The ministry

2.2. Some features in the novel which were discussed by readers.
I read "The Radiant Way" a great many years ago, and remember nothing about it. I have never read the second book in the trilogy, so came to this final volume without any real prior knowledge of the characters in it.
I enjoyed it well enough, but probably not enough to make me want to go back and read the first two volumes of the trilogy. There were some powerful passages in it, mostly in connection with Cambodia and the refugees from the horrors visited upon that tragic country by Pol Pot. The following seemed to sum up what little I know of the terrible situation in which so many people in refugee camps must find themselves:⁹
She had watched others around her deal with their memories in this way, and in others. Some, like her daughter Sok Sita, had lost their wits. Some had cauterized the past with rage, and lived off anger and hatred. Some had been arrested as by a flow of burning lava in postures of bowed submission, of cowed despair: and now crawled around, bent and deformed. Some of the young fed off film-star dreams of escape. Playing ping-pong, they chattered of visas and papers that would never come. Some plotted revenge. Some went back across the border to join the resistance. Some lived for the moment, learning camp ways, learning to wheedle and exploit and profit, to scavenge and trade. Even here, there were objects to sell and recycle, there were unexplained arrivals of snakeskin and pig meat and musical instruments. Of late, a new supply of small carvings had begun to appear on the market. A lizard, a fish, a flower, a crocodile: antique or fake, who cared? They fetched a price.
With the scene widening to Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia, this novel might stand on its own, but it’s better enjoyed as the conclusion of the trilogy with The Radiant Way and A Natural Curiosity. It’s 1988-Liz, Alix, and Esther are back, mostly Liz, and Konstantin Vassiliou, who was a child in The Needle’s Eye, represents the coming generation along with Liz’s stepsons. Narrative technique is more involved than in the earlier books, combining the usually omniscient, often intrusive narrator with the first-person voice of Hattie Osborne, acquainted with Liz through Stephen Cox. Hattie is the one who says “Everything links up,” and links are everywhere, including to Stephen’s travels in 1985 and to mysterious fragments of text that could be Stephen’s inventions. For a reasonably alert reader, the book offers many rewards.
"Drabble chooses to set a brief but resonant prologue on the border between Thailand and Cambodia, at the bridge that links Aranyaprathet with Poipet. Here two worlds are separated: Thailand's modern and relatively westernized orient and the horror of Cambodia's "sunlit darkness" (3). On one side is "Good Time" and on the other is "Bad Time" (365), terms borrowed from George Steiner's reflections on the Holocaust, and borrowed again by William Shawcross in his account of the Cambodian tragedy, a more recent, postcolonial holocaust." ('Investing in Conrad, Investing in the Orient: Margaret Drabble's the Gates of Ivory.' Journal article by Roger Bowen; Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 45, 1999.
Drabble's use of the knife-thin line separating ordinary everyday-ness from horror deeply impressed me when I first read this novel about a decade ago. She meant also to draw on the way that 'stories' come across the void, how the world living in the 'good time' of fulfilled dreams 'consumes' the stories of suffering elsewhere. That is the reference to the 'gates': in the Odyssey, in a Greek pun, Penelope warns the stranger to mistrust dreams that come through the 'deceitful' gates (ivory sounds like 'deceit' in Greek) and only to put faith in the 'fulfillment' gates (horn, same). But there is not only a geographic border between 'good time' and 'bad time'. Sometimes that boundary is merely temporal and contextual. For me, the metaphor is forever glued to the image I saw coming out of the Capital South metro on my way to work, of the plane framed flying too low in a bright blue sky, beautiful Fall sunlight shining on the marble and concrete and the only hint of 'bad time' a single man screaming into a cell phone on the sidewalk, attracting the attention of a policeman in front of the Madison Building. I skirted the same dreamscape in Russell Square. When I came back through King's Cross, having walked across half of London, the crowds getting on emergency service trains were subdued, sometimes silent, knowing that the main body of the station, where we usually stood slurping sodas and watching signboards and jabbering on phones, was now a morgue and triage station. A plane, hanging too low in the sky, a train that doesn't arrive -- the small disjuncture before the large. Any one of us could find ourselves in 'bad time', it's only a moment away from now. ¹⁰
I finished this book, the third in Drabble's trilogy, while on vacation in Maine ... vividly recall that I had forgotten to take a nightgown and read the book "in the altogether" in my hotel room at night. The things one remembers ... Drabble had been a favourite of mine since The Millstone. The Gates of Ivory is her greatest book, brilliantly dark, yet human perservance, hope, whatever it is, shining through. Not sure how she does it, but she's an absolutely marvellous writer. This began for me a fondness for books about people disappearing ... yes it's got Conradian overtones, but there's nothing wrong with that! Recommend if you want a read that somewhat challenging but ever so worth it.
Abandoned a hundred or so pages in. In 50 years time it might be quaint but I found the 1990s setting tedious. Were we really like that? Or did we think people like that were smart? Irresponsible, sexually free, rebellious in a sort of teenage way, and all this in grown up adults. I sort of remember when this was a thing and we admired it in others. Now it just makes for a dreary book.
This is the end of a trilogy, begun by The Radiant Way ( LJ 10/15/87) and A Natural Curiosity ( LJ 7/89), that examines life through the eyes of Liz, Esther, and Alix, three friends who met at Cambridge in the 1950s. In this final novel, Liz appears as a counterpoint to Stephen Cox. Influenced by Conrad and his own work as a novelist, Stephen succumbs to an overwhelming desire to observe first-hand the antithetical world of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. His friends are skeptical, but no one becomes morbidly concerned until the relics of his journey arrive in a package for Liz. A fascinating mystery ensues, one that's sturdy enough to carry the full weight of sobering social commentary and political reportage along with it. Drabble structures the novel around divided narratives, rather than straight chronology, reasserting in the process her abiding interest in the complexities of human experience. A bibliography is included.