Summary
Three well-off, middle-class, middle-aged English couples gather in the Hampshire countryside for a pleasant weekend of conversation, tennis, good food, and relaxation. There is only one problem, which dominates the weekend, even though no one really wants to talk about it: What should the Palmer family do about their formidable, eccentric mother—a noted author and thinker—who has abandoned her old life and without explanation has gone to live in a run-down former hotel by the sea in Exmoor, in the West Country? Why has she done this? Is she mad? What is she plotting? How is she going to allocate her money in her will? These are the questions to be considered by Frieda Haxby Palmer’s three offspring—Daniel, Grace, and Rosemary—who have never been very fond of their mother, nor she of them.
Such is the opening scene in Margaret Drabble’s fifteenth novel. As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the Palmers, in spite of their relative affluence, are not a family to be much envied. In fact, the ominous first two sentences of the novel, “Begin on a midsummer evening. Let them have everything that is pleasant,” suggest as much, at the same time drawing attention to the godlike powers of the narrator. Drabble enjoys doing this. Throughout the novel, as in many of her previous novels, she adopts the role of intrusive narrator, thus providing herself with a chance to explore, usually with a caustic and disparaging eye, the state of mid-1990’s, post-Thatcher Britain, in which the ruthlessness of the free market has triumphed and few people bother to talk anymore about social justice. This is a left-leaning view of the “state of the nation” that will be familiar to anyone who has read previous Drabble novels. Indeed, The Witch of Exmoor is in some ways an update, ten years later, of The Radiant Way (1987), which examined, unfavorably, the Thatcherite Britain of the 1980’s.
The Palmers are professionally employed, complacent about their comfortable position in the scheme of things, and unwilling to change. Daniel is a lawyer, Grace is a neurologist, and Rosemary is in arts administration. Of the spouses, two are outsiders: Nathan Herz, Rosemary’s husband, is Jewish, an advertising executive from a lower-middle-class background; and David D’Anger, Grace’s husband, is an aristocratic, expatriate Guyanese, a charming, ambitious academic, journalist, and parliamentary candidate. It is through David that one of the novel’s main themes is brought out. At the Hampshire weekend, David initiates a game he calls the Veil of Ignorance, in which participants have to decide whether, if they were to discover the principles on which a just society were to be founded, they would be willing to accept these if they did not already know what place they would occupy in the society. Would they press the button to make it happen? Their response is for the most part summed up by Daniel, who says, “I gave up any hope of any kind of social justice years and years ago. What I have, I hold. That’s my motto.” Drabble, as narrator, pours considerable scorn on this notion:
The middle classes of England. Is there any hope whatsoever, or any fear, that anything will change? Would any of them wish for change? Given a choice of anything more serious than decaffeinated coffee or herbal tea, would they dare to choose?
The narrator’s view of the current state of Britain is equally plain and censorious. After informing the reader that David is haunted by his vision of a fair society, she breaks in, “Is this possible, you ask, in the late twentieth century? . ....
(This entire section contains 1939 words.)
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. Surely we know better now? . . . Lecturers and professors still discuss the concept of the fair, the just and the good. But they have no connection with a world of ring-roads and beef-burgers, with a world of disease and survival.” This point is forced home later when it transpires that Nathan has taken on a project to “update” the image of the National Health Service. The assumption is that, political realities being what they are, there is no chance of providing adequate health care for everyone, so advertising wizards must use their tricks to ensure that people simply expect and are happy with less.
Such social commentary aside, the tale that unfolds around the mad “Witch of Exmoor” and her eerie castle is admirably gothic. Frieda is in fact not mad at all, although her family might be forgiven for thinking her so. After all, she has been behaving strangely: She has taken up smoking, discovered a sudden passion for Wagnerian opera, and abandoned her car in the middle of a London traffic jam and tried to give it away. On top of that, she has produced an unreadable, overresearched historical novel that departs completely from her previous works of social history and has effectively destroyed her reputation. When Patsy hears Frieda on the radio spouting mystical nonsense about her connections with Sweden’s seventeenth century Queen Christina—the subject of the book—the family is convinced that she is, to put it colloquially, off her rocker.
The Palmers are concerned about what their mad mother is likely to do with their inheritance (which they do not really need), although they are rather cagey about what they say to each other about it. Their anxiety increases when Frieda mysteriously disappears. Several weeks later, her body washes up on the coast (it appears that she fell from a cliff). In her will, they discover, she left everything to her favorite grandson, the precocious, too-good-to-be-true Benjamin, who reacts to his good fortune by becoming sick, then becomes progressively sicker as time goes by. His illness is of the mind, not the body, but his parents, David and Grace, seem strangely incapable of doing anything to improve the situation.
