What will happen to champagne socialists now that the Homeland of the Revolution has been exposed as a barren and impoverished dump? Where can limousine liberals look for their model of progressivism now that, for those with any remaining shred of intellectual integrity, collectivist ideology has been utterly discredited? These may not strike you as among the most urgent questions facing mankind in the last decade of the twentieth century, but they are a lot more engaging than most of the unanswered questions posed, in a steady and unrelenting stream, by Margaret Drabble in her new novel, The Gates of Ivory.
In fact, the question of what happens now to the fashionable Lefties is one she doesn’t ask rhetorically, even though it is the question that lies behind all the enormous number of those she does ask. These concern both her mysterious characters’ disappearances into the Cambodian jungle and things in general. Where is Stephen Cox? Where is Sean Flynn? Where is Mitra Akrun? Where is Pol Pot? What has happened to them? Can you believe anything you read in the newspapers? Will the fame of Rimbaud or Rambo last longer? Who is shelling whom on the Cambodian border? Will a Labour government solve London’s transport problems? Is this the End of History? Who will win the pennant?
Never has a novel been written so much in the interrogative vein.
Never has a novel been written so much in the interrogative vein. And to all
