Madness and death in Korea
Francis King
THE RED QUEEN by Margaret Drabble Viking, £16.99, pp, 357, ISBN 0670915238 (t £14.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 This diptych of a novel starts with a surprise. Margaret Drabble's fame rests largely on fiction dealing with social issues in contemporary Britain. But here she has taken real-life intrigue, madness and murder in 18thcentury Korea as the subject for the first half of her book. Her inspiration, Drabble tells us, came from a reading of the memoirs of the Lady HyegyOng. These were written in Hyegyeng's widowed old age, over a period of ten years in four separate sections, each with its own (as some histo rians have seen it) self-serving agenda. As a mere child, having been abruptly removed from her family, HyegyOng enters the Imperial Court as the Crown Prince Sado's bride. For a while the two innocents are happy. Then Sado displays disturbing signs of incipient madness. Mysteriously, clothes — which he con stantly changes and destroys and jade fill him with revulsion. Soon he is raping women and ordering the random killings of officials, servants and concubines. Eventually King Yongjo decides that his demented and dangerous son and heir must die — but without any bloodshed. Sado is imprisoned in a rice chest, in which, after ten days of horrendous suffering, he finally expires. As his widow, Hyegyong fears for her life, but through a combination of cunning and luck somehow survives. Drabble has HyegyOng narrate her story as a ghost speaking through a 'ghost' — Drabble herself. As a result of this collaboration, the Korean can transcend not merely death but also the narrow limitations of the culture in which she once lived. When she is dealing with Sado's madness, we find references to such things as chemical imbalances, neuro-transmitters and paranoid schizophrenia, and to such people as Jung and Freud. The initial effect of this is disconcerting. But through a constant focusing of the past through the lens of the present, Drabble makes stunningly immediate the 'strange mixture of fear and violence, of boredom and elegant inertia' in which Hyegyong struggles to survive.
In the second half of the book, a present-day medical researcher, Babs, is attending a conference in Seoul. In its ironic tone, intellectual references and faintly absurd happenings, much of this section might have come from David Lodge or Malcolm Bradbury. During the outward flight Babs begins to read HyegyOng's memoirs. At once she is struck by parallels between the life of the Korean princess and her own. Chief of these is that she too has suffered the terrible burden of a husband destroyed by insanity. The climax occurs when Babs goes to bed, for the third time unlucky, with a worldfamous Dutch scholar, and he then inconveniently dies on her. On her return to London Babs meets and becomes friendly with Margaret Drabble, and so infects her with the obsession that will eventually lead the eminent writer to produce the novel that we are reading. Despite all Drabble's efforts with the superglue of her resourceful intelligence, the two halves of this diptych never really cohere. The second half is an entertaining but not all that remarkable novella, part travelogue and part fiction. The first half, on the other hand, as luridly eventful and as stylistically rich as any Jacobean tragedy, shows Drabble in brilliant form.
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