Customer Reviews

The Sea Lady

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

 

 

If you fell in love with Drabble's novels while reading her early material from the 1970's, then you might not be as enthusiastic about this work. It's an uneven novel, but contains some of the loveliest evocations of childhood I think I've ever read. The novel is also, in part, a love letter to English coastal regions. Also I found the main characters, Ailsa and Humphrey, delightful. If you like witty dialogue and surprising plot twists, you'll love this. And quite honestly, I have no idea what the other earlier reviewer is talking about with "anti-Americanism." Is he/she writing about a completely different book?

I wish I could find a more imaginative way to endorse this delightfully inventive novel.

Initially, I was impatient with the slow pace of the second chapter, and I also found the Public Orator to be intrusive and unnecessary. I wanted
Humphrey and Ailsa to get together more quickly than they did. However, once I trusted the author, and was
able to read the novel on its own terms, I began to like it better and better. I realized the value of the Public Orator only at the end of the novel when I knew more about him.

Although I am not especially interested in fish, the descriptions
of them also grew on me. I liked
the sea squirts who were born with
spines, and then lost them over time.
I liked the spiffy fish who apparently committed suicide,
rather than remaining confined in a tank.

I liked the depictions of childhood,
and of approaching old age, and the
theme of how to come to terms with
one's life after most of it is over.
I found The Sea Lady to be surprisingly reassuring.

(Sorry about the wretchedly irregular
lines. This is the best my computer
could do -- and I tried.)

For some reason I seem lately to have been reading several novels about aging, depressed, and lonely academics or members of the media or arts community--E.g. Shroud, by Banville; Amsterdam by McEwan, and A Foreign Affair by Lurie, among others. The Sea Lady is another and one of the best of this flourishing genre. As in The Sea Lady the protagonists seem always to be highly successful (unlike most of us real aging academics reading or writing amazon reviews), very depressed about their miserable lives (but it's not always clear why and sometimes seems self-indulgent), are divorced or in any case alone and lonely (but many of us real retired academics are still married, with squabbles of grand children), and are almost obsessively self-involved (aren't we all?--or perhaps I should only speak for myself here).

The Sea Lady is the compressed life story of several children who meet one or two summers shortly after World War II vacationing on the seashore of England near the border with Scotland on the North Sea. Two, Ailsa and Humphrey, meet again later in life, fall in love and marry, divorce, etc. Then meet yet again in their sixties, etc., etc. All the children turn out to be famous or wealthy as adults; all are successful, miserable, lonely, aging or aged now in 2006 (the story is told seamlessly with flashbacks).

Drabble is a fine writer with a sensitive simple style that is very similar to Ian McEwan's but without the twisted, dark tones of McEwan. Although nothing happens in the novel, there is no violence, little lurid sex, or anything else of moment, I found it gripping and enjoyable. This is life, a mirror for us aging academics. Even if we're not successful or miserable and lonely there is much in this novel that illuminates and perhaps quiets our own demons.

Some of the things I very much liked about The Sea Lady: Drabble manages to weave a lot of trivia about life in England since WW II into her narrative. This novel evoked England for me better than many others that I've read lately (I'm a confirmed anglophile). Also Drabble uses quotes and snippets from Shakespeare in a creative and charming way that enhances the story. (I'm also a life-long Shakespeare fan.)

I must say that I am amazed by Drabble's talent. I wonder how she can breathe such life, such intensity into her story and characters. I admire and wonder at this talent, this genius. As with other fine writers, I wonder how they can know so much, sense so many things and get them on the page and make them live off the page. This is the first of Drabble's novels that I have read and I came upon it by accident, but I plan to read more of her works. Congratulations!

Both the author and the heroine of this novel are too clever for their own good. The heroine has no choice since she is a figment of the author's imagination. Drabble, by contrast, should not try so obviously and so tediously to be both erudite and deep. She works too hard at displaying the results of her research, at leaving clues, at giving hints and at pontificating about the development of the plot (in the guise of the "Public Orator," whose identity isn't revealed until the reader has had a chance to become thoroughly irritated with him). As a result, the story seems contrived and the effort to follow it, to remember the clues, and to take the hints left me disgruntled that the novel's ending is more philosophical than rewarding.

I read a lot of Margaret Drabble's novels in the 70's and 80's and then stopped because I didn't have the same leisure to read and/or she wasn't high on the authors I most adored.

I picked this up and realized how much both of us had changed. Whereas, when younger I don't think I would have strugged to read a novel that breaks so many rules: "Show, Don't tell" ; Few adverbs and adjectives; Keep the plot moving et al: Ms Drabble goes for none of the above.

And yet what a relief to be inside her language and what wild language it is. Where usually a novelist would choose one word, Drabble here give three or five or seven! It's lushious in that way but not easy going.

Next: Yes M. Drabble surely shows us a lot but in a telling and wordy way. Near the beginning maybe 1/8th through, she introduces the Public Orator, who we first think is she herself only it's a he. This will be more elusive and more interesting later on. And descriptive to the max, Drabble lingers and doesn't let plot take over, she cares most about creating characters and sense of place, both of which she does masterfully if one has the patience to deal without a plot for several sections.

