The ministry

CHAPTER II. LITERARY ANALYSIS OF THE NOVEL.
2.1. The main elements in the novel.
Margaret Drabble's latest novel, The Gates of Ivory, completes the trilogy that began with The Radiant Way (1987), followed by A Natural Curiosity (1989). Interestingly, Drabble's elder sister, novelist A.S. Byatt, launched a trilogy that was to capture three decades of English social history, from 1950 to 1980, beginning with The Virgin in the Garden (1978), a novel involving two sisters, and Still Life (1985). Byatt's masterpiece, Possession (1990; see IFR 18.1 1991]: 66-67), which won the Booker Prize last year, is not part of this unfinished trilogy. Coincidentally, the central character of Drabble's new novel, Stephen Cox, is a writer who has recently won the Booker Prize—an honor that has not yet been accorded to Margaret Drabble. Drabble's new novel invites further comparison with Byatt's Possession. ⁶
The Gates of Ivory opens with Liz Headleand, a psychiatrist, receiving in the mail a package posted in Kampuchea containing fragments of manuscripts and diaries apparently written by Stephen Cox himself and, startlingly, two finger bones. This parcel, known as "The package" or "The Text," must be decoded and interpreted in the interests of saving Stephen (if he is still alive) or (if he is dead) discovering his cause of death. Whereas Byatt's drama of literary detection in Possession aims at multilayered depth, Drabble's aims at many- sided breadth. Her novels have developed from a claustrophobic domestic sphere to range wider over contemporary British society. The Gates of Ivory extends this range geographically by following Stephen Cox from England into the heart of the Indonesian darkness. Drabble's state-of-the-nation novel has become a way-of-the-world saga. Perhaps Drabble's experience editing The Oxford Companion to English Literature (1985), a formidable task of coordination, has influenced the recent scope of her fiction. This trilogy represents Drabble's first attempt at connected novels with common characters, inviting the label "soap opera." The Radiant Way introduced three women friends—psychiatrist Liz Headleand, social worker Alix Bowen, and art historian Esther Breuer, as well as Liz's sister, Northam housewife Shirley Harper—following their careers from fifties Cambridge to contemporary London, culminating in the capture of serial murderer Paul Whitmore, a specialist in severed heads.
After completing The Radiant Way, Drabble determined that Alix Bowen, the social worker, would be bound, by "a natural curiosity," to follow Paul Whitmore to his Yorkshire prison to try to discover what formative influences led him to a career of decapitations. And she does, in the person of an estranged abusive mother. Even before publishing A Natural Curiosity, Drabble she had already begun a novel that would take Stephen Cox (a minor character in The Radiant Way) to Indonesia.Initially, Drabble did not intend a trilogy. Her 1988 "Author's Note" states: "A Natural Curiosity is a sequel to The Radiant Way, and picks up some of the characters and stories, while adding others. I had not intended to write a sequel, but felt that the earlier novel was in some way unfinished, that it had ked questions it had not answered, and introduced people who has hardly been allowed to speak. At the moment of writing this, I intend to write a third but very different volume, which will follow the adventures of Stephen Cox in Kampuchea." And it does. Liz Headleand also follows Stephen to Kampuchea, questing the quester.
Drabble's trilogy is a thematic and artistic unit that also shares parallel concepts and similar techniques of symbolism and narrative structure. The theme of human evil possesses herbête humaine, capable of atrocities that Drabble seems to delight in recounting. Just as Titus Andronicus and Lucan presided over A Natural Curiosity, so Tamburlaine and Mistah Kurtz loom large in The Gates of Ivory, as prototypes for Stephen Cox's target, Cambodian demagogue Pol Pot, about whom he plans to write a play. Monstrous creatures, such as the werewolf and minotaur, with the head of a human and body of a beast, symbolize the divided nature of la bête humaine. Severed heads punctuate the pages of The Radiant Way and The Gates of Ivory, as mountains of skulls in Cambodia mock poor Yorick.
The trilogy's narrative methods are very similar also: each novel features multiple viewpoints with dramatic vignettes connected by montage. As the narrator observes, arbitrariness governs the selection of characters. Drabble suggests an infinitely expanding social network, conveying Woolf s web of relationship, until the web threatens to thin into nothingness. In The Gates of Ivory ostmodern fragmentation becomes an intellectual concept, as Stephen Cox's personality is reconstructed from the fragments of his package, as well as fragments of narrative.
