Beginning with her novels of the mid-seventies, Margaret Drabble has noticeably shifted her emphasis from an earlier concentration on the moral and domestic dilemmas of her female characters to narratives that reflect—and reflect upon—a problematic, violent, and arbitrary universe. From The Waterfall, The Realms of Gold, and The Middle Ground （published in the late sixties and seventies） to her most recent series of novels, The Radiant Way, A Natural Curiosity, and The Gates of Ivory （published during the late eighties and early nineties）, her characters suffer bodily injury and fragmentation as terrorism, crime, random accidents, and disasters seep into and disrupt their lives. I would like to consider the evolution of Drabble's darkening vision from two angles: first, the way in which the imagery of bodily injury and fragmentation mirrors and represents Drabble's increasingly pessimistic view of contemporary life; and second, the fact that the narratives themselves have become structurally fragmented, mirroring the author's evolution from a focus on domestic manners toward a more socially and politically sweeping and “disruptive” （Drabble's term） form that experiments with postmodernist narrative structures.

An extensive critical bibliography demonstrates scholarly efforts to delimit and categorize the slippery term “postmodernism” in literary discourse. It has been employed to define a historical period succeeding the period of literary modernism in this century as well as to delineate formal elements of narrative that diverge both structurally and philosophically from realist and modernist conventions. As Linda Hutcheon observes, the task of definition is complex because a primary feature of the postmodern is its inherently paradoxical essence. “＼P］ostmodernism is a contradictory phenomenon, one that uses and abuses, installs and then subverts, the very concepts it challenges.” Regarding the postmodernist novel in particular, “fiction is offered as another of the discourses by which we construct our versions of reality, and both the construction and the need for it are what are foregrounded.” The postmodern world thus offers “an infinite plurality of representations.” A significant aspect of postmodernist narratives includes the tension between the “presentation and subversion of Realist conventions“; the texts direct our attention “not to fictions of origins and ends but to the process of consciousness itself as it constructs and deconstructs such fictions.” Brian McHale posits that the “dominant” or primary mode of postmodernist narrative is ontological, in contrast to the epistemological mode of modernist narrative. “＼P］ostmodernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground questions like … ‘Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?’” By contrast, “modernist fiction deploys strategies which engage and foreground questions such as … ‘How can I interpret this world of which I am a part? And what am I in it?’”

Drabble's partial turn away from the conventions of mimesis to embrace certain of these postmodernist narrative strategies—deliberate disjunctiveness in narrative structure, narrators who subvert realistic conventions by intermittently commenting directly on the text we are reading, and other strategies to be elaborated in the course of this discussion—has its sources earlier in her work, in the recurring idea of fragmentation. That idea, initially represented through imagery and plot events concerning bodily injury or literal fragmentation, ultimately evolves in Drabble's most recent fiction into a deepening trope of disjunction that is mirrored in both the thematic and structural dimensions of her narratives.

The trope of bodily injury shapes narrative events beginning as early as The Waterfall （1969）, in which a serious automobile accident dramatically disrupts the passionate affair between Jane Gray and her married cousin James Otford; James is nearly fatally injured while Jane is scarcely hurt. Yet James's injury takes the form of a coma rather than physical mutilation; he eventually recovers completely. Representations of bodily injury, fragmentation, and mutilation become more marked with The Realms of Gold （1975） and The Ice Age （1977）. In the first, the central character, Frances Wingate, discovers a lump in her breast; surgery leads to the welcome verdict that it is benign. In the same novel, Frances's great-aunt dies of starvation and neglect, and another member of her extended family acts out his profound depression, killing his baby daughter and himself. In The Ice Age, the central character, Anthony Keating, suffers a heart attack at the age of thirty-eight. His close friend, Kitty Friedmann, is maimed, losing a foot to a random IRA bomb that kills her husband while they are dining out in celebration of their wedding anniversary. Keating's attempt to connect the breakdown of his own body with the breakdowns of modern urban life provides an instructive foreshadowing of concerns that have since become increasingly central in Drabble's fiction. As the narrator phrases it, Anthony “could rationalize his own misfortunes, but there was no rational explanation for the sense of alarm, panic, and despondency which seemed to flow loose in the atmosphere of England.”

