[In the following review, Grossman offers tempered criticism of The Gates of Ivory.]

Margaret Drabble's trilogy on the lives of intellectual women of her own generation in England comes to a magisterially conceived finale with her new novel, The Gates of Ivory. Drabble has narrowed her focus from the trio of Cambridge graduates with whom she began—Liz Headleand the London psychiatrist, Alix Bowen the doer of good works, and Esther Breuer the reclusive art historian—to the first of the three. Liz, moving as a tolerant, mainstream-liberal observer in the circle of British cultural operatives, has always been Drabble's alter ego, and here she is handed a novelist's challenge: an anonymously sent package containing the personal papers of her friend Stephen Cox, a writer who has vanished on a trip to Cambodia to find out “what had happened to the dreams of Pol Pot.”

This event triggers the novel's expansion outward in multiple directions. From Liz, scanning through Stephen's clippings on the Khmer Rouge, cut to Stephen's flaky agent Hattie Osborne's memories of her last night with him before he left England, cut to episodes of Stephen's doomed journey to Bangkok, Hanoi, Phnom Penh and the Cambodian forest. Then cut to the Cambodian refugee camps, and a bereaved mother whose photograph, circulated worldwide, makes the reputation of young photojournalist Konstantin Vassiliou—who with his mother Rose appeared in Drabble's The Needle's Eye some twenty years ago.

Thus the narrative grows into a global catalog of randomly linked lives. Plotlines often fade out, although at the end of the book Liz's memorial gathering for Stephen pulls the London crowd together for review. And within each episode itself the dominant stylistic device is again the catalog, whether of the contents of Liz's old handbag （watch for deadly superabsorbent tampons）, or the varieties of brothels in Bangkok （including Red-Indian style, geisha style, and wedding style complete with gowned brides and organ music）, or the jumble of international refugee-aid organizations active on the frontier: “Oxfam, UNBRO, ICRC, UNHCR, UNICEF, WHO, FPP, FHH, WR, COER.” And, inevitably, of Pol Pot's continuing atrocities.

To control this flood of referential detail Drabble invokes a pair of organizing categories, Good Time and Bad Time. These appear to correlate mainly with life in the prosperous, politically stable West on the one hand, and on the other with Third World immiseration under violent, militarized regimes: London vs. Phnom Penh. But the concept of Bad Time also stretches to include evils erupting from within, as in the case of Alix Bowen's protégé, the serial killer Paul Whitmore. And it is occasionally hinted that the West and its ideologies are implicated as a source of Bad Time in Southeast Asia. “How could a French infection from the Sorbonne drive this quiet, faraway peasant people mad?” Drabble asks, having noted that Pol Pot went to Paris as a student in electrical engineering and came back a revolutionary ideologue.

Such ethical questioning of Western domination invites more searching consideration than The Gates of Ivory gives it; the fact that Drabble holds back suggests where her current work is most vulnerable. She has been criticized for shortchanging sympathetic representations of character in favor of such features as her appended bibliography of nonfictional sources. And she has openly declared herself a kind of social historian rather than a novelist per se. In fact, she has moved her work closer to an established European mode of socially and historically conscious fiction. In America, we tend to enforce （at real cost） the territorial grouping of literature with psychology as being primarily concerned with individual realities, while assigning the collective picture to history, sociology and cultural studies. I would frankly honor Margaret Drabble for resisting this kind of segregation, which is especially damaging to women writers, given the pressures on them to stay inside a domestic frame.

The problem with The Gates of Ivory is rather its attempt to cover too broad a canvas, which results in a kind of conscientious skimming. Instead of reaching toward a prophetic nightmare of the barbarized, generic Khmer Rouge guerrilla （“Terribly, he smiles. He is legion. He has not been told that he is living at the end of history …”）, might she not have focused closer to home on the singular decadence of the European revolutionary Left?

But this raises a crucially difficult question for the novelist: what is the subject that is at once vitally my own and that of my culture; and further, at once my own and that of everyone? Nadine Gordimer is one of the few who have succeeded in formulating an answer. Margaret Drabble, despite her confident handling of the surface dramas of her world, appears to be searching still.