[In the following review, Greene offers positive evaluation of The Gates of Ivory.]

The Gates of Ivory begins as Liz Headleand—familiar from The Radiant Way and A Natural Curiosity, the preceding novels of the trilogy that Margaret Drabble here completes—receives a curious package in her post one morning, a package containing part of a human finger bone. It arrives from Stephen Cox, last seen at the end of The Radiant Way, on his way to Cambodia to write a play about Pol Pot; it contains fragments of a prose manuscript and a play, some journals, postcards, sketches and a booklet of “Atrocity Stories,” but no message or instruction. As Liz and various other friends of Stephen try to piece together the meaning of this “text“—is it a joke, an S.O.S., a novel or evidence of “craziness on a grand scale”?—the reader contemplates the tragedy of Cambodia. The novel engages us, simply, as a missing persons story, and more deeply as a mystery on a “grand theme.”

Drabble's canvases have become larger in the course of her thirty-odd-year career. She began in the sixties with works that associated her with “women's issues” （e.g., The Millstone, The Waterfall） and moved, in the seventies and eighties, to large-scale works that offer vast panoramas of English society and analyses of the condition of England （The Ice Age, The Middle Ground, The Radiant Way）. In The Gates of Ivory, she reaches out to bring England into a global context. This final installment in the unnamed trilogy is in some sense the most ambitious of her eleven novels to date.

As we cut back and forth between Stephen's journey to Cambodia and Liz's efforts to track him, we see that Stephen himself is by no means clear about “what on earth he is doing here.” He is fascinated by Pol Pot, that much he knows. When Liz asked him why he had picked Cambodia, “when the world was full of atrocities waiting for novelists, poets and screenwriters to descend upon them like vultures,” he had said, “Because it's so extreme, I suppose. ＼Pol Pot］ had a great project, you know … the greatest reconstruction project of the twentieth century. He was going to take Cambodia out of history, and make it self-sufficient. He was going to begin again.” Stephen, who won a Booker Prize for his novel on the Paris Commune, shares Pol Pot's revolutionary fervor and cataclysmic vision, and he shares his nostalgia as well: “I seek a land where the water flows uphill. I seek simplicity.” Though no apologist for Pol Pot, he sees Cambodia as a great experiment gone wrong, “the death of a nation, the death of communism, the death of hope.” Its failure meant the death of Stephen's faith as well, and so he turned to the Orient to “kick-start his imagination,” in search of a story. Finally, however, Stephen goes because he has no reason to stay, and both he and Liz keep returning to the conversation they had shortly before he left: “There's nothing to keep me here,” he had said, and she had “thought … of saying something rash and blind like ‘You could stay here for me,’” but “had said nothing.”

Stephen thus joins the “desultory, ragged band of witnesses” who are drawn to “the bridge”:

Imagine yourself standing by a bridge over a river on the border between Thailand and Cambodia. Behind you, in the little town of Aranyaprathet, bristling with aerials and stuffed with Good Time merchandise, connected by road and rail and telephone and post office and gossip and newspapers and banking systems with all the Good Times of the West. Before you, the Bad Time of Cambodia. …

Many are drawn to stare across this bridge. … ＼S］ilently, attentively, one after another, they come, and take up the position, and then turn back. … For different reasons and for the same reason they are drawn here. … They are asking a question, but there is no answer.

The Gates of Ivory is about the attempt to comprehend Bad Time from within the comforts and complacencies of Good Time. As such it is an appropriate sequel to A Natural Curiosity, which concerned the fascination of Alix （Liz's best friend） with the serial murderer and decapitator Paul Whitmore; only here we contemplate serial murder gone big, gone political, and are asked to take in the “Big numbers. Mass destructions. Mass graves”—the twentieth century. What is the cause, what can account for such atrocities? characters repeatedly ask. Like Alix contemplating Paul Whitmore, they ask whether men like Hitler, like Pol Pot, are born wrong or driven wrong by wrongs done to them. Is it nature or nurture that makes such hard hearts? Alix unearths a bad mother and a childhood trauma in Whitmore's history, yet she knows this does not finally explain him—“he is as incomprehensible, as opaque as he ever was.” Alix—like those drawn to the bridge—is asking a question to which there is no answer.

