“Real conflict for me at least always turns out to be wordless, which is why I find drama and the theatre so unreal.” (Margaret Drabble, The Garrick Year)

/ madamebibilophile

Back in June I was inspired by heavenali’s a year with Margaret Drabble to read the author’s first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage (1963). I was really impressed by what she’d achieved when she was just 24, and so I was keen to pick up her second novel The Garrick Year (1964), which was written only a year later. Once again I found the sure style really striking.

“All that strange season, that Garrick year, as I should always think of it, which proved to me to be such a turning point, though from what to what I would hardly like to say.”

Emma is an ex-model and mother to toddler Flora and baby Joe. She’s a bit adrift as to what she wants to do with her life, but is keen when offered a newsreader’s job. Unfortunately her selfish, self-serving husband David also gets offered a job, which involves moving from London to Hereford for a year so he can act in the local theatre productions by acclaimed director Wyndham Farrar.

At first David seems an outright pig, telling Emma she has no choice and he’s already signed the contract. It turns out this isn’t true and Emma never thought it was. Still, they both know it might as well be. This is the early 1960s and while staying behind for a year might be theoretically possible for a married woman with small children, it’s not hugely likely even with a nanny.

“I could hardly believe that marriage was going to deprive me of this [job] too. It had already deprived me of so many things which I had childishly overvalued: my independence, my income, my twenty-two inch waist, my sleep, most of my friends who had deserted on account of David insults, a whole string of finite things, and many more indefinite attributes like hope and expectation.”

Drabble captures that compelling mid-twentieth century time where women are starting to have a sense of more possibilities and life choices opening up, but these options still don’t seem wholly obtainable.

So David isn’t quite as dreadful as he first appears, but neither is he particularly likable. And he’s about to get worse, as he brings his roles home with him:

“this time I was condemned to a whole season of Flamineo who happened to be a self-centred existentialist pimp.”

As in her first novel, The White Devil by John Webster is heavily referenced. I’d be interested to know why this slightly bonkers, bloody Jacobean play seems so significant for Margaret Drabble at the start of her career. (And I say that as someone whose MA was on ritualistic bloodshed on the early modern stage – bonkers and bloody theatre is right up my street 😀 )

But The Garrick Year isn’t a pity-fest for Emma in contrast to David. She’s young and self-centred too, an intellectual thinker but not personally reflective. She can be quite bitchy, describing ingenue Sophy “as stupid and as shiny as an apple”, but I don’t think we’re supposed to take pronouncements like: “The provinces have never appealed to me, except as curiosities.” entirely seriously. Emma knows she can be a snob, and contrary.

“I feel that I’m insulting something when I am bored… My tastes are shallow; My life is shallow; and I like anonymity, change and fame. In Hereford I could have none of these things: I was condemned to familiarity, which beyond anything I find hard to maintain with ease.”

Her insight is limited, so when she starts an affair with Wyndham, she doesn’t really understand why she would do such a thing. It’s not particularly passionate, and remains unconsummated for the majority of its frankly tedious duration (tedious in terms of events, not portrayal!)

Drabble balances really well the spiky, sharp observations of Emma with a degree of sympathy for her. I don’t think as readers we’re supposed to necessarily like her, but not despise her either. Rather we’re encouraged to recognise how incredibly thwarted and frustrated she is, at a time when she has agency and choices but not enough of either.

“I personally, I myself, the part of me that was not a function and a smile and a mother, had been curled up and rotten with grief and patience and pain.”

I’ve read somewhere that Drabble goes off the boil in later novels, but these early ones are really hitting the spot for me now. I find women’s lives in this period endlessly interesting, and she captures that time so well. She’s not afraid to make her characters recognisably real even when they are not particularly appealing, and she incorporates her intellectual considerations seamlessly so they never obscure characters or plot. I’m looking forward to exploring her further.

