329. The Dark Flood Rises

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The Dark Flood Rises

by Margaret Drabble

Didn’t expect this to be so philosophical. Also, the main character mentions a “land tax” which I interpret to mean a tax on rent -- aren’t there already property taxes in the UK?
P3 Land tax?

P5 I do like her use of the Premier Inns. I expected her to be critical but why not see such places as being shelters, places of respite, little bits of heaven. Even if this is represented primarily by the properly cooked soft-boiled egg. There is something wonderfully tactile and sensuous about this ordinary detail. I can translate it into the perfect scrambled eggs my grandmother made -- if I found those at a hotel chain I would make an effort to frequent the places. And I’m reminded of the fictional kitchen at the Hotel Paradise and even of Melrose Plant’s club in London.

P9 A person on regional TV,  “To tell you the truth,” says this robust young person, ‘I’m always hoping something really really terrible is about to happen, like the end of of the world, you know what I mean? And that I’ll be right there?...”

p10 Fran does know exactly what she means. She too has often thought it would be fun to be in at the end, and no blame attached. One wouldn’t want to be responsible for the end, but one might like to be there and know it was all over, the whole bang stupid pointless unnecessarily painful experiment. An asteroid could do it... She can’t understand the human race’s desire to perpetuate itself, to go on living at all costs... She is happy to see that this healthy and happy young person shares some of her metaphysical defiance. It is an exoneration.

One wouldn’t mind dying by cataclysm, but one doesn’t want to die young by mistake, or possibly by human error... Is is not much comfort to reflect that, like Antigone, Sara has escaped getting old by dying young...

How old is Fran? In her 70s but where in her 70s? P19 Is she just 70? (This is such a delicate calibration. I’m planning to continue my greening work until I’m 75, and I plan to re-paint my apartment then as well. It would be a drag to have to paint earlier than it’s strictly required. Especially since I just touched-up the place last year. As much as I want to see the new look I have planned, I don’t want to go through all that trouble before I have to.) 

I finally looked up the plot summary of Beckett’s “Happy Days” in SparkNotes. It is a good metaphor for ageing, slowly getting buried in deeper and deeper earth. Sadly, the summary includes this sentence, “Winnie sees that Willie is trying to crawl out of his whole.” I wish I thought this was trying to say something profound, rather than simply being a typo.

But this gets back to how old Fran is, I tend to think you don’t start getting buried until you are past 75, though I know that isn’t always true. But for an ordinary case, like Fran, I would think the burying would start closer to 80. And this relates to the mystery of people who fall and can’t get back up. I quizzed my physical therapist about this and she said the elderly are simply not used to being on the ground and once down, have no plan about getting back up. And obviously there must be a lack of strength as well. I’m on the floor every day and I’m not aware of getting up being a particular problem, except when my back is out. Then it does require a plan. But if this is the case, why aren’t the elderly simply required to get on the floor and then pull themselves up again everyday in training? And they, like me, could do some core exercises and maybe some hip stretches while they’re down there. Wouldn’t that be both sensible and easy?

P17 Drabble’s attitude toward drink seems to match Grimes’s. I wonder if she’s an alcoholic too? And there are many references to smoking as well... hmmm. Could someone write a dissertation on the correlation between characterization and chemical dependencies?

P20 For ageing is, says Fran to herself gamely... a fascinating journey into the unknown...”

Over breakfast, her good mood continues, indeed intensifies... she finds herself to be almost entirely happy. Fresh newsprint, good coffee, assorted texts, some messages on her BlackBerry, what more could the modern world offer? She has selfishly forgotten, for the moment, [her son] Christopher’s distress. As we age, yes it is true, it is true, we become more and more selfish. We live for our appetites. Or that’s one way of looking at ageing. Old people are very selfish, very greedy...”

P21 Her egg, when it arrives, is perfection. The yolk is soft, the white is firm...

Perfect, says Fran, with emphasis, Perfect, she repeats.

