Customer Reviews

Millstone

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Waterfall remains my favorite Margaret Drabble novel, but this one uses a faster pace and even more humor. That humor comes from timing and odd observations, rather than obvious attempts at making readers laugh. For example, just before Rosamund Stacey loses her virginity, her seducer asks, "Is this all right? Are you all right, will this be all right?" Rosamund then tells us "that was it and it was over." You'll hate when this book is over. Rosamund seems like an old friend, and you'll enjoy your visit with her.

This was my first Margaret Drabble and I was pleasantly surprised at the cutting but subtle satire of English manners of the 1960s. The theme itself -- a single woman's decision to have a child without a husband -- was rather in keeping with the sexual revolution brought about in the 1960s in Western Europe. The narration is light and engaging, in keeping with the best of the traditional English social satirists from Austen to Pym. For my taste the books loses momentum in the last quarter, but it is still a very intelligent rendition of manners and mores.

This moving short novel portraits the rude awakening of a young woman, who after making love with a 'silly bugger' becomes an unmarried mother.

The dreams of youth, 'I used to be so good-natured. I used to see the best in every-one', becomes 'my growing selfishness, this was probably maturity.' 'Life would never be a simple question of self-denial again.'

There is also the chasm between the education's view of mankind and the facts of real life.

Education was the cause of 'my inability to see anything in human terms of like and dislike, love and hate, but only in terms of justice, guilt and innocence', and 'the endurance of privation is a virtue.'

However as an adult, she is confronted with 'resentments breed so near the craddle, that people should have it from birth'; 'facts of inequality, of the heart-breaking uneven hardship of the human lot. These things were as nothing compared with the bond that bind parent and child'.

As another woman in the novel says: 'I haven't the energy to go worrying about other people's children. I only have enough time to worry about myself. If I didn't put myself and mine first, they wouldn't survive.'

And finally, there is the unbearable burden of Victorian religion: 'the thought of sex freightened the life out of me.' 'If Octavia were to die, this would be a vengeance upon my sin.'

In naturally flowing prose, Margaret Drabble paints a most human portrait of innocence and struggle for (emotional) survival, youth and adulthood and the mighty marks of religion (guilt) and 'unselfish' education.

A masterly written short novel.

But to call it a "treat" is to belittle this wonderful book. Drabble is an uneven author. Her Sea Lady is a brilliant novel that I highly recommend. Other of her works are indifferent or worse, e.g. The Radiant Way (see my review). Well, The Millstone by Drabble is one of the best novels I've read in years. Truly a surprise discovery that I highly recommend. This is a heartwarming and also somewhat tragic story that unfolds with humor, irony, insight, and empathy.

The entire novel is told in the first person from the point of view of Rosamund. Rosamund is a diffident young literary woman living alone in London who gets pregnant the first time she has sex, and that quite casually with a casual friend. This book was written in the mid-1960s and reflects the developing and changing attitudes of that era toward sex and life, but still at that time having an "illegitimate" child was not accepted and expected the way it is now. Nevertheless Rosamund, through a combination of diffidence and courage, ends up having her child.

Of course, since I was about the same age or a bit younger than Rosamund in the mid-60s, this story rattled my aging memories. It brought many a smile to my wrinkled face, and yes a tear too. Much has changed since the 1960s--Gosh, it was almost fifty years ago. Besides a glimpse into literary London, The Millstone is a depiction of the state of medicine, especially gynecology and pediatrics, at that time. Fortunately medicine has improved vastly both technically and socially. The Millstone paints a very depressing picture of the British National Health Service and the treatment of mothers to be and mothers with sick children. This novel is an indictment of nationalized medicine--but that is only a small part of the story.

The best thing about this novel is Rosamund. She comes to life for the reader as a real human being. She is no cardboard character, but a real thinking, loving, fearing human being, as engaging as a character in a Shakespeare play. The Millstone is also a tender and moving exploration of motherhood. I am not familiar with any other work in English that so profoundly and lovingly describes this most natural and indissoluble human relation with such clarity and insight. This reader will not soon forget Rosamund and her little daughter Octavia. What is hard to remember is that they are not friends of mine but only made up characters in a book. Marvelous!

Rosamund Stacey is the first person narrator of her own story in the Millstone by Margaret Drabble. Rosamund is a single mother - nothing strange about that, perhaps, at least in a twenty-first century Britain where now half of births are outside of marriage. But in the early 1960s, when The Millstone was written, unmarried mothers were not so common and it was a status to which considerable stigma was attached.

