, if not overflowing, have enough money in them to allow them to keep their lunch appointments in good restaurants. It is hard to imagine that such malaise and such ease could co-exist so companionably within these characters.
The Radiant Way shares with Drabble’s other fiction a central ambivalence toward her London world.
The novel opens