Last, when reading the last quarter of this book, you'll see or I did, how all that might have seemed cumbersone or wordy before this was done so intentionally. What would be the right metaphor: Maybe this, a long courtship where all the clothes are kept on and then the sex is far more intense when it happens. Well, poor analogy no doubt because we get sexy mid way through the book and it isn't sexy at the end, but the characters so well dressed for us, so well researched and seen, at the ending feel so full that the tedium of the ride is well-earned, and I personally felt I was in the rooms with the protagonists at the end, and able to see each with naked clarity. Excellent and unforgettable characters at that.

I'll only add, this is not a book for thoese in their twenties. The main characters are in their 60's and aren't many of us who read a lot the same? So the sense of a life ending, which begins to churl in most our minds after age 60 is a subtext here, better done than in any book I've read recently. Bravo, Ms. Drabble and thanks for the amazing ride.

i've had my problems with margaret drabble over the years, probably because i loved her earliest books (which i discovered in my 20s) with such passionate intensity, the flame was bound to flicker (or should i say, the tide was bound to ebb...).
in fact, i wondered, on beginning TSL, if i'd even bother to see it thru to the end. if i were still in my 20s, i might not have persevered. but see it thru i did, and i'm delighted to have done so.
TSL is indeed a slowish sort of novel, not for the impatient or the very young, but a novel so full of glimmering insights--about relationships, about growing old, about love, sex, culture, and anything else one might care to seek insights about--and dazzling language that i felt renewed and positively weepy upon finishing it (5 minutes ago!).
so, perhaps not for everyone, but very much for me. thank you, margaret drabble.

As always Margaret Drabble has given us a thought provoking, beautifully written story about the connections, often brief and ultimately failed, between her protagonists. Yet in the end, forgiveness and a kind of love remain. Her narrator is the unnamed Public Orator (at least until the end and even then remains mysterious) who describes the lives of the two main characters from childhood to middle age. The sea and sealife are used as the main metaphor in a most effective manner. Margaret Drabble is one of the few authors whose books I read as soon as a new one comes out, and this one did not disappoint.

When two distinguished guests are invited to a special ceremony, they will be meeting for the first time in three decades. In fact, neither of the two knows for sure that the other will be there.

In the beginning moments of the book, we meet one of them who is at a different event, presenting an award-winning book. We see that she is used to the spotlight--she is even boldly dressed and seems confident in her place at the podium. This woman is Ailsa Kelman and she seems created for public life.

Then we focus on the other one--Humphrey Clark--who is traveling toward the event on a train. He seems plagued by all kinds of physical manifestations of his anxiety about the event, although he seems convinced that he is coming down with a cold. But then he realizes that nostalgia may be at play.

Over the next few chapters, we then see these characters as they reflect on the past, on the childhood summers in England's North Sea area, in the town where the special event will be held. Ailsa and Humphrey actually only spent one summer together in that town, along with Ailsa's brother and another child, Sandy Clegg; as each character reminisces, we see quite divergent experiences from each person's perspective.

Later in the book, we realize that their paths actually crossed again a few years later, when they were in their twenties. Something surprising happens between them, an event that few people know about.

We travel with these characters through their memories and also follow their moments toward the final ceremony, where much is revealed. Surprising secrets are unveiled.

Throughout the book, I enjoyed some of the stories and nostalgic moments. But sometimes these reflections went on so long that I was bored with the tedium of the past. I enjoyed most of Ailsa's reflections, but Humphrey's memories seemed laced with boring descriptions of scientific experiments. Perhaps these experiences were a mirror of his persona, which might explain the tedium. I did not like this character, and only minimally enjoyed Ailsa.

In fact, The Sea Lady felt like a long journey I had to get through, perhaps like the journey the characters were taking toward their ceremonial destination.

I probably would have abandoned the book at some point, except that I was curious. So, while I didn't really enjoy most of it, I kept plugging along. For this reason, I will give the book a 3.5 starred review.

For readers who prefer a strong dose of facts with their fiction, Margaret Drabble's The Sea Lady will not disappoint. In fact, Drabble puts her research to such relentless good use that her omniscient narrator seems to know something about everything. She knows about foetal sentience and eubacteria and ancient filaments from the Archaean Age and hundreds of thousands of other things and she takes such pleasure in letting us know what she knows that many readers will be inclined to forgive her for being a show-off. And then the story she tells is a story about a woman who's also a show-off, which gives her a certain strategic protection.

Readers who long to read about relationships, on the other hand, and the process of intimacy--how characters come to know each other across every kind of barrier or divide--might tend to feel irritated now and then. The language, too, often seems to take refuge in a sort of lacquered paraphrase where everything that's emotionally compelling has been either deliberately or casually left out.

And Drabble herself seems ambivalent about her own agenda since she so often mocks Ailsa, one of her two main characters, a cultural studies guru who, when we first meet her, stands before an audience in a shimmering dress made out of sequins and silver scales, a mermaid dress in which (in a particularly stunning and memorable evocation by Drabble who has always written brilliantly about women's clothes) she "gleams and ripples with smooth muscle, like a fish."

