[In the following review, Clark offers positive assessment of The Witch of Exmoor.]

Over the course of her long career as a novelist, which began with A Summer Bird-Cage in 1963, Margaret Drabble has steadily widened her sphere of interest, from middle-class domesticity to the nation's social and moral dilemmas. Indeed, in her recent trilogy—The Radiant Way （1987）, A Natural Curiosity （1989） and The Gates of Ivory （1991）— she broadened her horizons even further, at one point forsaking the metropolis for Cambodia. In The Witch of Exmoor, her first novel for five years, she opts for a very English setting. Yet its characters have links with Guyana, Jamaica, Denmark and the Jewish diaspora, while the narrative questions the nature of national identity—and of Englishness in particular.

The witch of the title is Frieda Haxby Palmer: social analyst, left-wing academic, author of books on such austere topics as the iron industry in 17th-century Sweden, and hailed by some as “Britain's answer to Simone de Beauvoir”. Frieda is also an unashamed matriarch, mother of three children whose adult lives form the novel's backbone.

Drabble mitigates Frieda's rather unpromising toughness as a character by making her a roguish eccentric and recluse. Sickened by the evils of contemporary society, she has withdrawn to splendid isolation in a decaying Exmoor mansion, where she plans her memoirs, cultivates the company of stray animals and forages the coastline for her supper.

Frieda is capable of some fantastically baroque excesses. She summons her family to a farewell dinner at which, to express her concern over food production, she serves shrivelled beefburgers containing “gristle, fat, chicken scraps, and water from cow's heads“. A departing lover defaces her passport by adding under “distinguishing characteristics” the words “paranoia and intransigence”.

Meanwhile, her children and their spouses go quietly mad as they contemplate what she might, in extremis, do with her considerable fortune. Through them, Drabble builds up a painstaking picture of upper middle-class professional life: a lawyer, a censor, a neurologist, an aspiring politician, an adverstising executive, an arts administrator, each representing an aspect of British society made recognisable through meticulously observed detail. These are characters pressed into service as performance indicators for the state of the nation.

To Drabble's great credit, she can address weighty issues such as homelessness or privatisation and still produce something readable. Her narrative grows almost stealthily in power and pace, while she deploys a succession of beautifully-turned phrases and delivers dialogue that convinces on its own terms. She softens the rigidities of her intellectual project by creating a good story.

Frieda disappears and her children's lives, as if released from a benevolent spell, fall apart. The abiding image is of a family whose members, although bound by a veneer of clannishness, are so self-absorbed that they have little understanding of community or loyalty. The most successful characters—Frieda's sons-in-law, a Guyanese academic and would-be MP, and a disillusioned Jewish parvenu—inhabit the margins of the family, but are central to the novel.

Drabble's recurrent theme is the just society. Does it exist as a practical possibility or simply in the pieties of a failing liberal imagination? Her authorial presence is equivocal, arch, ironic, suggesting that she views the project with some scepticism. It becomes clear that she is aware of the limits of the novel as social chronicle or vehicle for change. Nevertheless, at a time when the “political” novel often appears as either stark fable or frantic farce, her shrewd appraisals and astute observations are more than welcome.