The Witch of Exmoor

by Margaret Drabble

In a “profoundly moving, intellectually acute” novel (Philadelphia Inquirer) that is “as meticulous as Jane Austen, as deadly as Evelyn Waugh” (Los Angeles Times), Margaret Drabble conjures up a retired writer besieged by her three grasping children in this dazzling, wickedly gothic tale.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, British Literature, Contemporary, Fantasy, Adult Fiction, Novels

264 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1996

About the author

Dame Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939 and was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She is the author of eighteen novels including A Summer Bird-Cage, The Millstone, The Peppered Moth, The Red Queen, The Sea Lady and most recently, the highly acclaimed The Pure Gold Baby. She has also written biographies, screenplays and was the editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature. She was appointed CBE in 1980, and made DBE in the 2008 Honours list. She was also awarded the 2011 Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature. She is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd.

Drabble famously has a long-running feud with her novelist sister, A.S. Byatt. The pair seldom see each other, and each does not read the books of the other.

Reviews

[Jaidee · Rating 5 out of 5]

5 "caustic, cynical, uproarious, ironic, sharp" stars !!!

2017 Honorable Mention with High Distinction Read

This is a book to relish !!

Freida Haxby is an intellectual, a trouble-maker, a recluse, a sibyl, a mess !! She has bought an old grand decaying hotel on the English moors and estranged herself from her adult children who worry about their inheritance as well as their mother's state of mind.

This book follows this mother and her brood as well as the spouses and the grandchildren with wit, irony, cynicism and charm. I was mildly outraged, laughed out loud, felt wicked and shook my head in mock judgement as I read this social satire that by the end transpires to something beautiful, metaphysical and profound.

Ms. Drabble is a wordsmith extraordinaire that with a deft and sharp tongue and pen is able to comment so much on British society, in terms of race, class and where we are placed within social structures. She understands that underneath social veneers lies not just our pettiness, meaness, selfishness but also our vulnerabilities, yearnings and desire for connection and symbiosis.

I have not read Ms. Drabble since my early twenties and I have left her for much too long.
Like her estranged sister Dame A.S. Byatt...Ms. Drabble is a writer of extraordinary talent and erudition.

This is a lovely companion read to my previous 5 star read The Past by Ms. Tessa Hadley.

My hats off to you Ms. Drabble and thank you for this lively and important family novel !!

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this and I can't help but compare it to my recent reading of The Radiant Way, published in 1987. It was a big sprawling, political, analysis of Britain (early 80s) focussing on three dynamic women, none of whom I liked, but I think that was deliberate.

This one - The Witch of Exmoor, published 1996 - 9 years further down the road of Drabble's extensive and notable career - this one is much more polished. I don't know if I can describe it as a novel - it seems Drabble is more a sociologist than a writer of fiction. Her eternal question, "are we evolving as a species?" "Are there improvements, individually; in societies as a whole?" A large part of this book is concerned with the idea of a Just Society, which several of her characters ponder and try to consider the possibility of and the consequences of such an organisation.

I might best describe this book as a sociological survey of a particular family through at least three generations, with the focus on the late nineties. I've found myself drawn more and more towards British writers, it's as if I am catching up with the country of my birth. I've not lived in the UK, for about 28 years now. It's interesting to me to note that I am the same age as Drabble when she wrote this book - 57. Her main character Frieda Haxby is focussed on unravelling her past, and writing her memoirs, in particular the painful memories of the rivalry between her and her sister Everhilda or Hilda as it is shortened to.

I've read a number of Drabble's novels; nearly all the earlier ones, and a re-read most recently of her famous The Millstone from 1965. It's one of her recurring themes - the two sisters, the elder, favoured sister, and the younger. I'd also point out that A.S. Byatt, Drabble's sister has died this week, 16th November. She was three years older than Margaret Drabble.

In this book - The Witch of Exmoor, the formative experience in Frieda Haxby's life seems to have been that sibling rivalry. Drabble is interested in those forces that form us into the individuals we turn into and our powers to either recognise who we are and subsequently our free will to either resist, or flow with what we have been allocated. There are many characters in this novel, David D'Anger, married to Grace/Gogo, is Frieda's youngest child. David is from Guyana. His people are originally from India, brought over to the "Caribbean" as indentured workers on the sugar-cane plantations. In his life he rises to Member of Parliament for Middleton, a medium-sized town in South Yorkshire - and thus Drabble explores several of her favourite themes. Each character embodies an aspect of what it means to be English and part of the country and society recognised as British, the U.K.

