The Sea Lady [Paperback]

 

 

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For readers who prefer a strong dose of facts with their fiction, Margaret Drabble's The Sea Lady will not disappoint. In fact, Drabble puts her research to such relentless good use that her omniscient narrator seems to know something about everything. She knows about foetal sentience and eubacteria and ancient filaments from the Archaean Age and hundreds of thousands of other things and she takes such pleasure in letting us know what she knows that many readers will be inclined to forgive her for being a show-off. And then the story she tells is a story about a woman who's also a show-off, which gives her a certain strategic protection.

Readers who long to read about relationships, on the other hand, and the process of intimacy--how characters come to know each other across every kind of barrier or divide--could tend to feel irritated now and then. The language, too, often seems to take refuge in a sort of lacquered paraphrase where everything that's emotionally compelling has been either deliberately or casually left out.

And Drabble herself seems ambivalent about her own agenda since she so often mocks Ailsa, one of her two main characters, a cultural studies guru who, when we first meet her, stands before an audience in a shimmering dress made out of sequins and silver scales, a mermaid dress in which (in a particularly stunning and memorable evocation by Drabble who has always written brilliantly about women's clothes) she "gleams and ripples with smooth muscle, like a fish."

Later on in the novel, she wears fishnet stockings and Drabble gives her (and everyone else in the novel) a great many fishy things to eat and do. There are high teas where fish is served--"fish teas"--and people eat fish dishes at the Dolphin Restaurant, the Neptune Suite of a hotel, and in the Marine Hall of a museum.

But Drabble's total control of her material deadens it somehow, and in spite of the fact that she appears to want to write novels of ideas, her strongest writing occurs when she makes full use of her descriptive powers to celebrate the physical world. The seashore, for example. Or childhood. Or what women wear.

And her greatest flaw? To impose her ideas too deliberately on her novels, to tie up the loose ends and to support her themes--in this case questions about, sex, the environment, the search for humility, and the inevitable corruptions of celebrity--with too great an efficiency.

First, though, here's the main story: a young boy and girl play on a seaside beach at Ornemouth in the early years of World War ll. Years later they marry, but soon drift apart, divorce, then lose touch with one another for over thirty years. When they meet again, the boy, Humphrey, has grown up to become a marine biologist, and is a responsible and decent man, too shy to have created a social life for himself.

The girl, Ailsa, has grown up to become a flexible feminist. She rolls with the punches, she rolls with the waves, every decade or so she re-invents herself to match the intellectual mood of the moment in a way that makes her seem to be one of its great exemplars.

After their divorce, Ailsa and Humphrey come to a radical parting of the ways. Humphrey retreats into the seclusion of scientific research while Ailsa steps out into the spotlight, dyes her pubic hair red and sings about menstruation in a cabaret monologue. She's also become the sort of feminist celebrity who's perfectly willing to be given a vaginal examination on national television.

Stylish, although at times leadenly so, The Sea Lady is obsessed with the sea and all things watery, including the theory that our great common ancestor was an aquatic ape. But Drabble also much too frequently skirts intimacy, instead providing prosaic facts, satire, or too convenient leaps either backward or forward in time. And even when Ailsa and Humphrey are still young (and at many other points throughout the novel as well) the language is imperial and distanced, as it is during a holiday on the Agean Sea where Aisla travels with Humphrey: "Their prospects were incompatible. There they were, high on well-consummated sexual passion... protesting their undying love and enduring union, and yet they were about to part..."

On this trip Humphrey also teaches Ailsa "about species and speciation and speaks to her of the causes of phosphorescence and of the peculiarities of plankton and of the parathyroid hormone in the gills of fish. She listens, as Desdemona listened to Othello; he listens, as Adam listened to Eve. It does not occur to her to rebel, it does not occur to him to suspect or doubt. It is peaceful, it is heavenly. They complement each other. Science and Art lie side by side: together they cover (or at least illustrate) the spectrum of knowledge...They are happy with their lot, with their identities, with their perfect bodies, with their present incarnation..."

Drabble does social malice extremely well, though, as in the following exchange. She has just told PB (an old friend who's become slightly hostile to her) that she's about to be awarded an honorary degree:

`Congratulations,' said PB, opening his lashless eyes mockingly. He hesitated, then he continued, with carefully offensive timing, `Whatever for?'

One had to laugh, and so she did.

The Public Orator, who is possibly meant to represent either Drabble's alter ego or Death himself (or Death herself), occasionally steps into the novel to make remarks or predictions. Hooded, faceless, omniscient, and interfering, he's more of a pest than a clairvoyant. As for Drabble, she organizes her material so resolutely that there's not much room left over for either surprise or for the occasional improbable event to find its way into the story. And although it's vital to know why things happen in the worlds of fiction, she too often seems to forget that it's how things happen that matters most of all.

Elisabeth Harvor's most recent story collection is Let Me Be the One, and her most recent novel is All Times Have Been Modern.

I always look forward to the latest novel by Margaret Drabble. For sheer joy of language she is not to be missed. One can detect in her work a humorous delight in experimenting with "writing style". In The Sea Lady she teases the reader with an omniscient narrator called the "Public Orator" who is identified as the "shadow self" of one of the characters. Readers of Drabble's The Red Queen will recall with delight how she injects the novelist, Margaret Drabble into that novel. In The Sea Lady she appears to be experimenting with another way of presenting "point of view". Three stars only because it does not match her Radiant Way trilogy, nor The Witch of Exmoor. For readers just discovering Drabble, be sure to read those also: Radiant Way, Natural Curiosity, Gates of Ivory, Witch of Exmoor. No one surpasses her in the use of the English language today.

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