The Red Queen [Paperback]

Margaret Drabble (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 3, 2005

Barbara Halliwell, on a grant at Oxford, receives an unexpected package-a centuries-old memoir by a Korean crown princess. An appropriate gift indeed for her impending trip to Seoul, but Barbara doesn't know who sent it. On the plane, she avidly reads the memoir, a story of great intrigue as well as tragedy. The Crown Princess Hyegyong recounts in extraordinary detail the ways of the Korean court and confesses the family dramas that left her childless and her husband dead by his own hand. When a Korean man Barbara meets at her hotel offers to guide her to some of the haunts of the crown princess, Barbara tours the royal courts and develops a strong affinity for everything related to the princess and her mysterious life. Barbara's time in Korea goes quickly, but captivated by her experience and wanting to know more about the princess, she wonders if her life can ever be the way it was before.

(20041003)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In her 16th novel, Drabble exhibits her characteristic ironic detachment in an elegantly constructed meditation on memory, mortality, risk and reward. Dr. Babs Halliwell, a 40-ish academic on sabbatical at Oxford, receives an anonymous gift on the eve of her departure for a conference in Seoul: a copy of the 18th-century Korean Crown Princess Hyegyong's memoir. In the crown princess's tumultuous time, women of the court could exercise power only through men. But the sly, coquettish and charmingly unreliable princess not only outlived her mad husband but also survived her brothers, her sons and innumerable palace plots. Her story and her spirit all but possess Dr. Halliwell, whose tragic personal losses and highly ritualized professional life cleverly and subtly mirror those of the crown princess. Upon her arrival in Seoul, Dr. Halliwell begins to come a bit unhinged as pieces of her long-submerged past threaten to catch up with her at last. "These things," she observes, "have long, long fuses." She innocently takes up with a generous Korean doctor, who becomes her tour guide in the jarringly foreign city. Soon, she's also flattered into embarking on a brief but intense affair with a famous and charismatic Dutch anthropologist who's busy grappling with ghosts of his own. Nimbly jumping across time and around the globe, Drabble artfully stitches together the disparate strands of both women's lives with "a scarlet thread... of blood and joy." The voices of the dead reach out to the living, where the ancient and the modern "pass through one another, like clouds of bees, like distant galaxies... like the curving spirals of a double helix."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Drabble read JaHyun Kim Haboush's translation of The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong: The Autobiographical Writings of a Crown Princess of Eighteenth-Century Korea (1995) and became possessed. Enthralled by the tough-minded memoirist and the crucial phase of Korean history she illuminates, Drabble doesn't simply fictionalize the crown princess' dramatic story, she transforms the royal author into a ghostly, insistent presence who has studied the world closely since her death and who has decided to retell her story in light of all that has transpired in the interim. And so the crown princess--proud, frank, intelligent, discursive, and still wounded by the cruelty of her father-in-law, King Yongjo, and the terrible crimes and suffering of her mad and murderous husband, Prince Sado--recounts her harrowing experiences, matching Anchee Min's historically based Empress Orchid [BKL N 15 03] with her vivid depiction of the claustrophobia and dysfunction of an Asian court, and also offering delectably caustic commentary on the modern world. But there's more. Drabble, a master at constructing two-track, two-epoch tales (The Seven Sisters [2002] brings Virgil into our time), abruptly switches to the present, where the intrepid Dr. Barbara Halliwell, a fetching English academic, reads the crown princess' memoirs on the way to a conference in Seoul, thus inadvertently instigating hilarious, sexy, and suspenseful adventures that reveal curious parallels between her life and that of the Korean princess. Drabble is sleight-of-hand adept at slipping profoundly insightful musings on human nature, history, and social mores into scintillating and all-consuming novels. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 348 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (October 3, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0156032708
• ISBN-13: 978-0156032704
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 6.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,105,506 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

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Fear and violence, boredom and elegant inertia.", November 23, 2004

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Red Queen (Hardcover)

Intending to write a "transcultural tragicomedy," Margaret Drabble announces that this novel will ask questions "about the nature of survival, and about the possibility of the existence of universal transcultural human characteristics." Using the real memoirs of 18th century Korean Crown Princess Hyegyong as the inspiration for her novel, Drabble creates her own version of these memoirs, placing them within the context of world history by relating them to what was happening in western civilization at the same time.

