[In the following review, Radin offers unfavorable assessment of The Gates of Ivory.]

This is writing by numbers. It is Caring, Compassionate, Concerned, Committed—all the C words. It is not quite a novel, but then Drabble hedges her bets on that count in her first sentence. Novels can cover a lot of possibilities, however. What makes The Gates of Ivory not quite a novel is its refusal to look up from the filing cards, to transform its thoughts into something that stands on its feet.

Thoughts there certainly are, in profusion. The last of the series that began with The Radiant Way, it moves from the beleaguered, estranging Britain of its trio of fifty something Cambridge-educated heroines to south-east Asia, penetrating into the horrors of Cambodia, where it weeps loudly, inconsolably, and finally painlessly.

“This is a novel—if novel it be …” it begins. On every level it is a protestation of helplessness and hopelessness. Its title and epigraph derive from the Odyssey's distinction between false dreams （which issue through gates of ivory） and true ones （through gates of horn）. So this, then, is a book about treacherous dreams that may itself deceive.

Apostrophes to the reader mingle with displays of authorial incompetence: “the limbo of my old Amstrad word processor …” Documents, the rough-hewn draft of a play, a kind of diary, even a bibliography that is appended to the book and to which the text refers us, are Drabble's other counterstrikes at the anti-novel, to which the term deconstructionist or postmodernist （both deployed within the book） are inappropriate.

Time present jostles with time past. The action, such as it is, shoots all over the place. One need not look only to contemporary writing for these devices, of course: most can be found in the earliest examples of fiction that we have, that is, in Homer. Drabble's professed urge to let multitudes clash with multitudes, her references to contemporary sorcerers and demons lead one to suspect that Homer, more than anyone else, is her model. Homer, however, is moving and fun to read.

At any rate, here is an Odyssey. Stephen Cox, a vaguely Marxist Booker winner of historical novels, sallies forth to Cambodia for no other reason, apparently, than “There is nothing to keep me here.” He leaves behind him Penelope—or several Penelopes. The primary one is Dr Liz Headleand, head-girl of the Cambridge trio and soul-curer. （Drabble can't decide within the series whether she is a psychiatrist or a psychotherapist.） Liz receives a peculiar packet containing that play draft, diary jottings, a poem by Rimbaud, and the bones of two human fingers. Finally, much later than we had thought, Liz sets off on her own Odyssey to find Stephen.

She does not, but somehow she rediscovers herself in a Bangkok hospital where she nearly dies of tampon-induced toxic shock: one of the book's many references to the more pathological aspects of gynaecology. Back home there is a memorial service for Stephen, at which Liz's stepson's primigravida lover goes into labour. After all her work to do otherwise, Drabble can't resist pulling that atavistic rabbit out of the hat. Life goes on.

If only it didn't go on so resoundingly Englishly. Although the （Homeric） multitude of incidental potted stories as well as that bibliography （28 titles） suggest that Drabble has done her homework, we get no real sense of Cambodia. Lists of atrocities rain down like napalm, presumably to poison us into pain. Back home in London and south Yorkshire with Alix, a former prison teacher who now visits a mass murderer for recreation, one can't distinguish between a Posy Simmonds cartoon and an author who wants us to take her characters' dulled plaints and her own obesity of adjective-noun-catalogue-syllable, this quite weirdly archaic diction in what she calls the Good Time （as opposed to the Bad Time of Cambodia）, for real. Are Alix's musings on her parents' deaths （“Potty and Dolly had behaved, at the end, impeccably. One could forgive them past embarrassments.”） meant to be comically smug or honourably stoical?

Is Drabble's characterisation of Stephen （“He does not much like the human race, with its chitter chatter munch munch aggressive acquisitive competitive pettiness. He is as guilty as anyone of chitter chatter petty mutter petty bitty bitch bunch bite and suck …”） meant to matter? One senses, grimly, that it is. With such a template for the so-called Good Time, how can one even recognise the Bad?