To end, I may be a fellow Londoner but I’m baffled as to Emma’s problem with lovely Hereford:

22 thoughts on ““Real conflict for me at least always turns out to be wordless, which is why I find drama and the theatre so unreal.” (Margaret Drabble, The Garrick Year)”

    • I know, me too! There was definitely an aesthetic in the 1970s/80s Penguin art department for soft focus portraits of women. I have a few Françoise Sagans with very similar styles! Not reflective of the tone at all…

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  3. I have rather stalled in my reading Drabble (as inspired by heavenali – I’m hoping she is Ok as she has not blogged for a few months – do you know? and if you can’t say on the blog but know her to correspond more personally, please pass on my good wishes). I very much enjoyed A Summer Bird Cage, wanted to read The Garrick year but haven’t found a copy yet, couldn’t get into the right mood to get very far with my reread of The Millstone and still have Realms of Gold (also in one of those covers!) in my tbr pile!

    Thanks for reviewing this one; I will recommence my search for a reasonably priced copy on your recommendation.

    I’m not sure what to think about your MA; I’m rather in awe and a bit scafred at what might be lurking beneath…..I wonder what Freud would make of it….and I thought you struggled with too much gore and violence in books!!

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    • Ali is still on Twitter and BlueSky, do you use those at all? If not let me know and I’ll send her your best wishes 😊

      I hope you can find a copy of The Garrick Year. There’s a Penguin design with a great 1960s cover that I covet! I’m not sure which I’ll read next…

      I really do struggle with gore and violence in books. For some reason early modern theatre is fine though… you’ve got me pondering why that is! Maybe because it leans more towards the stylised/metaphorical, whereas contemporary novels it’s meant to be very realistic – which I don’t need at all? Although I missed Lucy Bailey’s Titus Andronicus a few years back, which apparently was very visceral and had audiences feeling quite faint!

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      • Thanks for the reassurance about Ali – I’m not on social media but please do pass on my best wishes; I’ve really enjoyed her blogging and we seem to have similar tastes in our reading preferences.

        I’ve just enjoyed looking at the very varied cover designs for The Garrick Year; I think I like the 1960s one if it is the one I think!

        If you reach any conclusions re your pondering about blood and gore in the theatre, please let me know, although, having given it some thought myself, I’, thinking that I would find it a lot easier to cope with than if it was in written form or even in a movie….one for a PhD for someone?!

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  5. Sounds like this really does nail the period well – when women were trying to assert more rights but the expectation was still there that they would sacrifice everything for their husband’s career/whatever. But interesting that she makes her characters unlikeable, always the sign of a talented writer I think!

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  7. I had the intention of re/reading more Drabbles this year but my other make-up-for-previously-abandoned-reading-year projects have taken more focus and, as they’d been planned, often the Drabbles have simply remained at the bottom of the stack and then others have been stacked atop as the weeks pass, but I do love these early volumes. I especially love her trilogy beginning with The Radiant Way, which I’m very curious to hear your thoughts on, given your Powell reading (mostly different, but I feel like maybe their intentions weren’t that different). (Maybe I’ll find myself ready for them all in a bunch in 2025, we’ll see.)

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  8. A lovely review of a most enjoyable book! There’s quite a lot of humour in this one, isn’t there?

    I love what you say about Emma here – it’s spot on.

    “Drabble balances really well the spiky, sharp observations of Emma with a degree of sympathy for her. I don’t think as readers we’re supposed to necessarily like her, but not despise her either. Rather we’re encouraged to recognise how incredibly thwarted and frustrated she is, at a time when she has agency and choices but not enough of either.”

    Like all of us, Emma has flaws and shortcomings, but we can still feel for her due to the situation she is trapped in.

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    • Thanks Jacqui! Yes, there is a lot of humour, particularly in Emma’s attitude to the theatre, which I didn’t really pick up on.

      I definitely felt Emma was recognisable and I really did feel for her. I think she saw her own flaws quite clearly too.

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