The Gates of Ivory [Mass Market Paperback]

Margaret Drabble (Author)

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: M & S (1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 077102861X
• ISBN-13: 978-0771028618
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,771,221 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Margaret Drabble is the author of The Sea Lady, The Seven Sisters, The Peppered Moth, and The Needle's Eye, among other novels. She has written biographies of Arnold Bennett and Angus Wilson, and she is the editor of the fifth and sixth editions of The Oxford Companion to English Literature. For her contributions to contemporary English literature, she was made a Dame of the British Empire in 2008.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Genius, Overlooked, August 1, 2001

By 

David Kleist - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Gates of Ivory (Mass Market Paperback)

Margaret Drabble is a literary genius. Her Headeland Trilogy, of which THE GATES OF IVORY is the concluding volume, is one of the great literary accomplishments of the late twentieth century. In it, an entire world--the global village itself--is analyzed, along with its problems, through the eyes and stories of a myriad of engaging, three-dimensional characters.

Because her stories have a substantially feminine focus; because Drabble's prose and work as a whole requires sustained attention to detail in order to perceive the interconnections and ramifications; because her styles of writing aren't as flashy as those of Rushdie (et al.); because she isn't intellectually fashionable (lord knows why); because she's a Brit and not an American; because her sister's less enduring but more popular/academic work sometimes overshadows her own; because she's relentlessly normal as opposed to brash, odd, or glitzy: all these possibilities still do not excuse the reading public as a whole from their general lack of attention to Drabble's stunning accomplishments as a novelist.

Read THE RADIANT WAY, A NATURAL CURIOSITY, and THE GATES OF IVORY and be the first on your block to recognize Drabble as Nobel-prize material!

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is a wonderfully complex novel, January 22, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Gates of Ivory (Mass Market Paperback)

Gates of Ivory is perhaps Margaret Drabble's most difficult novel because it weaves back and forth between London and Cambodia, between "Good Time" and "Bad Time." However, amidst social commentary, Drabble's humor comes through, and the ending is reminiscent of the ending of Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway." I cannot do this novel justice in a short, quickly-written review. I can only strongly recommend that you read it.