[In the following review, Fairlie offers unfavorable assessment of A Natural Curiosity.]

It is discouraging to open a novel and find it prefaced by an author's note that reads:

I had not intended to write a sequel ＼to The Radiant Way］, but felt that the earlier novel was in some way unfinished, that it had asked questions it had not answered, and introduced people who had hardly been allowed to speak.

Only a few scattered critics in Britain and America suggested that in The Radiant Way, which appeared in 1987, Margaret Drabble had slipped badly. But she now has her doubts about it, and perhaps also about this sequel, since she adds that she intends to write a third novel, picking up the story of a minor character who has disappeared to Democratic Kampuchea, where we are to follow him. One has been offered, in one's time, more enticing prospects.

In A Natural Curiosity we are escorted back to Drabble's England of the 1980s, again with her three protagonists, the middle-aged friends Liz and Esther and Alix. They were all born in Northam, an imaginary industrial city in Yorkshire, reminiscent of the Sheffield in which Drabble was raised. They went to Cambridge, as Drabble did. Then, still in Drabble's footsteps, they moved to London. They have now, like Drabble, reached their 50s, three professional （emphatically not business） women: Liz is a therapist, Esther is an art historian, and Alix （who has moved back to Northam） has a contrived job that is less important than her obsession with a mass murderer in a nearby prison. In other words, none of them （like a novelist?） really works for an employer, or even with a partner. This gives them at least a sensation of independence.

What are we to make of an experienced novelist who thinks that her autobiography, followed so closely, can breathe life into three characters? Their dissimilarities, perfunctory and mechanical, worn like labels, are not enough to differentiate them clearly, even though （with Esther packed off to Italy） they are now apart. Nor do the distinctions create any tension in their 30-year friendship that might call for an interesting accommodation. In their exchanges—at the end they are brought together again—their voices are interchangeable.

By now we have followed them through 719 pages, from New Year's Eve 1979 to late May 1987, and still we cannot be sure why we were introduced to them in the first place, or what we have learned about or from them. They, like their readers, have also had to struggle with the hobbling repetitiveness of Drabble's writing, the wearying lack of movement in the two novels, and contrivances in the plot that exhaust even a willing suspension of disbelief.

There are reminders of how Drabble used to carry us with her: the lucidity of observation, her exploration of character, and generally the style of her earlier fiction. When A Natural Curiosity opens, Alix is driving across the Yorkshire moors, on a mission to Porston Prison, “as the white mist parted for her. She had the illusion of moving in a small patch of light, her own small pocket of clarity. She took it with her, it moved with her.” To start us off, we could hardly ask for better. We are informed and we are intrigued. Once Drabble would have left it there. Now she piles on five sentences about “The sleeping place of the sun. … As the Ancients put it,” that obliterate the pocket of clarity. Clumps of snowdrops clustered round the swollen bole of a tree: “Their little white heads assemble.” If you have the gift to find a verb of such exact, livening observation, why add, “A promise of spring,” fit for a Hallmark card? The snowdrops are not wanton. They reappear later, now on Alix's desk:

They jostle in their wineglass on their thin stems. She lifts the face of one of them, gazes inquiringly into its intricate green and yellow and white, and lets it fall back. With a sigh, the whole wineglass rearranges itself, with inimitable, once-only grace, to create a new pattern. The flowers shiver and quake into stillness. They cannot fall wrongly. They cannot make themselves into a false shape.

Moment, mood, character, even time of year, in a wineglass.

But read the passage again, deleting “With a sigh” （trite, off-putting）; “inimitable” （ditto）; “to create a new pattern” （the snowdrops have rearranged themselves）; and the final “They cannot make a false shape” （the preceding sentence found just the note on which to end）. Each falsifies precisely the point that the snowdrops were making: January, a new beginning, her middle-aged characters possibly rearranging their lives, but all too likely to fall wrongly. Now Drabble squashes the snowdrops.

Why do these two assertive and ambitious novels, uncomfortably joined like Siamese twins, make themselves into a false shape? She places many hurdles in her way, but the main obstacle lies in the nature of the ambition. In all the forced artifice of plot, character, image, and, alas, the actual writing, one feels the author gritting her teeth to deliver the Great English Novel of the 1980s. The politics; the class divisions, the unemployed, the homeless; the North, the South; the inner cities, the suburbs; the greed, the crime; the shimmer of the affluent, the drudgery of the neglected; the culture, the generation gap （still?）; the crumbling of standards, the attrition of loyalties; the bankruptcy, the futility; and behind it all, the surrender of empire.