Like Kitty Friedmann, Hugo Mainwaring of The Middle Ground （1980） has also been maimed by random violence （although not during the present time of the narrative）; a foreign correspondent, Hugo lost his forearm to a stray grenade explosion while he was reporting a story from Eritrea. In addition to that physical mutilation, Hugo has a brain-damaged child, a fact that resonates with Kate Armstrong's discovery early in the novel that she is pregnant with what turns out to be a severely deformed fetus. Hugo's attitude toward his damaged child and his physical disfigurement seem to be deliberately contrasted with Kate's coping capabilities, as suggested by her surname, “Armstrong.” After considerable inner anguish, Kate decides to terminate the pregnancy with an abortion （at the same time deterring future pregnancies with sterilization）. Afterward, she faces the “blank waste of freedom,” agonizing that she has “cut out the child, but not the malady” of middle-aged stagnation. In the same novel, Kate's good friend Evelyn Stennett is partially blinded by ammonia thrown into her eyes when she inadvertently stumbles into a domestic argument between a sexually confused girl and her angry Jamaican boyfriend in a lower-income housing project. Kate wonders if the personal violence she observes around her is an expression, “a culmination of all that vaguely directed ill-will, hatred and frustration, of the terror we each now feel when walking down a concrete underpass, when we fumble for a key on our own doorstep with the sound of footsteps behind us, when an unknown car pulls up at a kerb? Belfast, Beirut, Baghdad.”

In each of these narratives （particularly in The Middle Ground, whose title overtly signals mediation or compromise）, there is an uneasy tension between the optimistic drive of the traditional narrative plot—everything will turn out all right—and its pessimistic contemporary undertow: characters who are in some way damaged, psychologically if not also literally amputees, as a result of the random misfortunes of contemporary life. Drabble's major characters manage to survive through precarious balancing acts, as suggested by Kate Armstrong hobbling uncomfortably in a pair of boots with a defective heel that she never manages to have repaired, or by Liz Headleand of The Gates of Ivory, occasionally limping because of a weak ankle that was injured in an accident and mended with a metal pin.

The tension between traditional mimetic plot and contemporary narrative strategies is also signaled, in Drabble's novels of the seventies, by her use of an intrusive narrator who periodically calls attention to the fictionality of the narratives themselves. For example, in The Middle Ground the narrator intrudes shortly after the opening scene with Kate Armstrong and Hugo Mainwaring at lunch to advise the reader, “Here is an account of Kate's past history, some, if not all, of which must have led her to wherever she now is.” Following twenty pages that summarize Kate's “history” up to the present moment, the narrator avers that “her progress was not, of course, as smooth as this pr‚cis might indicate.”

While Drabble's novels of the late seventies open up her canvas to the generalized random violence of a politically and socially divisive contemporary world, her novels of the eighties and nineties further extend that darkening vision as well as her increasingly visible deviations from traditional narration. Both The Radiant Way （1987） and A Natural Curiosity （1989） are deeply preoccupied with violations of the body and with socially aberrant behavior, ranging from pedophilia and child abuse to serial murder. One of the three central female characters, the psychoanalyst Liz Headleand, becomes an analyst in search of her own past, eventually confronting the reality of her long-deceased father's pedophilia and her own sexual victimization by him during early childhood.

Moreover, in both The Radiant Way and A Natural Curiosity, Drabble adds further experimental riffs in the direction of postmodern self-consciousness and disruption of linear narrative within a traditional novel form. In the first of the two, Drabble parodies the interview format of the Ithaca section of James Joyce's Ulysses. Alix Bowen, suffering from insomnia, “submit＼s］ herself to a version of the following questionnaire”:

Q. Did she, Alix Bowen, in December 1983, consider that London was a more dangerous, more drug-infested place than it had been when Jilly Fox was convicted of various offences way back in 1979?

A. Yes, she did.

Q. Did she blame the Tory government for this deterioration in law and order?

A. No, not really.

And so on for two full pages. Later in the novel, a minor character is the vehicle for Drabble's gesture toward narrative self-consciousness and discontinuous narrative form. The narrator observes rather wryly that Charles Headleand is “programmed to take in several story lines, several plots at once. He cannot quite unravel them, but he cannot do without the conflicting impulses, the disparate stimuli.”

