The Sea Lady
Margaret Drabble Fig Tree, 352pp, £17.99
Time passes and things change - assumptions, ideas, reputations. Some things decay, while others mutate and evolve. Nothing is fixed. The characters in The Sea Lady think they have left the past behind, but it continues to work on them.
Margaret Drabble's 17th novel begins with a televised award ceremony for a book about science. The award is announced by Ailsa Kelman, famous for years as the nation's most outrageous feminist. Now in her sixties, apparently riding the crest of the wave of her reputation (sorry, but the relentless sea allusions are catching), Ailsa is secretly ashamed of some of the stunts she has pulled in the past, such as wearing a "plasticated foetus" on a chain around her neck. She is a good-looking old trout, who wears a fabulous silver dress like a mermaid's tail. Appropriately, she is giving the prize to a book called Herma phrodite: sea change and sex change, which concerns the sexual mutability of the creatures of the deep. Ailsa considers this as she does her usual networking after the ceremony, which is taking place in what appears to be a fishy section of one of the Kensington museums. Her own life has evolved along similarly startling lines - her only daughter, Marina, is a lesbian who has reproduced without the help of a male. The old certainties turn out to be less reliable than Ailsa assumed.
She is about to travel north, to a seaside town called Ornemouth, where she will collect an honorary degree from the spanking new uni-versity. When Ailsa was a child, she spent a memorable summer in Ornemouth - memorable because it was to have a dramatic effect upon her later life. This is the first time she has been back.
Professor Humphrey Clark is also travelling to Ornemouth. He is a marine biologist with a stalled career and a blank emotional life, whose closest relationship is with his secretary. He does not yet know that Ailsa will be present. In the distant past, when they were young and hopeful, he and Ailsa were married. It ended badly - perhaps killed by Ailsa's naked ambition and passion for showing off - and they have not met since. An unnamed commentator, calling him or herself the Public Orator, waits with gleeful curiosity to see what will happen when the ex-lovers come together once more. "The Orator disdains the primary vulgarity of plot, in favour of an ambitious attempt at meaning." Fortunately, Drabble does not turn up her nose at a good plot - the primary vulgarity of this one gives her novel energy and suspense, through all the weighty layers of meaning.
Humankind began by crawling out of the sea, and the relationship of Ailsa and Humphrey has its origins in the sea-surf. They met as children, playing on the beach at Ornemouth. In those days, at the tail end of the war, Humphrey was a withdrawn and studious child, already fascinated by marine life. Ailsa was a daredevil and attention-seeker, given to temper tantrums.
They meet again as young adults. Humphrey is beginning his academic career, and Ailsa - still perpetually angry - has found an outlet for her anger in fringe theatre. An appalled Humphrey watches her performing a monologue about menstrual blood and is unwillingly captivated. The two of them fall madly in love, at the time of their lives when they are at their most mutable. They are soon pulled apart by the evolution of their working lives - Humphrey into academia, Ailsa into the spotlight.
Drabble has a keen sense of the past and the ways in which intellectual fashions evolve. She is pitiless - and very funny - about the flimsiness of Ailsa's various posturings. Where Humphrey craves knowledge, Ailsa craves exposure. Their love affair mirrors the age they are living through. In the cultural upheaval of the Sixties, Ailsa dives boldly into the new medium of television and Humphrey is left behind.
Drabble has been at least as famous as her heroine for at least as long, and it is impossible not to wonder about the real identities of some of her characters. For instance, Ailsa's second husband is a brilliant theatre director named Martin Pope, who could easily be Trevor Nunn or Peter Hall, or a mixture of both. Yet it is the ideas that take precedence in this dense, fascinating novel. Drabble writes beautifully about the passing of time and the sad, incomplete experience of human love. The marine references are worked in a shade too heavily, but the prose is the thing - wise, intelligent and witty, encompassing all kinds of truth.
Kate Saunders's most recent novel is "The Bachelor Boys" (Arrow)
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
