Margaret Drabble: The Seven Sisters

By ELSPETH SANDYS

Margaret Drabble has had a hard time from the critics over the past decade. There seems to have been a consensus that her best books are all in the past. While I have not always agreed with this assessment, I have felt disappointment with some of Drabble's more recent books.

The Seven Sisters completely dispels that feeling. I'm tempted to compare it with my favourite of her earlier works, The Waterfall. Both novels tackle difficult subjects: in the case of The Waterfall, the sexual longings of a woman who has just given birth; in The Seven Sisters, the feeling of a woman in late middle age, facing the loss of her family and the inevitability of death.

The latter may sound depressing but that is not the effect of Drabble's treatment. The immediacy of the first-person narrative, and the cumulative build-up of short, snappy sentences and powerful, sometimes shocking images, create a sense of constant movement, at variance with the apparent passivity of the novel's main character.

Candida Wilton lives alone in a third-storey flat in Ladbroke Grove. Anyone who knows this demoralised area of North London will recognise the multicultural shops, broken pavements and dark, dangerous alleys Candida walks on her regular visits to her Health Club. Drabble's portrait of 21st-century London is one good reason to read this book. It's the London of Dickens that stalks these pages, not the London of Cool Britannia and the Third Way.

The second section of the book is written in the third person, but it is Candida's voice we hear throughout. I began to wonder if this novel isn't also about the process of writing, and the difficulty of inhabiting any mind but the author's own.

As if to prove this point the third section of the novel is written, ostensibly, in the voice of Candida's daughter, Ellen. But in the fourth and final section we learn that it was written by Candida all along.

It is her vision that takes her on a pilgrimage to North Africa and Italy. And it is her voice we hear at the end, resigned, hopeful, curious, wondering who, at the moment of death, will call her; whose hand will stretch out to take hers.

Drabble is no romantic. She sees things as they are; but then she sees more. The effect created by her luminous prose is that there is meaning, even in places and people that seem to be without hope. What that meaning is, is too fragile to be entrusted to words, but it is there in the imagery, and in the persistent hopefulness of story-telling.

The Seven Sisters deals with things we may not want to think about but, like the constellation of the same name, it creates a sense of mystery that cannot be answered by the devices of plot. A courageous and uplifting book.

Viking

$34.95