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Rezensionen (3)
Guardian Review
With their echoes of Simone de Beauvoir and Samuel Beckett, this quiet meditation on old age seethes with apocalyptic intent The closing pages of Margaret Drabble's previous novel, The Pure Gold Baby, contained a brief though significant aside concerning Maroussia Darling, a classical actor and grand dame of the north London enclave in which many of Drabble's novels have been set: "We are old now and I heard this week from Maroussia that she has to have what she discreetly calls major surgery, and the prognosis is not good. She has had to pull out from the National. This is very sad news. We are dying off, one by one." Maroussia was only a marginal figure, though the rumours about her health proved to be portentous. In the new novel, two old friends book tickets to see her buried to the waist in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days. It turns out to be a farewell performance in the bleakest sense. Once the curtain falls she sends a few final emails before taking a fatal overdose: "It will serve Beckett right. She has served him well and loyally and she deserves a grand finale at his expense. He has set it up for her." Francesca Stubbs is furious with herself for wasting what seems to be a pointless and uncomfortable evening in the theatre. But she is horribly aware that Beckett's awful tragedy of stasis and decrepitude could soon become her own. Fran is "already too old to die young and too old to avoid bunions and arthritis, moles and blebs, weakening wrists, incipient but not yet treatable cataracts and encroaching weariness". She staves off retirement by traversing the motorways of Britain as an inspector of care homes inhabited by clients only slightly more advanced in years than herself. Her oldest friend Josephine, meanwhile, is a retired academic who has opted to live in faux-collegiate sheltered accommodation. "Although in excellent health, [Josephine] has met Old Age half way and is determined to make friends with her. La Vieillesse, that is what she sometimes calls Old Age, after the title of a terrifying book on the subject by Simone de Beauvoir." De Beauvoir wrote her classic study of the ageing process in 1970, in terms that now appear to be prophetic: "The paradox of our time is that the aged enjoy better health than they used to and that they remain 'young' longer. This makes their idleness all the harder to bear. Those who live on must be given some reason for living: mere survival is worse than death." Drabble's novel can perhaps best be understood as a fictional meditation hovering between the twin poles of De Beauvoir's essay and Beckett's play; in terms of conventional narrative development, very little happens. Fran checks into budget hotels up and down the country in order to inspect failing institutions whose inhabitants are more often than not left "softly wandering in their wits". Josephine teaches poetry to an adult education group and works on her tapestry, while the rest of the novel concerns the manner in which their wider circle of friends and acquaintances deal, or fail to deal, with the indignities and infirmity of old age. The compensation for the reader is that these characters are brilliantly drawn. Fran's industry is offset by the sedentary lifestyle of her ex-husband Claude, a retired surgeon who sits among the plump cushions of his Kensington mansion ingesting self-prescribed narcotics and listening to Maria Callas. Yet even Claude's complacency pales in comparison to the titanic self-centredness of Sir Bennett Carpenter, a grand antiquarian caught in negative equity on a paradisal Canary island that seems slightly less paradisal once he suffers a fall. The twee environs of his retirement haven are summed up by the history of the islands he intends to write: "There had been betrayals and dispossessions, but they had been small in scale. The Canaries did not swim with spilt blood. Their dried mummies were very ancient and very dry." Yet beneath the apparently placid surface, Drabble's novel seethes with apocalyptic intent. The low-magnitude earthquake that shakes Sir Bennett off his feet is a portent of the volcanic activity beneath the north Atlantic that could yet have devastating consequences. The influx of Moroccan asylum seekers to the Canary Islands is highlighted as one of the least reported of European refugee routes. In either case, the narrative is loaded with dire predictions of "the dark flood" approaching. It would all be a bit much to take, were it not for the stoicism of Fran herself, a woman who chooses to live in a dodgy north London council block, secretly rather likes dining in Premier Inns and cannot refrain from watering pot plants in airport lounges and lavatories. It's hard to argue with her assessment of her job as "a bit of a downer" -- and the same might be said of the novel itself. But you can't help feeling uplifted by her righteous indignation about the claim that the majority of us can now expect to spend the last six years of our lives suffering prolonged ill health: "Fran found this statistic, true or false, infuriating. Longevity has fucked up our pensions, our work-life balance, our health services, our housing, our happiness. It's fucked up old age itself." - Alfred Hickling.