By the second novel in the series, A Natural Curiosity, Drabble's ever more intrusive narrator makes even bolder references to the fictionality of the story we are reading. Observing a minor character, Stephen Cox, who has gone to Cambodia （but whose fate there is not elaborated until the succeeding novel, The Gates of Ivory）, the narrator confides to us that he is “still alive, although none of the characters in this novel know it.” Later in the same novel, as Alix Bowen watches television, the narrator impersonally lists a series of atrocities that have been reported during a single month. Following the statement of such items as “A man in Hansborough had slept two nights in bed with his girlfriend without noticing she was dead. ‘I suppose I must have been drunk,’ he said,” the narrator rather sardonically challenges us to “Spot the one invented story, if you can. No prize offered.” Still later, the narrator steps outside the narrative frame entirely to address the novel's readers, teasingly inviting us to resolve a subplot involving another minor character:

I wonder if those of you who object to the turn that Shirley's life has taken are the same as those who objected to its monotony in the first place. If you are, you might reflect that it might be your task, not mine or hers, to offer her a satisfactory resolution.

Meanwhile Shirley, waiting for this resolution, turns on the hot tap once more, and lies back. …

Drabble has explained that her intrusive narrator performs the function of an “old-fashioned realist voice,” at the same time articulating her concern about what she terms “authorial imperialism”: “to whom does a fictional character belong ＼the author or the reader］?” In this question, which lingers either in or between the lines of her most recent novels, Drabble reveals her interest in postmodernist concerns about narration, characterization, and authorial control.

Drabble's disruptions of traditional narrative form to expose its fictionality parallel her narrative expression of disruptions within the social world that traditional fiction represents. In her most recent narratives, Drabble carries forward from her fiction of the seventies her figuring of social deterioration through bodily injuries and accidents. In fact, in the recent series of novels she seems almost obsessively preoccupied with a particular form of bodily dismemberment: decapitation. In The Radiant Way, a psychopath known as the Harrow Road murderer commits a series of shocking, headline-grabbing murders-by-decapitation, culminating in the beheading of a disturbed girl whom Alix Bowen had tried to help while teaching English literature to adolescent female felons. The image of decapitation is emotionally distanced, but nonetheless pervasively present, in the art historian Esther Breuer's fascination with its iconographic representation in classical art, including severed heads in portrayals of Salome with the head of St. John the Baptist, Judith and Holofernes, Perseus and Medusa.

As I have proposed elsewhere, in A Natural Curiosity, the sequel to The Radiant Way, Drabble not only reprises but revises several ideas from the immediately preceding novel. The grisly image of the severed head is invested with spiritual as well as sacrificial and mythological meanings. Additionally, in this “sequel” novel, Drabble even revises the character of the decapitating murderer himself: attempting to humanize the criminal （though not his crimes）, she provides Paul Whitmore not only with Alix Bowen's sympathy but with an entirely respectable interest in the history of ancient Britain and a mother whose monstrous conduct almost explains his psychopathic personality.

Severed heads reappear in The Gates of Ivory, this time bluntly suggesting both atrocity and mortality. As Liz Headleand （whose name virtually encodes Drabble's multivolume preoccupation） searches in Cambodia for her missing friend, Stephen Cox, she dreams of seeing his head delivered on a platter and of her own death by beheading. Stephen and other Westerners he meets in Southeast Asia casually debate about primitive cultural practices, including head-hunting and “ceremonial decapitation.” More often, however, the figure of the severed head has decayed to a skull, signified by the characters' recurring allusions to Hamlet's “poor Yorick”; or, rather than singular skulls, “Piles of skulls, emaciated living corpses, images of our time,” as the narrator phrases it. Stephen dreams of a man who keeps a skull in a “little black bag … Alas, poor Yorick, says the skull. … The skull is one of many. Three million, two million, one million, eight hundred thousand. Who is counting?”