Alix speculates, further, about her own motives for asking: for the novel is also an attempt to understand what drives us to seek out “the horror,” to write about it, to represent it. Stephen is following a long line of novelist-adventurers—Conrad, Somerset Maugham, Paul Theroux, William Golding—who have been attracted by a spirit of quest, of conquest; and Stephen feels special affinities with Conrad, “drawn to his loneliness, his restlessness, his temptation to despair.” There are also the journalist-adventurers like Malcolm Caldwell and Sean Flynn and Konstantin Vassiliou—the dashing young photographer Stephen hooks up with in Bangkok, an Easy Rider-type millionaire whose photographs of the refugee camps include a particularly haunting photo of a woman, Mme Akrun, staring tragically, asking “Where is my son?”; a photo that stares down from walls in various relief agencies and turns up in the package that Stephen has sent to Liz. （Mme Akrun also figures as a character in the novel, sought out by both Stephen and Liz, who wish to hear the desolate story of her missing son, Mitra.）

But when Konstantin Vassiliou suggests that he and Stephen collaborate on a book, Stephen is reluctant to write the text for a book of “glossy photographs of tragic people.” Though Konstantin insists “I photograph life, not death,” Stephen wonders “if this is so. If it is possible,” and tries to quell his doubts about photojournalism—“Why, as a trade, should it be any worse than his own?”—but he cannot.

How, indeed, does photojournalism differ from Stephen's trade as a novelist? （Or from Drabble's?） In the course of his disillusionment, Stephen decides that it does not, and ends up renouncing his own prizewinning novel:

He had cashed in on the Commune, he had turned it into fiction and sold it. The Commune had done him proud on the market. Gide had sold the Congo. Malraux had sold the spoils of Angkor. This was what writers did. They seemed to purvey messages, but in truth they sold commodities. Art was nothing but a trading speculation. Rimbaud had sold poetry and skins and gold and ivory and guns and slaves.

So Stephen repudiates those writers of his youth—Rimbaud, Malraux, Gide—who fed his dangerous fantasies: “Beware what you read when young. Beware what you feed upon. It may bring you to this shore, this brink, this bridge.” Writers, too, “flash you, print you, fix you, sell you,” are no better than the “devouring camerafolk” who batten on atrocities and turn life and death into photo opportunity—“The cameras whirr and click. The vultures circle.” It is appropriate that Stephen himself be similarly preyed upon, when his agent Harriet Osborne conceives the idea of buying “an option” on his life before she even knows he is dead; and she is already too late, for a film crew has beat her to him, descending on his remains for a documentary. Representation is the ultimate colonialism, and worse, it is cannibalism—art feeds upon death and life feeds upon art, in a kind of macabre food chain. Drabble is exploring these vampirish, ghoulish relations—art and life, life and art.

This novel is not only about the impossibility of comprehending Bad Time from the perspective of Good Time, it is also about the ambiguity inherent in the attempt: “It would be easy to say that we grow fat and greedy, that we thrive on atrocities, that we eagerly consume suffering,” but “it is not as simple as that.” Drabble reveals the horribly mixed motives of human action, the intermingling of heroism, despair, idealism and delusion, the fine line between battening off atrocity and attempting to alleviate it. While some go out there playing at being heroes, at being Errol Flynn, spurred by a heroism that is a kind of despair—as Konstantin admits, “it's quite easy to be a hero … if you don't care if you die”—others “do not seem to be here for death or glory, for their name on a byline, for their faces in front of the camera, for the hope of a Pulitzer Prize.” At the refugee camps there is a band of workers, anomalous in these self-interested times, displaced persons of the West, working “against the grain … shoring up the impossible, trying to make water flow up-hill.” What are they playing at? Even the kindest, even Alix herself （Alix suspects） have mixed motives: “Is it death itself that attracts her, that compels her” to Paul Whitmore? When Harriet Osborne observes a “weirdo” reading The Road to the Killing Fields, she dismisses his interest as “hardly wholesome”; but then, she wonders, “whose is?” Is Drabble's own interest wholesome? Is this a story to “pass on,” as Toni Morrison asks at the end of Beloved? Are atrocities to be “passed on,” in the sense of communicated, or “passed” on, in the sense of let drop?

Besides questioning the morality of art, Drabble questions the truth of art, approaching these age-old issues from new angles. The Gates of Ivory is about the difficulty of distinguishing “true” from “false” representations of experience—representations we can trust from representations that “deceive,” messages that come through the gates of horn from those that come through the gates of ivory. The gates of ivory, as Drabble's epigraph （from the Odyssey） tells us, “deceive us with false images of what will never come to pass,” whereas the gates of horn “speak plainly of what could be and will be.” But in this postindustrial, postcolonial, postmodern age, our experience is so thoroughly mediated—in the literal sense of being shaped by the media and by technological methods of information dissemination—that it is difficult to know which is which, which is “real.” “Stephen Cox meets a Kampuchean refugee who is playing the role of a Kampuchean refugee in an American semi-fictionalized documentary about Kampuchean refugees. He meets extras who have worked on The Killing Fields, some of them survivors of the killing fields. … The gates of ivory, the gates of horn. The shadow world.” Seeing a documentary about Cambodia, Liz wonders, “How can one believe anything anyone says? How can one even believe the evidence of one's own eyes? … They could be actors dressed ＼as Khmer Rouge］,” though “the bones are bones, it is true. One could be sure of them.” Bones and blood are absolutes, and Liz and Stephen keep returning to them as to the bottom line—though on the tables of a bar in Saigon, the skulls, purported to be American, turn out to be plastic.