The trilogy's titles symbolize central concepts. The Radiant Way is an ironic title, for the aureate image is ambiguous, suggesting a sun that could be either rising or setting. Drabble refused to interpret the book's logo of a sun on the horizon, preferring to retain its ambiguity. Similarly, the title of The Gates of Ivory is ironic. Referring to a speech about dreams delivered by Penelope to Odysseus disguised as a goatherd in book XIX of The Odyssey, the figure refers to the gates through which dreams come to us—the illusory through the gates of ivory and the possible through the gates of horn. Communism may be the impossible dream that has finally died in Kampuchea, where Stephen Cox travels to quest its corpse. The dream that Penelope recounts to Odysseus, however, predicts Odysseus's return to vanquish the suitors, a dream that is already on its way to being realized. Indeed, Penelope's conversation with the disguised Odysseus serves to demonstrate to him not only that she recognizes his identity, but that she has also devised the strategy whereby he can vanquish the suitors. Does this irony, hardly likely to have escaped this literary novelist, suggest that Communism is not an impossible dream after all? Does the radiant way lead to the Orient through the gates of ivory?Does Drabble's three-volume saga impel us to consider the trilogy as a new artistic unit, rather than as three autonomous texts? Just as Drabble's postmodern playfulness in employing Trollopean authorial intrusions in recent novels appears a retrospective technique, so her trilogy may echo the three volume novel of past centuries. Is Drabble's trilogy saga or soap opera, as some critics have claimed? Tune in next year when perhaps another sequel may render this trilogy a tetralogy.
Sovnovels (The Radiant Way, Natural Curiosity) that here she even appends a bibliography, a list of actual books that her character, as well as their creator, might have read to negotiate the present work's concerns. Liz Headland, the London psychiatrist of the earlier two novels, has received in the mail a package from the Far East. It's from Stephen Cox, the novelist—and apart from jottings and stray drafts, it contains a human finger bone. Cox, intrigued by the fanaticism of the Khmer Rouge, has made his way to Thailand, then Vietnam, and hopes to go further into Pol Pot's former heart of darkness. Back in London, Liz sifts through the fragments hoping to find a weave—and when she doesn't, she feels she must herself find Cox, from whom no one's heard anything for a long time. Her search dovetails through near-disaster (toxic-shock syndrome in a Bangkok hotel) with what she discovers has been Stephen's demise by illness deep in the Cambodian jungle. Drabble, ever the schematicist, jumps blithely from Liz's London overcivilization to Stephen's dread-filled voyage into primitive evil, scattering contrasts as she goes. Paradoxically, what saves the book from the triviality of its predecessors is this moving-finger-of-fate approach. Here, it mostly works. Attitudes are overarched by pity and terror; individual lives seem movingly fragile against the forces of chaos. Still, Drabble's global, sampling manner is frustrating. In sections about the Far East here, she writes as a novelist— particular, definitive, surprising. Most everywhere else, she is at the lower flame of the journalist/littÇrateur, telling us what we know already.⁷
The Gates of Ivory is a vibrant, mesmerizing novel that juxtaposes the cynical, sophisticated realm of London against the dreaded world of the Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. In London, psychiatrist Liz Headleand receives an unexpected package, containing, among other things, a laundry bill from a hotel in Bangkok, old newspaper clippings, and two human finger bones. She recognizes the handwriting as that of Stephen Cox, who has been travelling in the Far East. With the help of her friends, Liz goes in search of the man who might once have been her lover, and gradually we learn of Stephen’s difficult pilgrimage, from Thailand to Vietnam and, finally, Cambodia. Disturbing, wryly humorous, and deeply affecting, The Gates of Ivory brings two very different worlds into uneasy proximity, and the result is potent.
Despite being the final novel in a trilogy, Margaret Drabble's "The Gates of Ivory," an incisive, precisely-written, remarkably-characterized book, stands solidly on its own. A mystery at heart, the book crystallizes a particular moment in time for a group of characters related, in some way, to writer Stephen Cox, from whom no-one has heard since he went off in search of the Khmer Rouge. The novel opens with psychiatrist Liz Headleand receiving a package containing a number of her friend Stephen's effects, including sketches, notebooks, and a couple of human finger bones. She must team up with Stephen's other friends and acquaintances to figure out where he is.