Other images of dismemberment and mutilation recur repeatedly throughout The Gates of Ivory. What eventually prompts Liz Headleand's travels to Southeast Asia—and her temporary assumption of the identity of a fictitious “Mrs. Stephen Cox”—is her receipt early in the novel of a package of Stephen's personal effects that contains finger bones from a corpse. Ironically, the bones were given to Stephen as a talisman of good luck （though only the reader, and not Liz, learns this fact）. In Cambodia, Stephen speaks with other travelers he encounters about the Khmer Rouge despot Pol Pot; about whom he hopes to write a play. According to one rumor, Pol Pot “has lost a leg and been fitted with a prosthesis.” Stephen thinks of the poet Rimbaud—not the fictitious movie hero-killer, Rambo, whose name ironically sounds the same when spoken—who lost a leg to amputation. Rimbaud's words accompany Stephen through his travels and are interspersed in the text; the image of Rambo—the rapacious soldier—also implicitly haunts the text.

What Drabble terms the “Bad Time” thread of the narrative—battle-scarred Southeast Asia—is punctuated with descriptions of casualties of war, political division, blood, and disease: maimed, amputated, disfigured bodies are everywhere. Symbolically, Liz Headleand, who assumed she had reached the end of periodic bleeding with menopause, bleeds unexpectedly in Cambodia. Even in the “Good Time” thread of the novel—Liz's London milieu—Alix Bowen's husband Brian, who suffers from colon cancer, is “disembowelled,” although, thanks to modern medicine, doctors have “stitched him up and remade him as good as new.” Less extremely, both Liz Headleand and Stephen Cox have damaged ankles held together with metal pins.

The motif of bodily mutilation, fragmentation, dismemberment, and decapitation persists in The Gates of Ivory not only in such concrete bodily references but in figurative form. Stephen Cox, who most clearly embodies Drabble's exploration of fragmentation, confesses to the enigmatic Miss Porntip in Bangkok that he regards himself as “all in pieces. … There is no consistency in me. No glue. No paste. I have no cohesion. I make no sense. I am a vacuum. I am fragments. I am morsels.” Even his diction mirrors his splintered vision of himself. Ironically, he has traveled to Southeast Asia in pursuit of wholeness, or “simplicity.” Once there, however, he is, like the cultures he encounters, further divided: “Stephen Cox hangs between two worlds. He is a go-between. Fragments of him drift on the river, surface from the mud.” Even Stephen's personal effects, which eventually make their way to England in the parcel Liz Headleand receives, are fragmentary “notes and scribbles”: “prose manuscripts,” “attempts at a play,” “diary notebooks,” “postcards,” and “sketches.” Fragments of these fragments are interpolated as part of the text of The Gates of Ivory.

Stephen Cox's personal fragmentation thus expresses the culmination in Margaret Drabble's fiction thus far of a cluster of ideas and evolving narrative strategies that originate earlier in her oeuvre. The recent narratives are driven less by linear plot than by a self-conscious narrator who intermittently draws our attention both to the arbitrariness of events and destructive forces described within the fictional world and to the arbitrariness of the narrative form itself. Drabble's characters struggle to comprehend, if no longer to rationalize, random events, just as the narrator endeavors to indicate, if no longer to explain or justify, the randomness that interrupts coherent narrative structure. Increasingly, fragmentation functions as both social condition and narrative strategy.

As Drabble's characters from Anthony Keating and Kate Armstrong to their recent successors, Liz Headleand, Alix Bowen, and Stephen Cox, grapple with the arbitrariness of events in the public world in order to sustain meaning within their own lives, so does Drabble compel her readers to grapple with the meaning of these increasingly disjunctive, plotless narratives. In The Gates of Ivory, irrational events and monstrous images not only predominate but strongly resist both psychological comprehension and narrative containment. The atrocities Liz Headleand observes in Southeast Asia—deformed babies and mass graves piled high with bones—are so outrageous that she questions her own senses, wondering whether what she sees is real or simulated for a documentary film that Gabriel Denham （another character from an earlier Drabble novel who appears in cameo in The Gates of Ivory） is shooting in Cambodia: “How can one believe anything anyone says? How can one even believe the evidence of one's own eyes? … The bones are bones, it is true. … It would be too expensive to fake so many. … But what of the deformed babies? Could they have been got up by a special effects film team?”