Later on in the novel, she wears fishnet stockings and Drabble gives her (and everyone else in the novel) a great many fishy things to eat and do. There are high teas where fish is served--"fish teas"--and people eat fish dishes at the Dolphin Restaurant, the Neptune Suite of a hotel, and in the Marine Hall of a museum.

But Drabble's total control of her material deadens it somehow, and in spite of the fact that she appears to want to write novels of ideas, her strongest writing occurs when she makes full use of her descriptive powers to celebrate the physical world. The seashore, for example. Or childhood. Or what women wear.

And her greatest flaw? To impose her ideas too deliberately on her novels, to tie up the loose ends and to support her themes--in this case questions about, sex, the environment, the search for humility, and the inevitable corruptions of celebrity--with too great an efficiency.

First, though, here's the main story: a young boy and girl play on a seaside beach at Ornemouth in the early years of World War ll. Years later they marry, but soon drift apart, divorce, then lose touch with one another for over thirty years. When they meet again, the boy, Humphrey, has grown up to become a marine biologist, and is a responsible and decent man, too shy to have created a social life for himself.

The girl, Ailsa, has grown up to become a flexible feminist. She rolls with the punches, she rolls with the waves, every decade or so she re-invents herself to match the intellectual mood of the moment in a way that makes her seem to be one of its great exemplars.

After their divorce, Ailsa and Humphrey come to a radical parting of the ways. Humphrey retreats into the seclusion of scientific research while Aisla steps out into the spotlight, dyes her pubic hair red and sings about menstruation in a cabaret monologue. She's also become the sort of feminist celebrity who's perfectly willing to be given a vaginal examination on national television.

Stylish, although at times leadenly so, The Sea Lady is obsessed with the sea and all things watery, including the theory that our great common ancestor was an aquatic ape. But Drabble also much too frequently skirts intimacy, instead providing prosaic facts, satire, or too convenient leaps either backward or forward in time. And even when Ailsa and Humphrey are still young (and at many other points throughout the novel as well) the language is imperial and distanced, as it is during a holiday on the Agean Sea where Ailsa travels with Humphrey: "Their prospects were incompatible. There they were, high on well-consummated sexual passion... protesting their undying love and enduring union, and yet they were about to part..."

On this trip Humphrey also teaches Ailsa "about species and speciation and speaks to her of the causes of phosphorescence and of the peculiarities of plankton and of the parathyroid hormone in the gills of fish. She listens, as Desdemona listened to Othello; he listens, as Adam listened to Eve. It does not occur to her to rebel, it does not occur to him to suspect or doubt. It is peaceful, it is heavenly. They complement each other. Science and Art lie side by side: together they cover (or at least illustrate) the spectrum of knowledge...They are happy with their lot, with their identities, with their perfect bodies, with their present incarnation..."

Drabble does social malice extremely well, though, as in the following exchange. She has just told PB (an old friend who's become slightly hostile to her) that she's about to be awarded an honorary degree:

`Congratulations,' said PB, opening his lashless eyes mockingly. He hesitated, then he continued, with carefully offensive timing, `Whatever for?'

One had to laugh, and so she did.

The Public Orator, who is possibly meant to represent either Drabble's alter ego or Death himself (or Death herself), occasionally steps into the novel to make remarks or predictions. Hooded, faceless, omniscient, and interfering, he's more of a pest than a clairvoyant. As for Drabble, she organizes her material so resolutely that there's not much room left over for either surprise or for the occasional improbable event to find its way into the story. And although it's vital to know why things happen in the worlds of fiction, she too often seems to forget that it's how things happen that matters most of all.

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Elisabeth Harvor's most recent story collection is Let Me Be the One, and her most recent novel is All Times Have Been Modern.

I had never read a Margaret Drabble novel before. Picked this up at a bookstore, read the first three pages, was hooked. Because of the language. Drabble describes one of her principals, the feminist media celebrity Ailsa Kelman, as she presents an award for the outstanding science book of the year. Every sentence, really almost every other word, describes a marine piscine labyrinthine scene (sorry!) such that these creatures' habitat swims (sorry again!) in front of your eyes in unforgettable, vivid images. What astonishing writing!

The story is almost as good. As an aging academic, I identified to some extent with Ailsa and her first husband, Humphrey, and their ambitions, triumphs, failures, blindness, insights. But they are good characters, period, and the vignettes of their childhood as occasional playmates in a working-class North Sea summer resort (?) area are quite touching and real. The subsequent flashbacks and tired memories summoned forth, as they head, separately, toward a graduation ceremony at one of the newer Scottish universities -- those get a bit old. Indeed, I grew tired of them about 70% of the way through. But then Drabble (and her Public Orator, who will seem at first like an annoying postmodern device a la Ian McEwen, but isn't, really) kicks the story into life again with an astonishing final few chapters.

A very satisfying read. I will have to explore Drabble's earlier work now.