Booklist-Rezension
In her latest caustically jocose novel, the superbly omniscient, celebrated British novelist Drabble (The Pure Gold Baby, 2013) gives voice to a delectable cast of smart, worldly, wry characters facing the dark flood of time and life's inevitable end. Drolly self-sufficient, Francesca Stubbs is jousting with age, determined to keep working, which entails, ironically enough, driving around England to inspect senior housing facilities. Much to her surprise, she also finds herself preparing and delivering meals to her contentedly semi-invalid ex-husband while Fran's friends are inventing their own rules of engagement for time's pitiless assault. Teresa, the trigger for many girlhood memories, is valiantly coping with a fatal disease, while Josephine is teaching an adult-education poetry class. Fran's son is in the Canary Islands where his documentarian girlfriend died suddenly while filming North African immigrants. He is staying with a generous gay expat couple, the elder of whom, a famous historian, may soon be history himself. With intimations of the pending ravages of global warming, Drabble's incisive grappling with questions of purpose and chance in life and death is peppered with wisdom, pluck, and humor.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books-Rezension
NOVELISTS, POETS, PHILOSOPHERS and theologians agree: Mortality, that relentless law of universal carnage, is the sole worthy human preoccupation. Still, it is the poets and novelists who have grappled least dispassionately with the cruel and steady majesty of time's engulfments. Howling Lear, stripped naked of his world. Ivan Ilyich, desolate on his deathbed, dismissed by the indifferent living. And through it all, the besotted Welshman's wild refrain, raging, raging, against the dying of the light. Margaret Drabble's contemporary England will have none of this. Modernity - salvific, hygienic, prophylactic, caring, taking every precaution - means to erase the howling and the indifference. The answer to creeping death is proper housing, or what American euphemism terms "senior living." There are to be no apocalyptic scenes of disintegrating horror. Death-the-leveler will be adjusted, via common-sense conferences and social service visits, to calm and flatness of tone. It is within the flatlands of the present tense, then, that Drabble sets Francesca Stubbs on her routine drives to distant parts of England to check out sheltered housing for the elderly. In her 70s, long divorced and the mother of two adult children, Fran is herself past retirement age. Yet she is in generally good health, has her own car, is satisfied with eating boiled eggs in mediocre hotels and is pleased to be employed by a charitable trust dedicated to the succor of the moribund. Where once solace for the very old meant faith in an afterlife, now God's mercy is replaced by practical ingenuity: "raised flower beds, patent window catches, isolation valves for gas appliances, key lockers for visiting carers." Fran recalls the quandary of a woman with weakened wrists who, after a minor stroke, died abandoned in her bathroom because she was unable to open the door to call for help: "If she'd had a lever-type doorknob instead of an old-fashioned screw doorknob, she'd be alive today." Fran is an unwitting Virgil who leads us through the circles of the hell of aging; but it is a hell where pragmatic thoughtfulness reigns and functional architecture is sustenance. Fran's friend Josephine, for instance, a former teacher of literature, has chosen to live out her days in Cambridge in a newly built imitation-Gothic Potemkin village designed to suggest that the old are still in student digs. Here Josephine presides over classes in writing where middle-aged would-be poets contemplate the Alzheimer's diminishment of fading parents. Claude, Fran's exhusband, once a highly successful physician, reclines in lavish invalid comfort on his day bed, the television soundless and his cat cozily in his lap, always in the company of Maria Callas's powerful recorded voice and sometimes, more intimately, in the arms of Persephone, his young caregiver. Fran prepares and delivers complex dinners that she knows will please him; it is a conscientious, not a wifely, act. Claude has tacitly announced his exit from the zone of the life-engaged. And so has Teresa, Fran's childhood friend, now painfully dying from asbestos poisoning. Teresa possesses what Fran does not: her Roman Catholic belief - yet what is the spiritual meaning of having stuck a thumbtack into a wall, thereby releasing its lethal fibers? Reunited after a separation of decades, Fran and Teresa remember how, as precocious little girls, they had talked of the evils of the world and whether or not God existed. Teresa for many years has been devoted to the needs of children in peril, but now, dependent on morphine for