P22 Yes, perfection. She reads the headlines and the lead story, moves to the continuation of the story on page two. She feels a powerful surge of happiness, a sense that all is well with the world, that she is in the right place at the right time, for this moment in time. She has had a good night, comfortable, pain-free, in a big white premier bed. And now she is at one with these munching people, she enjoys their enjoyment, as she spoons her chaste and perfect egg. And she is at one, through her almost-reliable friend of a newspaper, with the miscellaneous events of the turning world.

And then there is the passage about robots. A robot floor cleaner makes sense, also robot furniture that would contain all your most needed things and bring them to you when needed. It would be simple enough to incorporate “steps” to pull yourself up or even a lift arm to pull you up if you fall. Plus a phone. It would be like a mobile steamer trunk. Or you could have a dirty clothes hamper that would, when full, insert itself into the washer/dryer. Though having it put your clothes away seems a bit challenging.

P28 The Way of the Bardo -- the liminal state between lives in Tibetan Buddhism. Or a similar state as of illness. TMM has something of the bardo about it. In Tibetan Buddhism you spend a year in Bardo, and that determines the character of your next life. I think Drabble here is thinking of old age as a similar intervening period. When you are neither here nor there. Neither really alive nor actually dead.

She cannot help but see a lifespan as a journey, indeed as a pilgrimage... A life has a destination, an ending, a last saying. She is perplexed and exercised by the way that now, in the twenty-first century, we seem to be inventing innumerable ways of postponing the sense of arrival, the sense of arriving at a proper ending. Her inspections of evolving models of residential care and care homes for the elderly have made her aware of the infinitely clever and complex and inhumane delays and devices we create to avoid and deny death, to avoid fulfilling our destiny and arriving at our destination. And the result, in so many cases, has been that we arrive there not in good spirits, as we say our last farewells and greet the afterlife, but senseless, incontinent, demented, medicated into amnesia, aphasia, indignity. Old fools, who didn’t have the courage to have that last whisky and set the bedding on fire with a last cigarette.

And yet, in the novel, she shows us none of this. And there’s really very little about what life is like in Jo’s development besides her meetings with Owen. I imagine it is rather like Gideon Pond only posher and more academic. Drabble doesn’t give me any reason to believe she’s ever been in one of these places.

P35 [Claude] ...He discovered classical music as a teenager, and this daily programme is aimed at his level. He knows it can annoy seriously musical people but he is not seriously musical. Culturally, he has always enjoyed striking an unsettling pose between the philistine and the mandarin, and somehow Classic FM fails to annoy him at all... now he likes to feel part of the stay-at-home family of the housebound, the housewives, the retired, the unemployed, the home-workers, the put-your-feet-up-you’ve-earned-a-rest brigade. The presenters speak to him pleasantly...

P36 Claude even enjoys the Classic FM commercials, as they attempt to sell him car insurance and medical products and barbecues and tickets to concerts and homely holidays in dullish English counties. The travel news, with its accidents and lane closures and roadworks, is a comfort to him, for now he is not longer driving or being driven, he is safe in his day bed, not stuck in the stationary fast lane or stranded on the hard shoulder. All over Britain, people are having a bad time at the wheel. Classic FM makes him feel part of the human race, without having to pay a high price for his inclusion.

And there is more about his love of classical music. Interestingly, and in support of what is said above about “Classic FM,” everything he mentions -- composers and performers, is familiar to me even though I haven’t listened to much Classical music since the ‘80s. His taste is quite conventional. If he were a symphony goer he would probably skip the more daring pieces, or leave early, or drink more. 

Now this is something I wish Drabble had gone into a bit more because I assume, but would like confirmed, that a Classical music fan might find, late in life, his taste expanding to include pieces that were previously opaque to him. I know this is true for me with Jazz, something else that I don’t listen to as much as I once did, but where I find my taste has altered, to embrace Bill Evans, for example. Presumably there would be classical equivalents to this were I to resume attending symphony concerts. But not opera. Pretty sure I will never like opera.

Some of what is said about Classic FM above also applies to my listening to News AM in the mornings. Especially the traffic reports. For me there’s always been a pleasure in not having to care about the traffic problems. And yet I do love the idea of the multifaceted commute. The twice daily flow of people on boats, trains, buses, and cars all over the metro area, from Petaluma to Santa Rosa and beyond. The breathing of “The Giant,” as Robert Pirsig called the city.