The inquiry into the enigma of “human nature” begun in the preceding two novels of the series becomes, in The Gates of Ivory, an inquiry into the enigma of “the human condition,” as Drabble's central characters attempt to understand not only individual but collective atrocity and the barbarous consequences of irreconcilable cultural and political differences. Accordingly, the issues are magnified and iconized as they are displaced from England to Southeast Asia: from the serial murderer, Paul Whitmore, to the genocidal murderer, Pol Pot; from the isolated random bombings and accidental injuries or deaths that punctuate the earlier narratives to veritable killing fields of human destruction in Southeast Asia. Recurring allusions to Homer's Odyssey and Joyce's Ulysses, Shakespeare （particularly the bloodthirsty Coriolanus）, and Joseph Conrad （whom several characters refer to as a “racist,” despite the novel's thematic echoes of Heart of Darkness—from piles of skulls to the deeper vision of savagery and despair） demonstrate Drabble's characteristic intertextual play with literary tradition as she looks over her shoulder to classical and modern predecessors. In this narrative, however, the literary references signal her revisionist argument with previously canonized Western texts in the glare of postcolonial awareness of global complexity—a world that can be neither understood nor represented through a single moral code or vision.

The case of “toxic shock” that Liz suffers while searching for Stephen Cox in Cambodia might almost serve as a metaphor for Drabble's current social perspective. In The Gates of Ivory, the incomprehensible, splintered, and arbitrarily violent world that shocks Liz Headleand is figured in Stephen Cox's notebook of “Atrocity Stories” and further emblematized in the figure of Madame Akrun, a Khmer woman who uselessly mourns the lost, mutilated, displaced, and dead members of her war-torn family. Madame Savet Akrun's name may be seen—like the novel itself—as a linguistic collage, encoding three human responses to the atrocities of war: “save tak＼e］ run.” Through this emblematic figure and her eternally lost son, Mitra, Drabble dramatizes the shock that accompanies the loss of the sense of “wholeness,” whether of body, self, family, world, or narrative itself. As Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann have observed in another context, “＼we are］ conscious of the world as consisting of multiple realities. As ＼we］ move from one reality to another, ＼we］ experience the transition as a kind of shock.” In Drabble's narrative, the possibility of unity is challenged, disrupted, and ultimately rendered illusory by a postmodern consciousness distinguished by anxieties of fragmentation, incompleteness, loss, and violent and/or arbitrary death.

In her attempt to represent more faithfully the confusion and disarray of “real life,” Drabble has developed a narrative form that encompasses an agglutination of details and episodes marginal to the central threads of the narrative, as well as cameo appearances of numerous minor characters （including, as she has done in previous novels, several characters from her earlier narratives） revealed in diverse cross sections of their lives. Fragmentation and disjunctiveness produce the very texture of The Gates of Ivory.

The most notable expressions of disjunctive narrative are the intermittent interpolations of various kinds of lists that also gloss, both seriously and parodically, the distinctive catalogues of Homer's Odyssey and Joyce's Ulysses. One list enumerates avenues of inquiry for Stephen's friends who want to begin a search for him. Another is a bibliography—titles of books recommended to Liz Headleand by her stepson to prepare her for her journey to Southeast Asia. As the narrator dryly observes, “Maybe the list itself would infuse her with the necessary information. Bypass reading: cut out the text: inject the title. A technique for the year 2000.” Other lists reproduce jottings from Stephen Cox's notes: a series of tableaux for a proposed historical drama about Pol Pot; a “questionnaire” like the one in The Radiant Way cited above, in which Alix Bowen queries her perceptions of England's social deterioration, but focused on absurd trivia such as “What happened to the liver of the brother of Lon Nol?”

Some of the characters even speak in lists. The Bangkok beauty queen whom Stephen Cox meets, Miss Porntip, extols what she regards as the benevolent influence of American culture on hers: “Is better life expectancy, more electrics, more saloon cars, more soap, more rice, more nice clothings and suitings, more ice-cream, more maple syrup, more Coca-Cola” and so on for an entire paragraph concluding with “more choice, more liberty, more democracy.” Later Stephen Cox recites acronyms of organizations of international altruism: “Oxfam, UNBRO, ICRC, ICRDP, UNHCR, UNICEF, WHO, FPP, FHH, WR, COER”—regarding them as “acrimonious acronyms ＼that］ cluster like flies round the wounds of sick nations.” In fact, most of Stephen Cox's notes, interpolated in the narrative, are essentially lists: reunion stories, atrocity stories, survival stories; compilations of statistics concerning mass deaths at the hands of genocidal monsters throughout history from Egyptian pharaohs to Tamburlaine and Hitler; numbers representing tons of explosives and herbicides dropped on Vietnam by American troops during the war.

