Customer Reviews

The Witch of Exmoor

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If you read James Wood's review in the New York Times, you would get the wrong impression of this novel. The reviewer, I think, completely misunderstood it. The book is a attempt at a genre novel, notably a gothic romance where the main character hides away in an isolated mansion and behaves in a somewhat crazy fashion, at least in the view of her family. Drabble writes in the fashion of a 19th century omniscient author who intrudes and comments on the action; to return to the fashions of long ago in this case is an experimental approach to the work. What she's trying to do, I think, is jolt us into seeing contemporary England much like the 19th century writers like Dickens offered a social critique of their times. Woods calls Drabble's characters caricatures, but unlike Dickens' portrayals, these characters are not types nor are they exaggerated. They are indeed individuals, but we see them more from the outside than the inside. There are many characters in this short novel; thus they can't be as well rounded as Drabble's usual characters.

The main character, the so-called witch, is not insane as Woods says, but merely eccentric. She alone seems to escape from the strictures of modern English society and finds a meaningful kind of freedom. Her grown children do not understand her or appreciate her because they are too caught up in the necessities of contemporary life in England: the materialism, the busyness, the indulgence of children, etc. The generation in the prime of life (her grown children) has forgotten all about endeavors to reach a just society because they are too well off and are distracted. Discussions concerning a just society are just a game to these people who have every material advantage, but something very essential has been lost and only the "witch," Frieda, has any idea what that might be. The novel is a sophisticated critique of contemporary life among the upper middle classes in England. This novel deserves to be read. Mr. Wood finds cliche where there is none in this unique work.

I dislike most modern fiction and seldom read anything written after 1900. For a few writers, I make an exception. Margaret Drabble is one of those. As Emerson said, If eyes were made for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being." Enjoy Drabble for her writing. If her stories were completely uninteresting, she could be forgiven just on the basis of her wonderful prose. Read her slowly. Appreciate her ability to capture the scene, to paint the characters visually, to be inside the minds of her different characters.
But there is the story, and she never fails to create a fascinating one. Why? Because she absolutely observes people in their habitats as a biologist might study a species.
She is also an intellectual. Horrors. But the fact is, if you are not particularly well read and intellectually curious, you can enjoy her books but will miss a lot. She is a thinking person and writes about other thinking people and the issues of the present.
In some ways she is an old fashioned writer--telling a story. But her detached pauses, when she steps back and reminds you that she is a writer in control of the story with the ability to tell you what she wants to tell you--and not to tell you what she doesn't--is very postmodern.
Her characters may be unfamiliar to some. If you've never envisioned a better society or contemplated life without a VCR or considered paring life down to simple, solitary existance--or if you've never had a mother who might possibly decide to chuck it all in and do as she pleases late in life, you may not identify with her people, but you can still enjoy them, for running through Drabble is always a sly sense of humor, a feeling for irony, and the irristible impulse to show that for all our modern navel-gazing, we are almost always complete strangers to ourselves and each day is potentially a surprise.
Can we ask for more? Read all of Drabble's books and live a fuller, more considered life.

Frieda Haxby Palmer has isolated herself in an abandoned hotel on the Western coast of England. Meanwhile, her three adult children, and their spouses, fret about what she's up to and who will get her money. The plot unfolds amidst superbly realistic descriptions of the family life of England's "chattering" class and the Exmoor countryside of Frieda's hermitage. Each time we start to sink into that dream world, however, the author jerks us awake: with a deliberately noisy twitching of her puppets' strings, a recondite allusion, a diatribe against Thatcherite politics, or a subtle evocation of the magical, mystical, mythical West that has captivated the English imagination since King Arthur sailed off from Cornwall.

Readers willing to go along with Frieda will find themselves journeying through a fascinating physical and mental countryside. It's not the Forest of Arden, but neither is it Lear's blasted heath. At the end, we find ourselves on Prospero's "golden sands," as a would-be benevolent dictator learns to relinquish control and entrust the future to the young.

I want to give St. Margaret the best rating but don't want to steer newbies to this book of hers. Better to stick with her earliest novels or her brilliant trilogy.

The Witch of Exmoor has many fine achievements, chiefly its characterizations and sharp social satire of the upper middle class in contemporary England. Alas, the disjointed narrative becomes irritating. She has some things she wants to tell you about the state of her country. Now, I am totally open to hearing those things, being political myself. But she introduces far too many characters into this story, and the result is lots of lost opportunities. I would have loved to read a story about almost any of these characters except the young Guyanese man, who has perhaps the thinnest characterization of all. His chief character traits are being naive and passive, and even the master writer Drabble cannot make these two traits appealing to most readers. Unfortunately, he's more important to the story than he should be.

However, if you love Drabble, you'll still enjoy this book. Her smart observations about contemporary life are astringent, chilling, and dead-on. That's why I read her--the fullness of her understanding and the complexity of her thought. But I do wish she had a better grip on her narratives. I think, looking back, that I've enjoyed most those books of hers that hone in on just a few characters.

Bottomline: she's brilliant. You will enjoy this if you like to be challenged and want a kind of state-of-the-world synopsis in your stories.

Rebecca Burke
When I Am Singing to You

My first Margaret Drabble! I liked how it opened with a family dinner, as I'm a sucker for books that feature food. It takes a while for us to actually meet the `witch', that is, Freida Palmer, the matriarch of the family who has just moved into a ruin of a house in Exmoore, as quite a bit of the story is about her three children and their respective families. Frieda then disappears about halfway through the novel, and the focus is then back on her family's exploration of their eccentric mother. I got a little irritated by that, as I was more interested in Frieda than her whiny family, and the omniscient narrator can get a little too much in this King Lear-ish adaptation.

This novel is written in third person present tense (like reading stage directions) with a fly on the wall perspective. I made it through three family dinners where the family intermittedly discusses the possiblity that their possibly just overly flamboyant mother may be insane and social philosophy (all the while bemoaning the position that most of the middle classes and superior cannot truly divest themselves of their self importance enough to discuss it objectively).

The third dinner was all that I could take and I quit about a hundred pages in. This won the Los Angeles Times award so it's somebody's bag, but not mine. I found absolutely no resemblance between Drabble's writing style and Dickens', as has been suggested. I can think of no other author to compare it to except possibly Fitzgerald or Conrad (without the descriptiveness).

Dame Drabble is an excellent writer and I found this book hard to put down. However there doesn't seem to be all that much story at the core. In lesser hands this would likely be a potboiler. Because of the intelligence Drabble brings to the narrative, it is more than that.

If i worked in the British Tourist Office, this book would be in the "Never Recommend this Book to a Prospective Tourist" list. The characters are despicable. The Witch, Frieda, is the most endearing character of all, and that is sad. Although she did a horrible job raising her children, she acknowledges no responsibility for how screwed up they came up to be. Ha! She plays both sides of the deck, claiming to be "green" and then profiting from industries that destroy the environment. Her son-in-law is a pretty boy politician, her favorite grandson has been brainwashed to believe he is the cat's meow, her own son is a self-important idiot who can't see beyond his own nose... Read it if you want to feel relieved at how your own family is not that bad after all.

Margaret Drabble is guilty of self-indulgent dribble. Her characters are lifeless at best and her story tiresome. The dialogue is unnatural, her descriptions needlessly wordy.