I think Drabble enjoys getting into the minds and realities of these characters, and the drinking and sometimes smoking, is just an aspect of that. It is curious that she writes so little about their troubles. We get Fran’s anxiety -- and Teresa’s too, briefly -- but we don’t hear much about the little health concerns that most people have. I don’t think I’m out of the ordinary in usually having a couple “issues” I’m dealing with at any given time. They are always changing and none are very important, but they are on one’s mind. At times “medications” have been mentioned without any hint of what they are for. I might even ask my book club if they don’t usually have a primary and secondary health concern -- and this doesn’t include the big, obvious issues.

P37 I do like Fran’s improvement ideas. It still annoys me that I learned about lever style door openers right after I last had to replace several door knobs. I’ve already raised the idea of replacing all the front doors in my building with lever style hardware. 


P51 Nor know that what disturbs our blood
Is but its longing for the tomb... 2nd time we’ve gotten that. She is a bit dark. Though I was just making that point recently with the book club. TMM, of course, but possibly somewhere else. Is there really much of this sentiment in the characters?

P64 I want to read this book about the Canaries in Roman times. And I like this approach of having a character talk about a book no one is ever going to write.

P79 Drabble is getting more and more interesting. There’s an effortlessness to her shifts of perspective that I find impressive. She doesn’t even bother with chapter breaks, just shifts narrators from paragraph to paragraph as it suits her. I’m glad I started reading a little early in the month because we are getting information now that makes me want to go back and reread the first narrator. Perhaps because I’ve never read Drabble before, I wasn’t expecting this much from the “telling” of the story.

On re-reading this, I’m less impressed than I was. Her omniscient narrator became frustrating and then maddening as she seemed to be so uninterested in the story and characters. Godlike in the sense of not caring. What’s the name for a narrator that could tell you everything but chooses not to? See also p82-83.

P82 Better and better. Now we have an omniscient narrator telling us what our characters will and will not allow us to see of them.

P92 Gee, this is fun.

P100 It’s odd how Drabble sets Fran up with two interesting friends -- Jo and Teresa -- only to kill them both off. Granted, that is one of the worst aspects of old age, that important people in your life tend to die. Are we supposed to get something from their deaths? The deaths our omniscient narrator doesn’t bother to attend. I look forward to re-reading Teresa’s section to see if there’s something there that will explain her death. Jo’s was out of the blue. If our narrator had attended, perhaps we would see if Jo had indeed been eager for the tomb or relieved at it not being her fault. I’m suspicious of what people think they think about death. For that matter, I would like to see Drabbles notes on illness and death -- what exactly is she basing her fiction on? Is it the usual fictive creation or is it based on experience? Normally I wouldn’t care, but here I do care.

P104 Jo’s investigation of Alice Studdert Meade is terminated at her death. Sara’s work is continued to some extent by Christopher, but it is no longer her work. No one is likely to take up Bennett’s history of the Canary Islands. No, I’m wrong about that last as Christopher is, surprisingly, taking on that as well.

Philosophers have an unfair advantage here as death is the ultimate form of research for the areas of philosophy that matter most. It’s as if you popped out of existence when you read the last page of a book, even if you were just scanning ahead. It would be considered cheating, but you would have to respect the dedication of the person so eager for eschatological certainty.

But back to life-work, Claude is happy to not be doing what he was doing, Fran likes what she’s doing. Poppit and Christopher are too young, and it’s hard to say what exactly they’re doing. (Christopher and Ishmael have their little adventure of closure, but that’s not what I’m talking about.) Ivor is a caretaker, but how he adjusts to the loss of Bennett we don’t learn. I don’t see that Drabble really comes to terms with how people abandon their previous selves in old age. (Drabble is 13 years older than me, so 79.) And Jo is probably a good equivalent of her life, except she’s more successful and still publishing. For intellectuals, there doesn’t seem to be the same phenomena of leaving your working life behind when you “retire”. Teresa was the most “retired” person but that was because she was dying and so concerned with eschatology, again. Not the norm.