relief, she no longer leaves the precincts of her couch. She too, despite the promise of faith, is terminally housed. What sort of house shall I die in? is Drabble's unyielding question. Its veneer is serviceable - lever rather than screw - but its intent is not. Its intent is scriptural, invoking Ecclesiastes; or Socratic, wooing the examined life; or both at once. Whatever the domicile, the query is the same: the transcendent nature of human purpose, and how it will reveal itself. Poppet, Fran's oddly austere daughter, is possessed by such a purpose. Impassioned by ecological guardianship, she resides on a flood plain in a solitary little cottage close to a canal, following on her computer the condition of ice caps, coal emissions, quake tremors, pollution in Mongolia. She lives in expectation of inundation. Christopher, her brother, is far more sociable and worldly, yet unanchored and adrift. His career as co-producer of a television arts program, once promising, is now stalled, partly on his own account, but mainly because of the sudden death of Sara, with whom he had been collaborating on a human rights mission. Not unlike Poppet, Sara is stirred to the marrow by the fearful displacements of inundation. She hopes to produce a documentary that will expose the travail of the human flood of migrants from Africa - oppressed, unhoused, destitute - who are washing up on the several coasts of the Canary Islands, halfway between the continents. And there, on Lanzarote, a sunny volcanic outcropping where elderly British retirees are not uncommon, Sara, in the glory of her confident youth and with her lover looking on, eats a joyful dinner of limpets. But mortality is no respecter even of the young. A fatal deluge of cancerous cells has already condemned her, and soon after, in the wake of an emergency flight to England, she will quickly succumb. Bereft, the documentary scheme now defunct, Christopher is taken up by Bennett and Ivor, a gay couple who have long been resident on the island. Indulgent, sybaritic, tourist-crowded Lanzarote is nothing like Fran's damp and dour England, with its mundane social conscience. Bennett has settled here for the mild weather and its benefit to his declining health. And more: for the sake of a house "almost unnaturally beautiful," ideal for a man "who struggled for breath climbing stairs, . . . complete with pool, sun terrace, a well-planted euphorbia garden of many colors, a fish pool, a tennis court" and an unstinting view of the sea. He is favored as a local celebrity - a cultural historian, author of a number of original studies, lately drawn to art history. Even now he has his work. The handsome and much younger Ivor has none, except to look after Bennett, and to worry over his own accelerating wrinkles. At 17, strikingly golden-haired, he was "a pinup boy, a collector's item," collected by Bennett and dependent on him ever since. They are both aging, but Bennett is frail, susceptible to dangerous missteps. One day, cautious as always, he slips or trips on the familiar grounds of his beautiful house, while far away on her flood plain Poppet notes a slight volcanic tremor in the Canaries. Ivor, practiced in melancholy wisdom, accepts that he must return to England when Bennett dies. And when we last catch sight of him, a helper in a West Country monastic care home is pushing Ivor's wheelchair. Drabble has Fran tot it all up, not omitting the worst: Evolving models of residential care ... infinitely clever and complex and inhumane delays and devices we create to avoid and deny death, to avoid fulfilling our destiny and arriving at our destination. . . . We arrive there . . . senseless, incontinent, demented, medicated into amnesia, aphasia, indignity. In the end, when the dark flood rises to cover these evolving models, however helpfully they have been updated (lever not screw, sun terrace and pool), their old people are anyhow all drowned. "The Dark Flood Rises" (the title is taken from a poem by D. H. Lawrence) is not a therapeutic, eschatological, sociological, political or even philosophical novel. Never mind that it can be mistaken for any or all of these. In one way, it is a hymn to an inherited England, to its highways, gardens, streets, hotels, neighborhoods, landscapes, parking lots, stoneworks, cottages, secluded and public spaces. Fran is "in love with England, with the length and breadth of England. . . . She wants to see it all before she dies." But this humane and masterly novel by one of Britain's most dazzling writers is something else as well, deeper than mere philosophy: a praisesong for the tragical human predicament exactly as it has been ordained on Earth, our terminal house. What sort of house shall I die in? is the unyielding question in Drabble's latest novel. CYNTHIA OZICK'S most recent book is "Critics, Monsters, Fanatics, and Other Literary Essays."