It is Thatcher's England—with, to drive the point home, a few limp references to “the fleshpots of Reaganland.” Got it? For Drabble is not going to move on until she is sure we have got it. All this and more （“the extraordinary mixture of whining vote-beseeching, arse-licking vulgarity, demotic stupidity, intellectual pretension, moral confusion, and entertainment-packaged pseudo-seriousness”） is to be shown through the three protagonists, along with the minor characters now brought forward to have their say, and a clutter of new ones—a nuisance to the novel, every one of them.

Almost mute in The Radiant Way, Liz Headleand's sister, Shirley Harper, is now made present, reflecting on the “dull despair” of her marriage:

The house ticks over, Shirley ticks over, Shirley-and-Cliff tick over. … It all seems a little unreal, but then, the country at large seems a little unreal too. It is hard to tell if it is ticking over or not. Are we bankrupt or are we prosperous?

There follows still another of Drabble's catalogs of England's woes. Or are these signs of prosperity? Got it? Are the emotional lives of the characters bankrupt or prosperous? Got it. This finger-wagging gets in the way of the characters, and between them and the reader. They are denied all volition, and we are denied our own to find them, and what they represent, for ourselves.

The marriages and ineffectual liaisons of Liz, Alix, Esther, and the rest are all, even those that are beginning, in various stages of disillusion, lifelessness, or final disintegration. Even Alix's steady （second） marriage to Brian, an “unreconstructed socialist,” survives largely because she is so enthralled by herself that it is of little consequence to her that she finds Brian a stick in the mud. Her marriage is another of her good causes, calling for a patient social worker. Beyond themselves, they like or care about few others. Their relationships with their children are mostly listless, cold, or actively hostile. It is even hard to be confident that they are deeply fond of or interested in each other.

So what impels them, which might make us care, as they re-examine their lives in middle age? We are directed to the title:

Attractive danger. Natural curiosity. Unnatural curiosity. Charles Headleand cannot resist pursuing a visa for Baldai. Alix Bowen cannot resist traveling to see her murderer across the lonely moor … and Liz Headleand will not be able to resist an invitation to appear in a contentious debate on television.

Toward the end we find Liz:

Her curiosity is at a low ebb. It occurs to her that not only may she die before she satisfies it, but that she may also lose it before she dies. Curiosity has kept her alive. What if she were to lose it now? She has not the energy to move. … She yawns. … She nods, her eyes close, she dozes.

（We're with her there.） Curiosity is a thin motive to explain three protagonists, or to sustain our interest in them. If they cannot resist what they choose to do, if they have been made by their creator so will-less, who cares?

The England they represent is so unremittingly dismal, hopeless, and hapless that it carries no conviction, even for a reader who laments much of what Thatcher is, stands for, and has done. Marriage and family are here the analogues of the discordance of English society in the 1980s. In The Radiant Way we were introduced to the family as the “source of murder, battering, violence.” Now we discover that Liz and Shirley's father committed suicide, and Shirley's daughter Celia is at Oxford, ignoring pleas from her family to get in touch because her father is ill. “The cold dull breath of home cannot touch her here.” As in the first novel, sex fares no better （except in one faintly warm encounter, when Shirley vanishes after not reporting that her husband has—of course—committed suicide, meets a stranger on the cross-Channel ferry, and conducts a brief romance with him in Paris）. Liz lunches with a friend who tells her he is getting married:

She wishes Ivan and Alicia well, yes, of course she does, but how can she, at her age, have any faith in their vision of married bliss … ? Unless they are freaks, who have escaped the human condition altogether, one can be certain that grief, boredom, infidelity or disillusion await Mr and Mrs Ivan Warner …

In this bleakness, the characters are carrying the burden not only of England through the 1980s, but of England through 2,000 years. In The Radiant Way we were introduced to Cartimandua, the Queen of the Brigantes, who betrayed her people to the Romans, and we are reintroduced to her on page ten of the sequel, along with Druids, Stonehenge, the Bog Man of Buller and, inexplicably, “Onychomys Leucogaster, the stubborn stocky mouse of Utah （see study by L. D. Clark）,” which pops up later, for no discernible reason. Cartimandua, the Brigantes, the Celts, and the rest, infest the new novel, all to suggest that the

treacherous Celtic Queen, gold-torqued, magnificent, betraying her people for the civilization and comforts of the Romans … ＼could be made］ topical, surely—a hint in the portrayal of Cartimandua of the Prime Minister, duplicitous Britannia, striking deals with a powerful American, abandoning the ancient culture of her own folk? Those stiff hair styles would surely lend themselves well to allusion, to analogue.