P109 Why, he that cuts off twenty years of life
Cuts off so many years of fearing death.

Reminds me of Nietzsche's the wisdom of Silenus.

P110 A reference to the Lisbon earthquake, again. Thank you Mann and Voltaire. You could do a novel about aging and dying and the places people choose to do these things with a modern Candide and Pangloss. It would practically write itself.

P111 After thinking how blameless humans would be in a disaster caused by the simple eruption of a volcano in the Canary Islands, “Christopher dimly remembers from his college days that the Lisbon earthquake... was the cause of much anguished philosophical questioning at the time, from Christians, deists and unbelievers alike, seeking to justify the ways of God to man.

Maybe we are all seeking a neutral agency to wipe us out. An asteroid, a tsunami, a tidal wave.

Our longing for the tomb. 

“A Dialog of Self and Soul” by William Butler Yeats (see HERE) This reminds me a bit of the dialectic of the body and soul in TMM, and there’s also the longing for death there as well. Yeats’s poem is TMM in rhyme. So glad I didn’t suggest this book.

This death wish motif is certainly pervasive in this book. The Stubbs family really does seem to be together on this topic. I so wish we had had that conversation between Teresa and Fran about eschatology. Drabble is as cruel in this as Voltaire thought God was at Lisbon. With the possible exception of Teresa, Ivor is the only example of faith in the book -- and RC again. I haven’t been able to discover Drabbles background.

P126 Somehow Drabble reminds me of both Andrew Sean Greer and Martha Grimes at the same time. The characterization of Grimes and the careful plotting (I assume) of Greer. (Though not as much of the plotting as I was expecting. The foreshadowing about Fran's brakes started with the first paragraph but never paid off.) I think we are up to seven points-of-view so far. And now I’m looking forward to not just meeting some more characters, as would be the case with Grimes, but also getting inside their heads. I wonder if there will be a character whose perspective is not invaded. That would be interesting, too.

We’ve just covered Jo’s poetry class for elderly students. And we didn’t get into all of their heads, but that’s not what I was suggesting above. I have the feeling Drabble is stringing together a list of things she’s curious about and just dipping into them briefly in the minds of her characters -- the history of the Canaries in Roman times being my favorite example of this. But there’s also the Dead Wives Sisters idea. There’s really so much here that isn’t about ageing and dying. 

But there’s still more than enough of ageing and dying. We’ve been in Fran’s head, but I don’t think that has given us any real insight (yet) into why she chooses to live in the problematic tower -- though it could just be because of the Tennyson reference. And we have no idea what’s wrong with Claude. Whatever it is it is a handy literary illness in that it restricts him without seeming to make him feel sick, so far as we can see. Everyone in the book seems to be quite well. Bennett’s is the point-of-view we haven’t experienced yet. I should remember to bring my copy of A Death in Zamora to the meeting, thinking of the Spanish Civil War.

P128 Drabble uses Maria Callas’s late life story well. This is what happens when you outlive your own life -- looking at each day as one day less to live. Though I’m not sure if this is really the soul’s or the self’s perspective. I rather think it’s more the self regretting the loss of its better days but not forsaking the ways of the flesh for the rest of the soul in the tomb. Does anyone in this novel represent the soul? Drabble lets Yeats and Lawrence do her intellectual heavy lifting but I’m not seeing how her fiction really supports their work. Does she mean to tell a different story in contradiction? Or, like her disengaged narrator, does she simply not care?

P129 Claude does not think about his own approaching death in this dramatic manner [as Callas did]. He is stoic and calm and philosophical and has made himself as comfortable as possible. But he is glad that Callas was able to project all this terminal passion and grief for him, in her last bitterness as well as in her triumphant prime. She had acted the glory. She was the very body of the glory. He doesn’t have to go through all that. That’s what opera is for, that’s what art is for. It spares us the effort. It shows forth what we don’t have to go through.