Before you start anticipating a rollicking adventure through the Cambodian jungle, be forewarned that this book has much more in common with Tolstoy than "Romancing the Stone." It's engagingly written, hopping between Stephen's adventures and Stephen's friends piecing together his exploits from their own memories and the contents of Liz's package. The pacing is much slower than one would find in a straight-out adventure story, with numerous meditations on atrocity, revolution, art, and human nature, but Drabble's thoughtfulness shines through her characters, even the flighty ones, to provide a gripping, thoroughly human story, even at a time where inhumanity seems in ascendance. This is wonderful piece of capital-L literature that I enthusiastically recommend.
Gates of Ivory is one of Drabble's best novels, written when she was producing a series around the lives of three British women. The focus of this book is the whole notion of Good Time, Bad Time and the way that the complex, sophisticated life in Britain can co-exist with the Heart of Darkness type destructiveness of Pol Pot's time in Cambodia. Novelist Stephen Cox, mesmerized by the vision of "starting fresh" that he associates with Pol Pot, tries to penetrate the rural depths of Cambodia, and disappears. His friends and lovers in Britain eventually try to find him, and tragedy plays out -- intermixed with multifaceted relationships that are changing at the same time in Britain. You have to like Margaret Drabble, and the intellectual and complex world she builds in her novels. I do, and this novel works for me, and kept me captivated even as I was re-reading it. But the picture of Cambodia is, I also have to see, much less powerful and vivid than in Kim Echler's "The Disappeared."
Finding Stephen Cox was the quest of Liz Headland. She was coruscating in The Radiant Way. I read about her friendship with two other friends whilst studying at Oxford. She helped them through difficult times--as a close friend and Psychiatrist. When faced with an insolvable dilemma, she said to them:" We were trained to think clearly at all times." This advice was helpful in my life. And it was my greatest thrill to be asked by her publisher to review "Jerusalem the Golden." Now I have met another brilliant writer: Josie Arden, who gave me "The Gates of Ivory"--to read to her as she is blind. Between reading her latest book: "Broken Ties of Time" and her award winning short stories: "This & That", I am struck by the similarities in Drabble and Josie Arden's theme: Family Ties. Read Margaret Drabble's book, and you will be mesmerised I love her brilliant use of adjectives, as when she speaks about a play she saw that was lauded and praised by the theatre critics. The corruption of the judges announcing The Best Play Award. "The ineffable, intolerable, incomprehensible, unprecedented small-mindedness of not giving the award to Taboo, when everybody knew it was the only play of the year worth crossing the Charing Cross Road to see! I would say that Margaret Drabble is truly one of the very best writers of fiction today. The sister of AS Byatt, she edited The Oxford Companion to English Literature-among dozens of books which have been widely praised by most literary giants. I can't wait to read "A Natural Curiosity"--the third book in this trilogy. This is a warm, intelligent and companionable book, meaty and of the earth rather than fashionably brittle. To sum up succinctly: Compelling narrative, psychological insight, generous human portrayal, acute observation. humour, horror, beauty and disgust. A masterpiece.
I was so confused about why I had this book - why did I request it on Bookmooch? - that I just looked through my emails to find out if I mooched it for a friend. I discovered I mooched another book I wanted and the moocher wanted two requests and Margaret Drabble seemed worth taking a punt on.⁸
I am finding it a slow read, partly because it is so late and I am so tired before I start reading at present that I often fall asleep after a few pages, The pace is slow, it is not a romping adventure, and while compelling in a strange way I would not call it gripping or exciting.
More later when I get further with it. I need to up my pace as I have another of Cotterill's charming books winging its way from Alderney to me shortly and I have to read and return that one. Oh and until I looked to see if others had reviewed this today I had no idea it was the final part of a trilogy. All to the good. Books should stand alone in my view.
Three or four stars? The writing is very fine, but the cutting back and forward between the stories of a group of people during a particular period left me sometimes searching back to recollect who the current subject was and their relationship to other protagonists.
I am sure a review I read mentioned a surprising or unexpected end with tragedy. I didn't see that as I thought the end was clearly flagged throughout. I enjoyed it but was left with a feeling of dissatisfaction. The book seemed to be part of the 'real life with lots of untied loose ends' genre which may reflect life but is not always the most satisfying literature.