A hermit with a handful
Teresa Waugh
THE WITCH OF EXMOOR by Margaret Drabble Viking, 116, pp. 276 Appealingly named The Witch of Exmoor, Margaret Drabble's new novel is not about a witch at all. Frieda Haxby Palmer is a distinguished thinker and writer — Britain's answer to Simone de Beauvoir — who at the end of her days has decided to retire from the world and live as a recluse in a huge, crumbling, one-time hotel by the sea on the edge of Exmoor, there to write her memoirs or, more impor- tantly it seems, to 'get rid of thinking and of reason . . . to will herself into another medium'.
Apart from the fact that Frieda might be blamed for being rather selfish, there is nothing much else the matter with her. She is a free spirit indeed, an eccentric, clever woman of enormous personality. Drabble draws her brilliantly, and, as a totally believable character, a grand woman, larg- er than life, she is an absolute triumph. The reader should be behind her all the way.
Frieda's horrible children are quite another matter: greedy and corrupt, prod- ucts of privilege and of the unjust society in which we all live, they are each concerned with themselves and with their mother's money. They and their children think of Frieda as a witch and they are all perfectly furious with her for disappearing to Exmoor, which they regard as suspect and inconvenient to themselves. They are sure that she is plotting against them and tell each other that she is mad.
These children, all successful and rich in their different ways, are a lively bunch of the kind of =likeable people about whom it is always amusing to read. Daniel, Frieda's son, is a successful lawyer with such a nice good-taste house in Hampshire and such a nice do-gooding wife called Patsy, who is so complacent that she can't begin to see beyond the end of her own nose. They have produced the disastrous Simon and sweet little Emily, the unexpect- ed dea er machina of the denouement.
Then there is Rosemary, the pretty one, married to an ugly but intensely attractive Jewish advertising man from the East End. She is a programme co-ordinator for an arts complex, whilst sister Gogo is a consul- tant neurologist, married to the exquisitely beautiful, dark-skinned Guyanan, David D'Anger, academic, television personality and parliamentary candidate. But none of these ambitious people's lives is destined to continue to run smoothly; so their personal tragedies evolve as Frieda's past and the mysterious events following her self- imposed exile are revealed.
At the beginning of the book all these brothers and sisters are gathered together in Daniel's Hampshire house where they play a game they call the Veil of Ignorance, which involves imagining a just society into which you would not mind being born, even if you were born at the bottom of the pile, so to speak. Of course no one is able to imagine such a society. Least of all can they imagine themselves being born at the bottom of it.
So the theme of justice for which David D'Anger, notably, sees himself as actively striving becomes central to the novel, and we are perpetually confronted with the bald, realisation that there can be no such thing. Sometimes the characters appear to be confused between the twin ideals of justice and equality and sometimes, too, the message is rammed home a little hard.
Drabble is able to produce perfectly evocative descriptions of the natural world as, for instance, of the sea: 'The water shimmers, and a great ruffle of breeze sweeps over it, turning the pale-blue silver to slate and back again', but, as with the theme of justice, she has a tendency not to leave well alone, to overstress her point, sometimes to overwrite.
As concomitants with justice, Drabble touches on a million 'issues': consumerism, materialism, race, equality, history and his- torical heritage, evolution, creativity, the Health Service, to name but a few. And of course hunting gets a dramatic if batty few pages — just before the end of the book. At times the reader may feel inclined to sigh and to ask, with Emily, if one has to have an opinion?
For all this, the book is a highly enjoy- able read which might improve with being twice as long, thus enabling Drabble to deal less frantically with all the important subjects that are dear to her. Certainly the end of the novel comes too soon, long before we are ready to see the characters so neatly tidied away, and some of them so cruelly dispatched.
Previous page