Finally I found it interesting to note that this book also connects to another recent read - Tessa Hadley's The Past, which is set in the same few square kilometres as Drabble's novel. Frieda's monstrous ruin sits above the Exmoor coastline, the nearest town is Porlock or even closer a small village called Oare. I loved Drabble's descriptions of Exmoor, the wild moors, and the even wilder seas and the long history of smuggling and skull-duggery. In a surprisingly similar way Hadley's book also is an ode to this part of the English countryside and I wondered if Hadley had read and admired Drabble's work.

I loved being taken to Exmoor, to The Valley of the Rocks, the switch-back roads, the coastal path - I visited by proxy. Here is a great description of Frieda, her folly and the English weather;

She had meddled with them all, with insatiable anthropological curiosity. But now her empire was in decline, it had shrunk to this barren strand, to this rotting folly, these dark wooded acres, this sunless kingdom by a sunless sea. [from Ozymandias?] Frieda Haxby, booted and skirted, picks her way towards the mussel beds. She carries a plastic bucket. She is watched by three crows. They are a faithful three. She knows them well. [Macbeth's witches?]

The weather has brightened. To the east the swagged clouds are heavy and swollen, but above her opens a bright-edged ragged baroque space of the purest, clearest virgin blue, from which might descend an angel, a grace, a dove. Arrows of golden light pierce from a hidden source, the curtains tinge with pink. Frieda's castle faces north, and the sun leaves her coast early; its sinking rays stream backwards, towards the brow of the moor.

I liked that passage especially because I recognised, with a thrill, that upward lift of the eyes to see a bright patch of sky in an otherwise clouded horizon. And I include this piece because although her political and analytical style dominates, she can also do that - capture a moment of intense reality.

There are lots of good things about this book and especially about Frieda. I could feel the flow and interest of the writing smooth into that effortless zone, as we move into Frieda's thoughts and then the irking drop as we are withdrawn - the interest rising again, as we are able to hear her memoirs, when her grand-daughter Emily, accesses them on Frieda's word-processor.

Drabble is an intelligent, entertaining writer. And she's been working her way through the British psyche for 50 years! Her first novel - A Summer Bird-Cage was published 1963. I'll be working my way through her books, because I'm intrigued by all those recurring themes.

[Glenn Russell]

Here it it, booklovers. One of the most scathing reviews ever written. Sure, there's Christopher Buckley skewering a third-rate Tom Clancy novel as well as Pat Robertson's piece of crap - The End of the Age. And there's Carl Hiaasen roasting The Campaign by Marilyn Quayle and Nancy Tucker Northcott along with Ray Blount, Jr poking holes in the superficial silliness of a novel entitled Embrace the Serpent by the same two female non-novelists.

But Margaret Drabble is a true literary novelist, judged by many as one of England's finest. And, after all, Magaret Drabble published a dozen works of literature prior to the novel under review. Anyway, here it is - James Wood's 1996 New York Times review of The Witch of Exmoor. I wonder what Ms Drabble was thinking if and when she read James' brutal assessment.
-------------------------------
THE WITCH OF EXMOOR by Margaret Drabble --- Review by James Wood

Caricature in fiction is not always a failure; it may be a writer's way of sticking to the point. Dickens's caricatures are expanded essences. But even caricatures need vulgar plausibility. Margaret Drabble's new novel, ''The Witch of Exmoor,'' has a Dickensian interest in the state of the British nation. It is full of Drabble's hot, aggrieved, leftish politics. But her characters are dead caricatures. They are neither bluntly alive nor are they vivid blots concentrating a single idea. They are almost nonexistent. Drabble deals with her subjects as if they were nuisances, or mere variables in the experiment of her novel.

Drabble's idea of social fiction -- which has been hardening since the early 1980's -- seems to demand that characterization must be angry typology. Her new novel is thus a magazine of cliches. First we are introduced to a representative middle-class English family, the Palmers, and their various spouses and offspring. Drabble coats them with disdain. ''So there you have them,'' she apostrophizes. ''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 between anything more serious than decaffeinated coffee or herbal tea, would they dare to choose?''

Within this extended family, four types emerge. There is the greedy and conservative lawyer, Daniel Palmer. Again, Drabble has her own opinions. ''It is now considered correct to covet,'' she breaks in. ''And Daniel is covetous. . . . He is covetous, and he is mean. And he practices a profession, let us remember, in which base motives are more frequently encountered than fine motives.'' Nathan Herz, who is married to one of Daniel's two sisters, is a Jewish advertising executive. Much is made of his Jewishness, since Jews are types too. (Drabble tells us about ''the trading instincts of his ancestors,'' and so on.) Being in advertising, Nathan is cynical and slippery. Drabble dismisses him from her moral classroom by awarding his firm the job of updating ''the corporate image of the National Health Service.'' She comments: '' 'Update' is the word that is used: 'alter' is what is meant. It has become clearer, as we approach the end of the 20th century, that we cannot afford a National Health Service for everybody, all the time.''