Still other catalogues in the narrative assume more ruminative form, speculating on alternative possibilities regarding the activities or fates of certain characters. In particular, this speculative mode focuses on two principal characters, Stephen Cox and Konstantin Vassiliou （the son of Rose Vassiliou, whose name is familiar to readers of Drabble's The Needle's Eye）, drifting in Southeast Asia as a freelance photographer; and on two emblematic figures, Pol Pot, master of genocide, and Mitra Akrun, the off-stage subject of one of Konstantin's most memorable photographs. Mitra's mother, Madame Akrun, becomes, through Konstantin's moving photograph of her, an “icon of sorrow, the maimed Piet …” who, mourning her son lost to war and carnage, is also a victim of that destruction. “Where is Mitra?” she （and we） ask:

Mitra bends over his medical text books in an attic in a Parisian suburb and late into the night he studies the names of the small bones and the large.

Mitra lies in a field hospital of delicate bamboo, delirious, with a newly amputated leg.

Mitra in a smart pastiche uniform of white and gold and green bows low at the gateway to the Shangri-La Hotel.

Mitra in a tattered uniform of camouflage and UN cast-offs sits on the earth with a group of children instructing them in the art of throwing the grenades which they have not got. …

Mitra strolls the green level lawns of Versailles and inhales the pungent aristocratic odour of box as he watches the crystalline play of the fountains.

Mitra crouches on his haunches and shreds chicken in the back yard of the Restaurant Phnom Penh in Montreal.

Mitra works as interpreter and resettlement officer in a refugee hostel in the Yorkshire Dales.

Mitra is dead and has been dead for ten years. …

Maybe Mitra does not wish to hear from his mother. Maybe he has deliberately concealed his tracks.

In short, Mitra is everywhere—or anywhere, or nowhere—and the possibilities are endless, speculative, contradictory, and ultimately unknowable.

By means of such catalogues or litanies that express but refuse to mediate the tension between hope and sorrow, possibility and misfortune, the knowable and the unknowable, Drabble expresses the shattering of human lives through war and through individual or collective atrocity. Narratively, the catalogues of possibilities unravel linear plot into a series of strands extending in a number of directions—disjunctive, mutually exclusive alternatives that are neither resolved nor dismissed. In place of the all-knowing narrator of Drabble's earlier fiction, who occasionally intrudes to expose the puppeteer working the strings backstage and to remind us of the narrative's fictionality, this narrator can no longer be relied on to “know” and to disclose the complete—or even partial—stories of her characters. Rather, she becomes an apologist for the limits of fiction itself—for untold stories and for the inadequacy of traditional narrative to tell them. Splicing into the more or less mimetic elements of her narrative lists that range from the ostensibly factual to the presumably parodic to the explicitly speculative, Drabble deliberately gestures toward a postmodernist sensibility, signaling the fictionality of the narrative and requiring her readers' collaboration in that construction.

In The Gates of Ivory, Drabble alternately seems to invoke the epistemological dominant （recalling McHale's terms for the primary modes of modernist and postmodernist texts）—her characters' efforts to “interpret this world of which ＼they are］ a part,” including Stephen Cox's travels in Cambodia and Liz Headleand's later quest for him amid the incomprehensible destruction she witnesses there—and the ontological dominant—Liz temporarily assuming the persona of a fictitious “Mrs. Stephen Cox” in order to discover, in effect, “Which world is this? What is to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?” At the same time, numerous other characters in the narrative, both major and minor, suggest the simultaneous reality of different “worlds,” each with its own values and assumptions, from the comic relief character, Hattie Osborne, in London to the mournful iconic piet … of Southeast Asia, Madame Akrun.