Chosen to be the bride of the Crown Prince when both are ten years old, the Princess abandons her family and marries the prince that year. We hear her adult voice relating the sad changes her husband undergoes after their marriage, as he becomes increasingly fearful and eventually insane, committing atrocities, including murder. "I failed my husband," she says, unable to stop his rampages. Describing her training to be queen, the birth of her children and their fates, and her experience in the claustrophobic court, she breathes life into her descriptions of her unusual existence. Though her observations are honest and fair, her language, not surprisingly, is elegant and formal. She keeps her distance, not really sharing her innermost thoughts and feelings.

In Part II, Babs Halliwell, a contemporary scholar in Oxford, leaves for Korea to deliver a paper at a conference on globalization. Drabble creates obvious parallels between the life of the Princess and that of Halliwell from the outset of Part II. As Halliwell boards the plane, she brings with her a copy of the Princess's memoirs, "sent to her anonymously, packaged in cardboard, through Amazon.com," which she reads in flight.

No reader will miss the parallels between the life of Halliwell and that of the Princess, who "has entered her, like an alien creature in a science-fiction movie." Halliwell's background, her tragedies, her own difficult marriage to a mentally ill husband, and her uncertainties about the future are clearly created to show parallels to the Princess's life. Drabble draws additional parallels between recent news events from around the world and events in the life of the Princess, in an effort to continue the connections across cultures and time.

Those who have studied other cultures may find Drabble's themes obvious and her deliberate parallels lacking in subtlety. She explains these parallels, rather than allowing the reader to discover them. The construction feels artificial, and Drabble's tone is sometimes coy. The diary of the Princess, however, is especially interesting for the light it casts on a way of life almost unknown to contemporary westerners, and for this the novel is both important and fascinating. (3.5 stars) Mary Whipple

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Two separate, interesting stories - combined needlessly into one book, December 15, 2005

By 

erica "ejs192" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Red Queen (Hardcover)

"The Red Queen" is a tale of two women struggling for survival in a world dominated by insanity, death, and some degree of oppression. The first part of the book is narrated by the Red Queen herself, a Korean woman married to the Crown Prince as a child and forced to navigate a series of political and familial struggles which ultimately lead to the Prince's insanity and death. The second part turns to Babs, an academic who has also lost her husband to insanity and who seeks to not only escape her past but embrace and exploit her present. Babs reads the Red Queen's memoirs on the flight to a conference in Korea, and the sprit of the Red Queen haunts her throughout the trip.

"The Red Queen" is intelligent and, despite requiring some effort to read, engrossing. Drabble tells a wonderful story and both portions of the novel are imbued with intelligent characters, well-constructed language, and a quiet sense of humor. The first part of the story, narrated by the Red Queen, is particularly unusual and insightful.

The novel's failing is that its central conceit - that Babs and the Red Queen are in some way linked, or more particularly that their stories are linked - falls flat. Although I enjoyed each part of the book, I saw little in the way of parallels beyond the obvious, and the consequences of these were not apparent. The second part of the book thus lacked focus, and resorted to an unnecessarily trite ending.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not impressed, November 28, 2008

By 

Eileen Kelleher (San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Red Queen (Paperback)

I found this book on a list of 100 books to read before you die, found the plot captivating and was terribly disappointed. I found the first part of the book (about the red queen) interesting, although not well written. The second "modern" portion was dull and predictable. I found I had to force myself to finish it and was not satisfied when I did. Would not waste your time.