And Claude is one of the more active of these quiet, English characters. No one is exactly raging against the dying of the light here. Reminds me of my own objections to Buddhism -- my fondness for Radha and Krishna while carefully avoiding the reality of Radha and Krishna. We celebrate the flesh with a good book and a perfect soft-boiled egg. Though I suppose you could see Dionysus in all that whisky and wine, but I’m having trouble with that as well. The one time someone in the novel thinks he’s had too much to drink it turns out to just be an earthquake. 

P132 The passage about the odd Jax and the equally odd young Poppet is interesting. I wonder when, if ever, we will be able to look at this more honestly?

P133 Claude... can still remember the disappointment of the hamper. [A gift from Jax following his successful surgery] It had looked so promising, but its wicker and red satin treasure chest had been loaded with small tins and jars of pate and confiture, with relish and bonbons, with small hard smoked cheeses and biscuits, and rather a lot of fake synthetic straw.

Makes for a nice symbol for “the good life,” what all the cool kids seem to long for. Isn’t that what we enjoyed about watching that program showing Ozzy Osbourne’s family? How much it was all like a disappointing gift hamper?

We go from Claude to Christopher who finds himself enjoying his visit to the Canaries. Even though he should be in mourning. He is not Maria Callas. Life calls to him in many of the ways life calls to the flesh -- though not sexually, as far as our narrator lets us know. Christopher was not deeply in love with Sara, so he doesn’t experience the soul-death of losing his soul mate. And yet, I can imagine other women, and not cold and distant women, going on and being revived by life. Though in Callas’s case, it may have been the loss of her career that was fatal.

P141 Poppit does not care much for the present, but she cares about the future of the planet and its inhabitants. She has transferred her allegiance to a vanishingly distant point. She has what some of her friends... consider an almost mystic capacity to personalize the planet and dehumanise her own concerns. Maybe, they think, she has no concerns? She does not seem very concerned about any of her friends... Cold though she is, she is also compelling. She is worth one’s while.
...

P142 ...She has reduced her way of life to what she considers and elegant minimalistic routine... She knows people who are out there, on the front line. She is the eye that watches them.
...
P143 She is fond of her little house, and of the surrounding water meadows and eel-rich waterways... She feels close to nature, in her solitary little dwelling on the canal, with the sky and the water, and the sky reflected in the water...

Fran has brought up that Poppet is living alone in housing that would have previously housed a family.

...This line of reproach didn’t quite reach Poppit, who was adroit at explaining why damp and lonely canalside cottage in a flood plain would be deeply undesirable to any local families.

P144 She is a casuist. Most statisticians are.
...

Poppit’s life is in the past. This is why she seems so old, for she is living a lengthy and extended afterlife. The most important events of her life happened before she was twenty-three and she lives in their wake. She has endeavoured to make that wake a placid level pathway. The brimming of the still canal mirrors it.

We don’t know what happened to Poppet in that most important and most disastrous relationship. Maybe one day she will tell us... Maybe Claude and his dusky paramour Persephone will be the first to hear an account of her disastrous, scarifying and destructive passion.

Not in this book. But I do note here that the narrator isn’t completely omniscient after all. My mistake.

P164, Past halfway and she’s still adding new characters. This time a childhood friend of Fran’s who is dying -- and not pleasantly -- from Mesothelioma. The detail of Mesothelioma seems to have been chosen for the aspect of cause and effect. Is it really true that a single fiber can kill? You would think we would all be dead if that were true. A quick online search throws doubt on this notion. For one thing, exposure alone doesn’t seem to be sufficient. You need to be genetically susceptible to responding in the wrong way to exposure. HIV might have been a better option, though of course that is fraught with other associations. 

The idea that a good Catholic would simply blame God and no one else, is interesting but, again, I don’t see much evidence for it. Still, I do think it is a good way to think. This goes back to my, this is your story now, theory of reacting to whatever life hands you. And this is related to the feeling expressed earlier (by who?) that an end of the world type event takes the pressure off everyone and is thus desirable. Christopher’s reflection on the earthquake/eruption/tidal wave possibility (that Poppit has just revived). 

