Fiction: The Red Queen

We discover something of what Drabble intends through the novel’s prologue, in which she explains that the crown princess “insisted on my attention”, speaking “with dramatic urgency, as though willing posterity to listen to her”. Thus struck, Drabble had no choice but to turn to fiction, because “I am a novelist, and, for better and for worse, writing novels is what I do.” Reassuring us that she had no desire to write a historical novel per se, Drabble goes on to explain that “Instead, I have asked questions about the nature of survival, and about the possibility of the existence of universal transcultural human characteristics.”

This is a lot of stall-setting-out for the reader to get to grips with, and it confirms that Drabble has become, of late, much more of a teller than a shower, much more of a theoriser than an animator. That didacticism, greatly in evidence in her ostensibly deeply emotional novel The Peppered Moth, seems to function as something a little like self-defence; it distances Drabble from her material, even as it “insists on her attention”, and, ultimately, it distances her from her audience.

This is a shame, because it would be difficult to uphold the accusation that Drabble has little to say, or that she has no imagination or voice with which to say it. This novel, with its prologue, two discrete parts (past and present), “postmodern” epilogue and three mini-appendices, ranges from 18th-century Korean court life, redolent with fear, repression, protocol and prohibition, to the comedy of manners provided by 21st-century academic conference life; its themes, in both sections, encompass claustrophobia and fetishism (both treated in an exceptionally interesting and original manner), cultural isolation and exchange, duty to one’s family and to one’s forebears, parenthood, medical ethics and transcultural adoption.

Intellectually speaking, there is enough there to power an entire roman-fleuve, and additional twiddles are de trop. Thus, in the crown princess’s memoir, which turns on the terrifying derangement of her husband, the future king, it is the story itself that should grip us, with its brutal imprisonments and murders and its overwhelming sense of sequestered lunacy. It does, but the portrayal of the narrator as a hovering shade, meditating after her death on the oedipus complex and planning to channel herself through the centuries towards academic Babs Halliwell, the protagonist of the contem- porary story, is bewildering and unnecessary.

Drabble may somewhere be aware of this, because the novel’s supernatural elements drop away somewhat in the second half. Or it may be simply that she has given herself too much to do: as well as Babs’s literary relationship with the dead woman and her journey to Seoul, she must also contend with her more personal ghosts (a dead son and, like the princess, a mad husband) and the advent of an unlikely love affair.

And she must also deal with her creator. Drabble’s style, which seems to go hand in hand with that recent slide into narrative tricksiness and tonal uncertainty, is becoming more self-conscious, more arch, more prone to irksome authorial intrusion. The crown princess cannot sign off without a crack at it — “Follow me to the world of globalisation and multiple choice. You may like it there. It is the future. It is yours” — while Babs can’t board a plane without Drabble fretting “Shall she take breakfast? Shall she buy a newspaper?” I don’t know, you decide, the reader wants to cry. It’s your novel, after all, and, for better and for worse, writing novels is what you do.

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