Customer Reviews

The Seven Sisters

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

The Seven Sisters marks a return to the deep characterizations that made Drabble's early to mid-period novels such good, deep reads. Candida Wilton strikes me as a woman who is ubiquitious in real life, but seldom taken as a novelistic subject: a woman in very late middle age, with no distinguished career, and a less than happy family life whose recent impolosion nonetheless came as a shattering blow. She shouldn't be a particularly likeable character, because she is rather cold -- bringing to mind Emma Evans in Drabble's sixties novel, The Garrick Year.

But as with Emma, the deepness of the characterization brings us to empathize with this woman for whom simple gestures and human interactions take tremendous effort and courage. She cannot help being the way she is -- that is her character. Yet by the book's end, she seems to be entering the final leg of her life with renewed hope and connection.

This is a grownup book, for intelligent people. I wish there were more being written like it.

I am not sure "the Seven Sisters" is a book for everyone. I am tempted to say that the story will most appeal to senior age women. On a second thought... maybe not. It will appeal to anyone who has been thinking of senior age, to anyone who has felt lonely, closed behind four walls, trying to figure out what to do with a day that stretches out endlessly... I myself do not belong to any of the above mentioned groups and still, have found this book to be relaxing and comforting, as in the end the bottom line is as always - reach out to other people.
This is a book of change. A very slow change that can happen in every age. Candida Wilton writes to herself the accounts of her London life. We do not know if Candida means her diary to be read by other people (there are hints she does), but it seems she wants to arrange her thoughts and feelings. Candida moved to London by herself after her divorce from Andrew. She says out front that she is not in a close touch with her three daughters. She does not make an effort to be connected to them or does not show the reader that she is much bothered by this fact. Only towards the end of the book do we start to understand the nature of her relationship with her daughters.

In London Candida tries to find what to do with her time. She walks, she exercises in the gym. She waits.

The main appeal of this book is its sincerity -although sincerity has many layers, as I understood in the end of the book. There are things you hold even from yourself. Candida's (she is candid) mood changes from depression (that even she is not able to fully admit to herself) to feelings of anticipation... a certainty that something good is about to happen to her; and indeed it does. The second part of the story is also told by Candida, however in the third voice and describes the trip she holds with her friends. Candida (or rather Margaret Drabble) seems to experiment with several methods of writing in order to achieve a better understanding of herself, or of others... The changing methods of writing are quite sophisticated and many issues connected with the changing methods are understood only later in the story. I am not certain these changes in tone were necessary. This is a good story which is able to stand by itself and I am not sure it needed all the decorations.

The Seven Sisters has a somewhat contradictory nature: surprising and boring, slow and fast, sincere and yet not totally revealing. I can understand all those who wrote it is slow. Indeed, this is part of the charm I found in this book. It did convince me as a frank description of a person writing to himself about all the small mundane details that make up one's life; accounts of conversations, thoughts, sights, things you eat. Face it; this is what you think about during the day, not always about highly philosophical issues. However, although the account is slow, there are sudden fast changes between the four parts, whereas the fourth part seems to be the most revealing. After you get used to a certain tone in the account, there are fast sudden changes. There is one part in the story which made me feel betrayed and cheated, and here I do agree with previous reviewers but all in all this is a believable story of real life. Candida is a dry person who does not hold a high opinion of herself - and this again is another appeal of the book. Its about regular people trying to give meaning to their lives in every age.

The first third of this book is so unassuming, even (shudder) "quaint" and "old-fashioned," that I was jarred both by the sudden change in fortune for the storyteller and by the three drastic changes in point of view that cause one to question the very truthfulness of the narrator. There is a reason for this ploy: while certainly a novel about growing old, "The Seven Sisters" is, above all, about a woman who is struggling, late in life, to find her voice.

Candida Wilton is that woman, cast aside by her husband, who remarries after an affair, and even by her three daughters, who seem to side with their father. She moves from the pastoral neighborhoods of Suffolk to Ladbroke Grove, a squalid area of London, where she tries to make new friends, first by taking a class on Virgil at a dilapidated adult education school and then by joining the yuppified health club erected on the site after the school is shut down. She even manages to make the acquaintance of a few human specimens from the seedy "street theater" that both frightens and bemuses her during her strolls. And she spends much of her time recording thoughts on her journey through life onto her new laptop computer; it is the entries of this diary that comprise the book.

The novel's first shift occurs when Candida reaps the benefits of an unexpected inheritance and decides to gather a group of "sisters," both from her past and from her Virgil class, to accompany her on a tour retracing Aeneas's journey from Carthage to Naples. This voyage allows her to deliberate on the meaning of friendship, on her passive acceptance of whatever has life has thrown her way, and on the "irony ... that as we near death, there are fewer people left to be sorry, fewer left to miss us."

For many readers, Drabble's introspective musings will surely be dull and ponderous; the startling postmodern shifts will seem incongruous; and the melodramatic use of the inheritance might seem whimsical (most lonely women won't find self-esteem with the arrival of a windfall). But Drabble's prose is so unassuming and her character's mindset is so immediately familiar that I was fascinated, and there's just enough of a "plot" to keep this novel from becoming little more than a character study of a woman with not much character. Through the diary of Candida Wilton, Drabble conveys, as few authors can, the sensation of suddenly feeling old and alone.

I read all but eight pages of this book in an afternoon - and only stopped when I did because our dinner guests were at the front door. A fascinating analysis of an ordinary woman of a certain age (my age) who starts the unfamiliar process of recording her thoughts in an unfamiliar medium (her new laptop). Surely most of us are ordinary, but Margaret Drabble shows us that with some perseverence and introspection we can also be interesting. Candida, the protagonist, slowly tests herself in her new life alone, with small victories helping her develop her independence. Discovering how to buy a lottery ticket, or understanding that the homeless man is not an ogre are part of her journey through a difficult period in her life. Perhaps Candida is a boring person to some, but this book certainly isn't boring - it's one of the marks of a fine writer to make the ordinary and humdrum appealing, amusing and occasionally even exciting.