And this goes well with my desire for a condition that is past treatment so you don’t have to even consider the “dance of death” options. And maybe there’s just a hint of Hans Castorp’s infatuation with living a passive life -- of dropping the protestant work ethic. And, I suppose, Fran represents that work ethic here. She continues to roam Britain doing good work instead of “enjoying” her “Golden Years.” (Me, too.) It wouldn’t surprise me if I need to read this twice.

P166 So Claude really is the representative, in this group, of “the flesh,” or “the self,” even though he is currently sidelined to his daybed. I’m not sure why I like that he has no real idea where Poppit is living. Even while retired and dying -- of what? -- he continues to be a useful source of medical information for Christopher later in the book. It would be better, I think, if his information had been useless or outdated. Or if he had simply been unable to attend. That is the aspect of aging this book doesn’t deal with. Even the demented aunt is presentable and entertaining in her own way. Teresa, with her history of dealing with special needs children, could have been the best means to delve into this if there were any special needs elderly people around.

P213 Something happened! And again in the Canaries. So at the moment we are interested in Christopher who is back in the Canaries visiting his new friends after the recent death of his GF. And we are interested in his mother, Fran, who is having a rainy adventure in the neighborhood of her daughter, Poppit, who is as yet uninvolved in the adventure. Then there are foci of interest in London involving Christopher’s father who is dying in style; and in Cambridge involving his “Aunt” Jo and another friend of the Canary couple. And there’s a residual focus from Fran’s first trip involving an elderly lady and the caregiver in the complex where she lives. I think that’s everything. I forgot Fran’s childhood chum in London.

P214 ...Fran is proud of her perceptions. She still enjoys perceiving. When she ceases to enjoy perceiving, she’ll know she is about to be dead. [Reminded of the end of Goethe's Faust.]

P227 Fran feels a great tearfulness rising up in her, a grief for all things, a grief for her daughter and thence, from that grief, a grief for all things. She had feared that she would outlive such grief, that her heart would grow thin and cold... She had thought that ageing would bring calm and indifference and impersonality. She knew it was unlikely to bring her peace of mind, as perhaps it had brought Teresa Quinn, who was practiced in an expectation of peace... she is, it would seem, condemned to grief, to an ever-replenishing well of grief, rising up from the centre of the earth of her body.
...

Her body has dried up, but not yet her tears. She lets them flow.

Perhaps Fran is the Maria Callas of this book. The one who feels for the others.

P236 Now, surprisingly, we are in Teresa’s head. Just when I had decided this was a book about the Stubbs it goes somewhere else. But then this is appropriate for an English novel as Teresa is RC. You can’t have English literature, apparently, without at least a touch of RC. And this gives us a chance to go to a religious place -- Teresa calls Fran a fair-weather pantheist -- which is a term I like a lot. And then there’s this,

Teresa has enjoyed discussing the last things with Fran, who, though an expert in trivia, is more than willing to apply her mind to eschatology. Teresa lies on her day bed... contemplating the new (to her) discovery that both pain and trivia can be a welcome distraction from the ultimately serious business of dying. Pain alters perceptions of time, and makes one wish to be elsewhere, to be speeding on one’s journey, whereas trivia comfortably and companionably block the forefront of the mind, occupying the space that might otherwise be devoted to prayer or thought or meditation or despair.

Trivia: a comfortable blanket, a mug of soup, a text message or two, a radio quiz, a book upon one’s lap.

Trivia: the meeting of the three ways, the lower arts.

And TV would be one of those lower arts. The distractions, so that one doesn’t think about the things it would seem one ought to be thinking about... says the student of philosophy.

P237 [D.H.] Lawrence had been dying when he visited Tarquinia and Cerveteri and Volterra. He had died so young, and he had so much hated to be dying. He’d been bravely building his ship of death for the dark flood, and fitting it out with food and little cakes and wine and cooking pans, but he hadn’t wanted to die. She is too old to die young, and that’s a comfort. She often counts, on her fingers, her remaining comforts.”

P238 ...Sometimes she feels terminally weary, and wishes, in a cowardly manner, that she might die in her sleep, without having to look her God or her faith or her oncologist in the eye.