Mrs. Cartimandua Thatcher. Got it? In case we are slow, Alix is forced by her creator to take down her “battered old purple Penguin Tacitus” to find that the ancient Britons were led on to their enslavement by the comforts of Roman life: “Coca-Cola, McDonald's, blue jeans, jacuzzis … yes, that was surely what Tacitus had in mind.” Surely.

Drabble won't let go of her portentous analogy. From the ancient Britons （“Hadn't they burned people alive in wicker cages?”） she ransacks history and mythology for the symbolism of violence on which she relies to give a jolt to an otherwise stationary plot. The Radiant Way ended with the identification and the arrest of the Horror of Harrow Road, of whom we had been hearing, off and on, for his ungentlemanly habit of cutting off women's heads. He was discovered to be Esther's upstairs neighbor （an unassuming man, except when severing heads）, who was taken away by the police while she and Liz and Alix chattered downstairs. This contrivance was rendered more implausible by the fact that the Horror's final victim was a former prison inmate, Jilly Fox, whom Alix had befriended in her social work, whose head he deposited in Alix's car.

It is to visit the imprisoned murderer P. Whitmore that we find Alix driving in her “small pocket of clarity,” cheerfully singing, “O come, O come, Ema-a-anuel, Redeem thy captive I-i-israel.” She is bearing as a Christmas present “a new, illustrated book about Roman Britain and the resistance of the Brigantes,” because “P. Whitmore was very interested in the ancient Britons, and knew quite a lot about prehistory.” Credulity is out the window, again. Eventually Drabble concedes that “Alix Bowen has got Roman Britain and severed heads on the brain.”

Severed heads of all kinds are strewn through the novel: from archaeology, Medusa's, in the Italian paintings Esther studies, even that of a bull mastiff owned by Whitmore's mother, whom Alix tracks down in a scene of ghoulish improbability. Violence becomes the only symbolism, of England and of people's lives, that Drabble seems able to reach. “Life is more like an old-fashioned, melodramatic novel than we care to know,” we are told. Drabble has written one, without the zest and even conviction of the authentic ones.

If Drabble wished to portray Thatcher's England with the banality of evil, it would have to be done with a good deal more subtlety, indirectness, and variousness than she here seems able to summon. Equally, if we are to be persuaded, as she sometimes seems to intend, that only the mad are sane in the high-tech England, “clean and sparkling,” that the solicitor Clive Enderby imagines for Northam, we can, at this late date, only yawn.

Still, the reader feels that such questions as the novel has asked have not been answered. Drabble herself appears to think so, because at the end, in a section marked off with its date at the top, Liz and Alix and Esther are brought together in Italy to explain it all to us. Liz is in the process of taking back Charles, after he has drifted unsuccessfully from woman to woman. （Few of Drabble's men are successful, in their businesses or the rest of their lives: poor husbands, poor fathers, poor lovers.） Esther has ended her lesbian relationship in Italy. Alix still bears, effortlessly, with Brian. Of her obsession with her murderer, Alix says: “So, I haven't proved anything. I've just confirmed my own prejudices about human nature. I've been traveling round in a closed circuit,” like the novel. “Me and my murderer together.” A natural curiosity? We've been put through it all to find that?

But Esther suddenly announces: “I'm coming back to London. I'm going to buy a flat. In London. That's the plan.” （We have no idea of what she learned in Italy, or learned from her lesbianism, or of why her creator wanted to impose either on her）:

Liz and Alix express their satisfaction at this decision. … “England's not a bad country,” says Liz. … “No,” says Alix. “No” … “England's not a bad country. It's just a mean, cold, ugly, divided, tired, clapped-out post-imperial, post-industrial slag-heap covered in polystyrene hamburger cartons. It's not a bad country at all. I love it.”

And they laugh—what else can they do?

The reader has more options.