All of which makes it difficult to crack the code of Stephen's bizarre text or decipher the message Liz returns with: As in Heart of Darkness, where Marlow sets forth in search of Kurtz, so Stephen sets forth seeking Pol Pot; but Drabble adds layerings to Conrad's tale, for when Liz sets out to track Stephen “into the heart, she supposed, of darkness,” she turns quester, becomes Marlow—which makes Stephen into the Kurtz of the story. （Pol Pot, all this while, remains absent, silent, making no pronouncement, not even one so elliptical as “the horror.”） And in the same way that Marlow represents the stolid virtues that enable him to return to the land of the living but make it difficult for him fully to comprehend Kurtz, Liz represents virtues and values that allow her to return, but render her finally incapable of understanding Stephen.

But Liz takes off in response to a connection with Stephen that is quite different from the spirit of disconnectedness in which Stephen had left; and if she does not return with a message, exactly, she does return to make gestures toward reconstructing and reconnecting, which to some extent atone for her earlier failures. The means to rebuilding are those acts of love and “responsibility” （a word that recurs） that provide an alternative to the barren destructiveness of male bravado, to the heroism that is despair, and are antidote to both Stephen's and Pol Pot's deathbound idealism. Against the dead-endedness of Pol Pot and Stephen, Drabble suggests means of re-creating that have to do with relationship and community—means not so cataclysmic as Pol Pot's but （one hopes） more effective. Can there be an art that commemorates life, not death, and that builds from and toward creation and community rather than destruction? The Gates of Ivory represents the hope that there can.

Drabble is well aware of the impossibility of containing the Cambodian tragedy within “a conventional plot sequence” that offers “a moving, human-interest story, with a happy ending”:

Such a narrative will not do. The mismatch between narrative and subject is too great. Why impose the story line of individual fate upon a story which is at least in part to do with numbers? A queasiness, a moral scruple overcomes the writer at the prospect of selecting individuals from the mass of history, from the human soup. Why this one, why not another? … Perhaps, for this subject matter, one should seek the most disjunctive, the most disruptive, the most uneasy and incompetent of forms, a form that offers not a grain of comfort or repose.

And her own form is to some extent disjunctive: As we puzzle over the bits and pieces of Stephen's manuscript and move in and out of a myriad of consciousnesses, we are put in the position of the characters in the novel, cryptologists trying to decipher Stephen's text and the Cambodian tragedy.

Still, Drabble does offer comfort and repose, a focus on individuals, happy endings and a certain tendency to wind things up—and this is appropriate to the end of a trilogy though perhaps not so appropriate to the subject she has undertaken: The resolutions seem a bit pat. This may be why she ends with a gesture toward the kind of experience her novel cannot encompass, envisioning a Mitra who eludes “the family embrace”:

Mitra Akrun has been much invoked. … But he will not respond to the summons. … He will march on, armed, blooded, bloodied, a rusty Chinese rifle at his back. Many have died and many more will die in their attempt to maim and capture him. He grows and grows, he multiplies. … He is legion. He has not been told that he is living at the end of history. He does not care whether his mother lives or dies. He marches on. He is multitudes.

And this gesture toward the limits of her project is right, for there is—there is bound to be—a certain dissatisfaction with it.

What I love about this novel is what I love about the best of Drabble's works—it's rich and complex and allusive and textured and intertextual and takes on the big questions: life and art, representation and responsibility, the possibility of political action, the question of human nature. It's a novel of ideas at a time when most fiction seems deliberately lobotomized; it's major in an age of minimalism. What I find disturbing is perhaps built into a project that takes on the unknowable, the unthinkable, the impossibility of conceiving of Bad Time from the perspective of Good Time, of understanding and expressing “the horror” within novelistic form; though I also have a sense, which I wish the novel had explored, that specific political factors, such as the U.S. bombing of Cambodia in the seventies, had something to do with unleashing “the horror” onto this land. Yet, I do think that this novel is doing something important politically. After Liz receives Stephen's package, she becomes obsessed with “the unfolding retrospective horror story of skull landscapes and killing fields” and sees Cambodia everywhere; she feels that Stephen has “posted” Cambodia to her. So, too, did I feel Drabble had posted Cambodia to me: The novel is an act of commemoration, a story to pass on—to tell and remember.