The Gates of Ivorymay be understood, then, as a hybrid of traditional and postmodernist attitudes and narrative strategies, expressed through Drabble's weaving together of several distinct geographical and symbolic domains and narrative conventions. The most realistic or mimetic dimension of the novel concerns Liz Headleand and her London milieu; what Drabble labels the “Good Time” actually functions as the “good place.” The “Bad Time,” which functions geographically as the “bad place,” is Southeast Asia, a site that literally represents extremity, personal dislocation, fragmentation, and death, while symbolically invoking the “underworld” of the Odyssean Hades. At the outset of the novel the narrator establishes the coexistence and interpenetration of these dissimilar domains: “Good Time and Bad Time coexist. We in Good Time receive messengers who stumble across the bridge or through the river, maimed and bleeding, shocked and starving. They try to tell us what it is like over there, and we try to listen. … We are seized with panic and pity and fear.” The narrator also introduces the tension between belief and disbelief that persists throughout the novel, rhetorically querying, “Can we believe these stories from beyond the tomb? Can it be that these things happen in our world, our time?”

Within that shadow zone of extremity and doubt, Drabble further juxtaposes the real （Stephen Cox and other Western travelers） and the iconic or emblematic （Madame Akrun and her lost son, Mitra; Pol Pot; the “inscrutable” Far East itself）. Moreover, Stephen Cox straddles the several narrative domains: he is the bridge between the known （a member of Liz Headleand's and Alix Bowen's social milieu） and the unknowable （What is he really in Cambodia for? How does he die?）. He functions simultaneously as a “real person” in the mimetic sense and a figurative journeyer in the killing fields of an imaginary/unimaginable domain.

The sweep of The Gates of Ivoryis almost impossibly broad: history, sociology, anthropology, political theory, art, literature; Hollywood, film, photography, pornography, sexual harassment, racism, cannibalism; Shakespeare, Mill, Conrad, Rimbaud, Malraux; menstruation, pregnancy, toxic shock, pollution. … The list could be considerably longer. The novel is overstuffed, almost glutted, with details. There are almost too many characters, conversations, stories, ideas, catalogues; almost too much texture, even allowing for Drabble's own explicit rationale within the text for its narrative untidiness and for her apparent abandonment of the “old-fashioned, Freudian, psychological novel”—the kind Liz Headleand prefers, that “begins at the beginning and moves inexorably to its end. She does not like confusion for its own sake. There is plenty of confusion in real life, without inventing more of it.”

Liz Headleand's objections notwithstanding, the narrator of The Gates of Ivory, in an extended comment that bears the voice of the author herself, makes her most explicit and extended intrusion anywhere in Drabble's fiction, expressing her dissatisfaction with “the old-fashioned, Freudian, psychological novel” and its conventional narrative assumptions. She enjoins her readers to accept the necessity, the inevitability, of the jumbled, “disjunctive” form she has chosen:

This story could have been the story of the search for and discovery of Mme. Akrun's son, Mitra: a moving, human-interest story, with a happy ending, a reunion ending, with music. Or it could have been the story of the search for and discovery of Stephen Cox. This too could perhaps have had a happy ending: perhaps, even, a wedding? You might well think that either of these two stories, or the two of them interwoven with a conventional plot sequence, would have made a much more satisfactory narrative than this. And you would have been right. Such a narrative would have required a certain amount of trickiness, a certain deployment of not-quite-acceptable coincidences, a certain ruthless tidying up of the random movements of people and peoples. But it should not be beyond the competence of a certain kind of reasonably experienced novelist. One may force, one may impose one's will.

But 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. Too easily we take refuge with the known. Particular anguish, particular pain, is, in its way, comfortable. Unless, of course, it happens to be our own.

Later, Drabble again emphasizes the strain between realist and postmodernist attitudes within the narrative. Near the end of The Gates of Ivory, the narrator excludes Konstantin and his mother Rose Vassiliou from the reception following the memorial service for Stephen Cox, insisting that these characters “belong to a different world and a different density. They have wandered into this story from the old-fashioned, Freudian, psychological novel, and they cannot mix and mingle with the guests of Liz Headleand.” It is not immediately clear why they cannot do so, since Konstantin Vassiliou, at least, has already “mixed and mingled with” Stephen Cox during significant parts of the preceding narrative.