Consequently, when Rosamund visits hospital for her regular check-ups, she is summoned from the waiting room with a call of Mrs. Stacey in an attempt to maintain the privacy of her status. She longs for the day - and not too distant - when her thesis on Elizabethan poetry will be complete and she can prefix her name with Dr., thereby avoiding the deception.

The Millstone is written in Margaret Drabble's conversational, yet dense style. The characters are highly complex and seem to live their lives with a devotion to intricacy. Not much happens to them, however, and events are few and far between. Rosamund's life is a case in point. It was Cambridge, of course, followed by the relative comfort of a flat in central London, an apartment provided by her parents calculatedly close to the British Museum, where she does most of her research. She is definitely not the run-of-the-mill young lass who attends university nowadays, our Rosamund. She has a boyfriend at college, of course, but they never sleep together, not even on the occasion they jointly plan to accomplish the act.

Rosamund is not really into sex, she thinks. She has a tendency to see herself as an object from without, and her observation of the absurdity of various aspects of being human lead her to a life slightly removed from reality, lived apparently at arm's length from experience. Though she sees quite a lot of Joe and Roger - both quite different but eligible males - the idea of anything other than a chat and a drink appals her. Each of the two men, of course, think that the other is the boyfriend and so are loath to raise the subject.

Then, for some reason hardly known to herself, she takes up with George, a gay radio presenter, and sleeps with him. Just once. And yes, Rosamund is definitively pregnant. As ever, she cannot decide what to do and, even when she eventually plans her course, she is blown off onto a different tack. She has read that drinking a bottle of gin in a hot bath might do the trick. She sets an evening aside. And then, just as the bottle is opened, friends turn up, she offers them a drink and they share the otherwise-ntended gin between them.

Rosamund is thus never really in control, despite appearing to have a strangle hold on her life. Circumstances always seem to conspire to prevent her getting precisely what she wants. But this is eventually seen as an illusion. Perhaps she does get precisely what she wants, but does not tell us, or herself.

And so Octavia is born. The baby is a life that Rosamund contemplated ending, but when the child is ill, the thought of her coming to harm is too painful to admit. A friend, Lydia, moves in, shares the costs and sets about writing a novel. When this is complete, an unsupervised Octavia tears much of it up, though perhaps not disastrously. Rosamund reminds us that babies are persistent, not thorough, so most of the pages are preserved. It becomes the mother's trauma, however.

Rosamund could be described as measured, always apparently in control, yet always feeling she is swept along with the tide. Passionate she is not. When George, who still does not know he is Octavia's father, says she might do well with a husband, Rosamund agrees, but only because it would be nice to have someone who could help to fill in the tax return. George is no better, since for his the purpose of marriage seems to be to provide someone to iron his shirts. It's all terribly British.

But the characters are beautifully drawn, expertly pitched against themselves and their relationships. The Millstone, thus, explores motivation and achievement, and the relationship between selfishness and selflessness. In the end, we are who we are.

This was my second Drabble book and, I gather, one of her earliest works and it is a dilly. The young woman protagonist isn't all that likable but she has character and verve and the writing is excellent. Some scenes propel the reader into a vortex of emotions (watch for the episode in the hospital). What a great read this was!

There is a long tradition in English literature of novels about unmarried mothers, dating back at least to Elizabeth Gaskell's "Ruth" and Hardy's "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" in the nineteenth century. Yet the subject was still felt to be a controversial one, much more controversial than it would be today, as late as the 1950s and 1960s; Shelagh Delaney's play "A Taste of Honey" from 1958 and Lynne Reid Banks's "The L-Shaped Room" from two years later were both considered very "daring". "The Millstone" is another novel on the same theme from 1965. The title presumably relates to the way in which the main character's unplanned pregnancy hampers her life, although there may also be a reference to Christ's words about those who harm children, "It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones".

Rosamund Stacey is a highly intelligent but naïve and unworldly young Cambridge graduate, writing a thesis on sixteenth-century English poetry while living in a flat in London. In all matters political she considers herself to be highly progressive, but when it comes to matters sexual, however, she is highly conservative. When we first meet her, in fact, she is still a virgin. She is dating two men, Joe and Roger, but is sleeping with neither. (Each of the two believes the other to be her lover). Rosamund's first, and only, sexual encounter is a one-night stand with a third man, George, a BBC Radio newsreader, and it is as a result of this encounter that she becomes pregnant. (George is rather camp and effeminate in manner, and Rosamund believes him to be homosexual).