P239 ... It’s not clear to her what she’s supposed to do, on a spiritual level, with the rest of the time she has left. She’s never much liked the language of struggle and battle, and anyway, she knows the battle is already lost. She hasn’t thought of her relationship with her cancer in terms of fighting the good fight, as some do. But the lines from Timothy come back to her, nevertheless: Fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life, whereunto thou art also called . . .

Lay hold on eternal life. Fight the good fight of faith.

She can’t do it.

Whereunto thou art also called.

She has known some who have lost their faith late in life, in their sixties, in their seventies, even in their eighties. Because the human story is so very disappointing, because the cruelty of it is so very great, and God’s care of his creation so hard to interpret.

P242 [About “the Catholic novelist Graham Greene] He didn’t like being called a Catholic novelist. He said he was a novelist who happened to be a Catholic. Teresa thinks that was casuistry.

P243 Her fretfulness and self-pity fade, and she feels herself rising up, into a higher and better place. She closes her eyes again, and is borne upwards, as she begins to doze and dream and sleep. She is released upward into dreaming, as the nagging little thorns of memory and anxiety and fear and rationality unhook themselves from the old heavy matted stuff of her consciousness, and allow her to rise from her body. She is released into the presence of a dream landscape: she is observing (but is not quite inhabiting) a scene with a foreground of a grassy hollow with olive trees and great tawny slabs of broken, antique stone. In the centre of the scene, the huge deep-rooted trunk of an ancient tree bears upwards in its forked branches a slab of stone like a sarcophagus. Far away, in the background, upon the distant hillside, far beyond and behind, in a higher country, stands a little white chapel. The place is known and unknown, familiar and unfamiliar.

When she wakes, she will recognize in this dream landscape an allusion to the Etruscan tombs, and to the saving of the virtuous heathen from antiquity, and to a hand-coloured print given to her one year for Christmas by grateful parents...

A heavy stone coffin, a flesh-eating sarcophagus, borne upwards in the living growing branches of a tree.

Her dream had married Jerusalem and Athens. She is pleased with the inventiveness of her dream life.

Just a hint of “Snow” here. I do love the way Drabble writes about dream.

P248 How can Jo not know what or where the “Peak District” is? Shocked. I think this was as a child.

P272 Drabble slipped in a little three paragraph section from the point-of-view of an actress mentioned because Fran and Jo went to see her in "Happy Days." This works because she is plotting to kill herself at the end of the play’s run. The third paragraph is just the sentence, “Poor old Winnie. Oh Happy Days.”

P278 “Fran is worried about almost everybody and almost everything...

She’s had a text from Paul telling her that his Auntie Dorothy has died... ...the apparent meaninglessness of Dorothy’s later life is worryingly incomprehensible to Fran, and the force of it revisits her. It begs some big metaphysical questions that she cannot even formulate, let alone answer. Dorothy had been so outgoing, so engaging, so beautifully turned out, and yet so disconnected. [Drabble/Fran is misusing “beg the question” just like everyone else here]

She’d have liked to have discussed these aspects of Dorothy’s life and death with Teresa, who had taken a keen interest in the story of Fran’s encounter with Dorothy and the energetic and vibrantly coloured Suzette, but Teresa has abruptly and in few words cancelled or postponed their next meeting...

P280 [In the newspaper] There is a... photograph of a leafless tree in Yorkshire, with some brave and defiant words by the ageless David Hockney about the beauty of trees in winter.

But Fran needs the leaves.

She wishes she were back in the Premier Inn, in easy reach of the comfort of a perfect soft-boiled egg.

P282 I summon to the winding ancient stair . . . yet again, followed by a bit more about Beckett and Happy Days

P290 They are dropping like flies now. Reminds me of a Tolstoy serial novel. And now it’s my favorite character, Teresa, who has died. And off screen to boot. We are never present when the interesting things happen.


The end was very odd. We are given much more about the future of these characters than I was expecting but little of any real interest. It’s almost like the book was finished by someone who hadn’t read the book. Or only skimmed a summary. And Fran’s brakes never came into it at all despite all the foreshadowing, which is rather mean. And we are never present for any of the deaths. There’s something to be said for this approach, yet it is also disappointing.