Though there is a kind of traditional closure to Stephen Cox's story—his demise in Southeast Asia is mourned at the well-attended memorial service in London—there is no consolation in the likelihood of his meaningless death to jungle fever and despair. Nor is it clear—to hark back to expectations raised by the traditional “old-fashioned, Freudian, psychological novel”—that Liz Headleand has been inwardly changed by her journey since, though figuratively “newly widowed” by Stephen Cox's death, she picks up the traces of her life rather facilely once she returns to England.

Although the disjunctive narrative form of The Gates of Ivory illustrates Drabble's attempt to represent a postmodern, irrational, incomprehensible world “at the end of history,” her principal characters—and, I suggest, the author herself—nonetheless betray a longing for the old unities, the older verities that confirm both narrative and emotional meaning. The two novels that precede The Gates of Ivory both conclude affirmatively, with a reunion of three friends—Liz Headleand, Alix Bowen, and Esther Breuer. The conclusion of The Gates of Ivory is almost falsely affirmative, given the disruptive narrative that precedes it: the three women, united at the memorial service, plan for their next walking trip together, at least temporarily forgetting, as Liz phrases it, “all about ageing and death.”

The nostalgia for meaningful connection coexists and overlaps with psychological fragmentation and literal or figurative dismemberment as defining conditions of late twentieth-century experience. In fact, the longing for meaningfulness is inseparable from the postmodern attitude that critiques its likelihood. As Alix Bowen concedes during the memorial service for Stephen Cox, even if God is dead, and even if “she has utterly relinquished him, … the ache lingers on in the amputated limbs.” Indeed, the imagery of amputation that cancels the possibility of wholeness or resolution appears not only in Alix's spiritual yearning but also in the haunting emblematic figure whose image concludes the novel. The representation of all mothers' sons who are literally and figuratively dismembered by war and cultural division, Mitra Akrun and legions like him march on, “armed, blooded, bloodied.” The Gates of Ivory is Drabble's “atrocity story,” bearing witness to the deeply disturbing splintering within contemporary experience. Represented in extremis as the legacy of war and genocide in Southeast Asia, its dark significance insinuates itself into the “ordinary” lives of her English characters.

The text concludes with a final list, which we may choose to regard from either traditional or postmodernist perspectives: a two-page bibliography of Drabble's research sources on Cambodia and Vietnam. If read conventionally, it acknowledges the author's indebtedness to her sources; if read in a postmodernist sense, it becomes one last catalogue of factual information that highlights the fictionality of the narrative it concludes.

Ultimately The Gates of Ivory not only exposes but demonstrates the limits of narrative mimesis—at least, mimesis as Drabble has employed it （even as she has increasingly deviated from it）—for representing cultural and personal fragmentation on such a vast and incomprehensible scale. Drabble betrays her rather awkward position out on a limb, suspended somewhere between realism and postmodernism. The tensions between the knowable and the unknowable, the real and the imaginary—or unimaginable—inevitably elude resolution. At the same time, Drabble enjoys parodying some of the more self-conscious strategies of postmodernism: early in the novel, Alix Bowen silently regards Stephen Cox's scrambled literary effects as a “Do-It-Yourself Novel Pack.” The names of people Stephen meets on his flight from London to Vietnam include the improbable Miss Porntip, the Southeast Asian beauty queen whose friends call her “O,” and the plane's pilot, Captain Parodi. Lest we miss the latter detail, Drabble has Stephen comment to himself, “Who better to fly one into the unknown? We live in the age of parody.” With an authorial wink from Drabble, Stephen recalls another Parodi he has met during his travels, “the manager of the Grand Hotel in Cabourg, the hotel of Balbec, which Proust had made his own.” Yet, to acknowledge once again the contradictions that characterize postmodernism, parody itself is “a perfect postmodern form … for it paradoxically both incorporates and challenges that which it parodies.”

Stephen Cox, the writer who aspired not to remember things past but to write a play about the genocidal Pol Pot, may be understood, among other meanings, as an emblem for Drabble's own difficulty in giving literary form to atrocity and chaos. Her ambitious weave of mimetic and contemporary narrative strategies demonstrates her equivocal assimilation of postmodernism's challenge: to render the complexity of our historical moment through a literary structure that signifies, while it does not presume to resolve, “the mismatch between narrative and subject.”