In the latter part of the book, Rosamund's main relationship is not with George, or with either of the other men in her life, but with her daughter, Octavia. After briefly considering, and dismissing, both abortion and adoption, she decides to have her child and to raise it herself. She finds that being a mother brings her happiness, but this happiness is put at risk when Octavia falls ill with a serious, although unspecified condition. (Margaret Drabble does not seem to have researched the medical aspects of her book. Had she done so she would have realised that antibiotics are not prescribed for viral illnesses such as colds and, more importantly, that the code of medical ethics would have prevented Rosamund's doctor, an old friend of her father, from betraying her confidences to her parents).

A word which other reviewers have used about the book is "dated". That is, in itself, not necessarily a criticism of a novel. After all, writers write for, and about, their own era, and they are not to blame if social attitudes change over the succeeding decades. Indeed, progressive writers like Ms Drabble are doubtless happy when the conservative social attitudes they describe later change in a more liberal direction.

"The Millstone", however, often seems rather old-fashioned even for its period. Although the novel was written by a member of the younger generation (Ms Drabble was only 26 in 1965), and set in the "Swinging London" of the mid-sixties, there is nothing "swinging" about Rosamund. The Pill and free love have passed her by. Even her political ideals, which she has inherited from her parents, have more in common with traditional Fabian Socialism, than they do with the "new left" radicalism of the sixties. She comes across as a rather passive character, passionless and sexless, not unpleasant but uninteresting. The same could be said about the book itself, which I found slight, lightweight and a disappointment, given that it comes from the pen of someone widely regarded as one of Britain's leading novelists. It is occasionally well written but also at times boring.

Did I really buy this? I could've sworn that somebody let me borrow their copy. Either way, I gave it away when I was done with it-- I really thought it belonged to someone else. That makes me kind of sad. I absolutely loved this book, and I wish I hadn't given it away. For those who are unaware, Drabble is the younger sister of the celebrated English author A.S. Byatt; however I'd say that Drabble should be the one being celebrated. Drabble writes with the intelligence and composure of Byatt, but she manages to avoid bogging down the novel like her older sister does. What I mean to say is, this novel has much better readability than the majority of Byatt's works; however, it is still crafted with the level of intelligence we've come to expect from these sisters.

Right at the cusp of the period of Swinging London, Rosamund, the dissertation-writing heroine of THE MILLSTONE, sleeps with a man for the first time in her life and becomes pregnant. What would be a tragedy for many other young women becomes more of a comedy for Margaret Drabble's heroine: she is freed both from a need to pay the rent (she can stay for a year in her parents' spacious flat in Marylebone as they travel in Africa) and from the solicitations of the baby's father (a BBC announcer whom she suspects is gay and whom she rarely sees, and who has no idea of her condition). What then should Rosamund do?

The novel is basically a gently comic and quite thoughtful look into how far British women's lives at the time were determined (or not) by their biological roles. Most of Rosamund's friends and her sister see the coming baby as a potential millstone, and urge her to abort the child, or to give it up for adoption, but Rosamund instead wants to see the birth and the raising of the child as far through as she can. The series of comic coincidences that serve to make it possible for Rosamund not only to have the baby but also raise it while completing her doctoral dissertation remind us of how unlikely it would have been for most women to do the same thing at the time as easily--despite the many tribulations Rosamund must face both from her country's National Health Care system and its sometimes obdurate practitioners, who refuse to allow mothers (let alone unwed ones) much respect or human consideration.

I typically do not gush when speaking or writing about a literary work, but rarely have I ever experienced so much heartfelt concern for the well-being of a fictional character. Drabble endows her main character with a fierce, albeit flawed, sense of individualism and self-sufficiency. She tackles burdens and obstacles head-on and alone, even when help was available for the asking. Drabble also coveys the conflict present within her. Rosamund considers herself a modern and liberated woman, yet she is still bound by the Victorian sensativities she denounces. Her lifelong seach is for true love, but only does she find it in the place, or person, she was not seeking to meet. Commentary: There was a painfully obvious correlation between the rise of the welfare state and the decline of the family. Rosamund could have never done what she did on her own without the welfare state operating in Great Britain, with no welfare state, she would have had to maintain close ties with her family.