In the meantime, Rosemary has discovered that she is in ill health and may have to rely on the unreliable National Health Service, Nathan is worried about losing his job, and Daniel and Patsy’s son, Simon, who is an Oxford student, steadily sinks into drug abuse, although at the time no one seems to notice. Things are not going well for the complacent Palmers, and one almost expects the narrator to break in and gloat, for she clearly does not care much for these, her characters.
There is one character in the novel who is presented in a sympathetic light, and that is Will Paine, a half-black working- class young man from Wolverhampton in the English Midlands. The fact that he is not purebred English, seems, in this novel, to be an advantage. Will has been in prison for selling marijuana, but he is a decent, honest, and sensible lad. Patsy Palmer took pity on him and offered him a room in the attic, from which he emerges now and then, early in the novel, to help with odd jobs. Patsy’s compassion eventually wears out, and she evicts him. The exigencies of the plot eventually take Will to Frieda’s castle, where he manages to persuade an initially hostile Frieda to allow him to stay and do some maintenance work. Frieda soon gets fed up with him and bribes him to leave. Flush with money, Will flies to the Caribbean, the homeland he has never seen, where he has to lie low for a while because the English police suspect, wrongly, that he had a hand in Frieda’s disappearance.
The irony of the novel is that Will, a man born with no natural advantages, ill-educated and unsure of himself, is the character who eventually has the most success. He moves on from Trinidad to Sydney, Australia, where he is apprenticed to a landscape gardener and his life flourishes in every way.
What Drabble intends to convey by this is subject to different interpretations. Will’s success might be seen as negating the frequent insistence on the lack of social justice. After all, Will succeeds even though all the odds are against him. He does not spend his time complaining about his position; indeed, the opposite is true. Even when he is in difficulties, he regards himself as lucky. His eventual success might seem to imply—whether or not this is what Drabble intended—that what counts most is individual character, not a person’s given place in society or the nature of that society. On the other hand, it is perhaps to the point that Will finds himself only because he is willing to take the risk of traveling abroad, away from the stifling rigidity of English society.
The note of hope sounded by Will Paine—if that is what it is—also can be found in the closing episodes of the novel. The emphasis shifts to the younger generation—to Benjamin, and to eighteen-year-old Emily, daughter of Daniel and Patsy. Benjamin eventually is set on the road to recovery through the attentions of Lily McNab, a child psychiatrist. It turns out that, like many gifted children, Benjamin has suffered under the weight of parental expectations. To use Drabble’s metaphor about the elder Palmers, Benjamin is thick in the mud of the life that has been mapped out for him before he has had a chance to find out who he really is. Early in the novel, he is presented as the perfect child: studious and scholarly, imaginative and hardworking, and popular with his peers. When he plays with his friends, he tells them he has special powers, and they believe him. His parents encourage him to regard himself as special. Lily McNab, on the other hand, tries to show him that he is not as special or as predestined as he had thought. He does not always have to be the best, but can choose to be ordinary. Benjamin pretends to go along with this, but secretly he still believes he has a special destiny. Drabble implies that it will not be easy for him to seek out this destiny, but at least he is ready to make his own choices, a development conveyed by the delicious image of young Benjamin biting into a particularly sweet candy—the sort that his parents would never let him eat—and slowly savoring it.
As for Emily, she is dispatched to Frieda’s house to sort out the dead woman’s papers. She sets out, full of youthful energy and confidence, on a glorious winter day. Implications of renewal are strong, and the narrator’s description of her as “wise young virgin” does not seem to be ironic. While Emily is at Frieda’s house, she has a shock when a deer, chased by hounds, crashes into the house and takes refuge under a table. The mounted hunters gather, but Emily, rising to the occasion like an avenging angel, says she is giving the deer sanctuary and orders the hunters to leave the property. And they do: “The undifferentiated mass of black-jacketed, white- stocked, fawn-breeched, red-nosed, hair-netted, khaki-jacketed, black-booted folk begins to mumble, thin, retreat. Emily tosses her golden mane and scrambles back over her window-sill.” Thus are the English middle classes at play put to rout, and youth and unsullied innocence, at least for a moment, has its triumph.
Sources for Further Study
Artforum. Winter, 1997, p. 32.
Booklist. XCIII, May 15, 1997, p. 1539.
Library Journal. CXXII, June 15, 1997, p. 96.
The Nation. CCLXV, October 13, 1997, p. 33.
The New York Times Book Review. CII, October 19, 1997, p. 15.
The New Yorker. LXXIII, November 3, 1997, p. 107.
The Observer. October 20, 1996, p. 17.
Publishers Weekly. CCXLIV, June 16, 1997, p. 44.
The Times Literary Supplement. October 11, 1997, p. 26.
The Wall Street Journal. September 24, 1997, p. A20.