What a great idea - making a late-middle-aged woman the "heroine" of a novel! If only Candida had been a more likeable heroine ... or a much *less* likeable heroine, for that matter.

I can only agree with other reviewers that the characterisation in The Seven Sisters is *excellent* ... but the narrator, Candida, strikes me as bland to the point of being irritating. I agree with Candida's own mild puzzlement that she managed to make and keep friends who, afterall, "didn't have to bother with [her]". I don't know why they did bother with her. And yet, people practically flock to Candida. The source of her apparent charisma remains a mystery to me.

The book is peppered with tantalising hints and significant little details. And Candida's friends - who make up "the seven sisters" - really are a colourful, vibrant, and diverse bunch of older women.

The thing that disappointed me most about this book was a dramatic shift and twist towards the end. I won't give the plot away - suffice to say I felt *betrayed*, which tells you just how absorbed I really had been in the story!

Embittered and depressed by her divorce, and estranged from the grown daughters who side with their professor father, Candida Wilton moves from a comfortable suburban house to a grubby, walk-up apartment in Central London and documents her new life in a computer diary, the first and longest section of the book.

Dreary, depressed and priggish, but tartly observant, Candida describes her brief excursions through the local streets to her health club, which was formerly an adult education college where she took an evening class on Virgil's "Aeneid." She took the class - and then joined the health club - with an idea to meeting people unlike those in her previous life in academe. But: "Already I was wary about making friends with the kind of person who would want to be friends with a person like me."

This line says much about what is endearing and annoying about Candida - her sour depression and her intelligent self-mockery. She spends most of her time alone, reaching out tentatively to women from the Virgil class, having a grudging lunch with an inquisitive friend from her former life and defensively bracing for a visit from her brash, brazen and successful old school chum. In the dirty, littered streets, she is a sharp, alien observer of everything from the "shocking" condition of the pavement to the impenetrable advertisements and graffiti posted along the way: "I couldn't decode any of the messages."

Candida reflects on her life and marriage, motherhood and age ("There was more to look forward to, but less to possess. It's the other way round now"). She's merciless, to herself as well as others and readers may well come to sympathize at least a little with the faithless husband. Then Candida comes into a small windfall of money - enough to lighten her tone and spur her to new heights of initiative - organizing an excursion from Tunis to Sicily and Naples to follow in Aeneas' footsteps. She recruits her friends from the Virgil class as well as her two older friends and the second part of the novel takes off in a completely different vein.

The third person narration is upbeat, the wit still wry but less mordant, the characterizations sharp and perceptive. The plot also heats up in this section, and the two following sections, with revealing, unexpected, and sometimes unlikely, twists. The novel is perceptive, clever and surprising. Though Candida occasionally makes you want to give up on her, Drabble ("The Peppered Moth," "The Witch of Exmoor") keeps you going with her acerbic, pitch-perfect prose and Candida's refusal to give up on herself.

This is a spectacular book--but it may fool you, because it is quietly spectacular.

It's basically about death and rebirth--spiritual death and rebirth--but you only find this out gradually.

At first it just seems the (brilliant) musings of Candida Wilton, a fiftyish woman who has been dumped by her husband (who is the head of a pricy private school) for a younger model.

She uproots herself for London--penniless (or almost), friendless, jobless, childless, skill-less, and, it would seem, futureless.

Almost by accident, she takes a course on Virgil, then, thanks to an unexpected windfall, retraces part of Aeneas's journey from Carthage to the Sybil at Cumae. She takes with her five other women, some new, some old, and meets the astonishing Valeria; and these become the Seven Sisters of the title.

But the Seven Sisters are also a part of London she can see from her shabby apartment; and also a constellation she can see through her slightly flawed living room window.

And that's the way this novel works--by connecting. Connecting the past and the present, and building the future. By connecting unlikely people and building not only friendship but character. Connecting the present day with the ancient past and forming a huge perspective on civilization.

Drabble's character is a triumph. Candida writes a diary that, unwittingly, turns into a kind of poetry. Surprisingly, poetry is not so much a matter of expression as of observation.

And the book is full of unexpected twists and jolts--always moving into new thematic material, just when you thought it had finished.

The last (very short) part is called "A Dying Fall." This seems apt and almost anticlimactic, except that it perfectly ties off and rounds out the main theme, which is: even the most mundane things are miracles; it is only a question of jumping the fences and noticing them.

There is nothing special about Candida, but Drabble makes her struggle to create a new life after her divorce facinating. Drabble shows that people of any age are continously searching for connection to their environments and their loved ones. The narrative change in the second half of the book does break the spell a bit, but when Candida explains what she was doing it makes sense and the ending is in keeping with the rest of narrative.

This was my first Margaret Drabble novel although I have heard of her, and had a feeling I would enjoy her work. The Seven Sisters is such clever fiction. The story is told in four parts. The first part is in the main character's words - Candida keeps a diary after her divorce and her move to a London flat. I enjoyed this part very much, and was totally surprised with one particular part to come later on in the story. The book is serious, I suppose, but there were many laugh-out-loud moments in it. I highly recommend The Seven Sisters. Her style reminds me of Carol Shields, especially her novel Larry's Party.

I am also a woman in my 50's, but I am not bitter and alone, so I loved this book. I think it's one of Drabble's best. The character of Candida is almost Fay Weldon-ish in her sarcastic observation of the world around her, and she's generally dead right. It's amusing, touching and entertaining. Highly recommended.