Even when Drabble seems to confound caricature, her subversions are obedient to cliche. Her joker in this English pack is David D'Anger, a Guyanese aristocrat married to Daniel Palmer's other sister. David is the radical outsider, a sociologist and politician. ''He is an academic. He is a politician. He is a journalist. He appears on television. . . . He is the future,'' Drabble writes. D'Anger is an entirely predictable typological eccentric. (That Drabble intends him to be a predictable rebel isn't enough; her intention is itself predictable.) This tuneless quartet is completed by a mad old woman, Frieda Haxby Palmer, Daniel's mother, who is the witch of the novel's title. With only the scantest evidentiary backing, Drabble describes Frieda's descent into insanity (''She had come to hate the human race''). A Gothic plot scrambles, sending characters flying. Frieda secretes herself in a castle near the sea, where she eventually dies. Her will leaves her considerable wealth to David D'Anger's son, Benjamin. Everything goes wrong. The Palmer family quarrel. Several of them die in strange circumstances; the young heir becomes ill. Frieda's will has cursed the Palmers.

But Drabble's wild story has no purchase, because her book has no actual people in it. Coleridge said that Shakespeare's characters were always ''a class individualized.'' Drabble's are a class classified. At no time in the book does it occur to the reader that the Palmers are anything but serfs to Drabble's blowing whims. Of course, it hardly helps that Drabble treats them like criminals on authorial probation. For many years she has been fond of intruding, as author, into her scenes. Here she cuts in on her characters, checks them in and out and tethers them to her hostility. She delights in telling us about the Palmers' hidden awfulness, their racism and greed: ''This is not how the Palmers and the Herzes spoke -- not at all, not at all -- but I am sorry to say that it is what they thought.'' She doesn't seem sorry at all. When she is not doing this, she issues dead summations, which sliver her characters into two narrow dimensions: Nathan, for instance, is ''short and squat and fat and hairy and balding and very ugly.''

There is something puritanical in Drabble's unwillingness to grant her subjects any freedom, as if they must all be put into the stocks of fictional predestination and pelted with adjectives. Perhaps this is a political puritanism. For the freest character in ''The Witch of Exmoor'' is Drabble's incoherent, austere politics; this character, at least, she allows a little unpredictable life. Somewhat anachronistically, Drabble uses her novel to attack Margaret Thatcher's legacy -- a country Americanized by superstores, by ''ring roads and beefburgers,'' fast food and mass travel. The novel feels uncontrolled in its rage. No aspect of contemporary Britain escapes the swivel eye of Drabble's promiscuous revulsion. Abattoirs, Britain's so-called ''Heritage Industry,'' the judiciary, even literary critics, are all gobbled up, like insects in the path of a famished bat.

For a moment, this wildness threatens to save the novel; one rather cherishes its broken singularity, as one might a defective toy. But not for long. After all, this is hardly the first time that we have come across a system ''which has decreed that some should be nonexecutive directors of companies on vast salaries, while others should teach small infants or drive long-distance lorries or wipe the tables in the service stations of the land. It is all a mystery.'' Or worse: ''The rich are different from us. And in the last decade, they have become more and more different. The rich have got richer and richer.''

Banality is forgivable. But Drabble manages the paradox of complacent anger, which is not. Both of Drabble's obvious influences, Dickens and Woolf, wrote sharp political satire, the price of which was a certain amount of caricature. Woolf's novel ''Mrs. Dalloway'' attempts a kind of fictional dissolution of Parliament; she pulls apart the English Establishment, and offers quick, slapping portraits of its most oppressive members (a sinister psychiatrist, a ridiculous painter, pompous Members of Parliament). Drabble lacks the energy of these two writers. More important, she has none of their coherent restlessness. Drabble's novel certainly has a restless surface, but like someone fidgeting in a chair, it is restless in the same place. Woolf did burlesque the Establishment, but Woolf is self-doubting, as Clarissa Dalloway is, caught between reverence and disdain for her country.

Drabble, on the other hand, flails around but never in the direction of self- doubt. Woolf hoped that patriarchal England would change. Drabble does not believe that her characters will ever change. As she writes of them: ''They are all of them already, irrevocably, halfway up to their necks in the mud of the past of their own lives. Not even a mechanical digger could get them out alive now. There are no choices.'' The novel makes clear that Drabble does not only mean her characters' personal pasts; she means their collective past. England has done them in. There are no choices in Drabble's world, and thus no real politics.

In the end, this book gives off an unwitting pathos, because it seems to represent a genuine confusion about how to write fiction at the end of the century. Drabble's suffocating intrusions, her tossed plot, her disregard for character or plausibility or coherence, suggest the agitation of a sensibility that has missed an important appointment and is madly waiting for something to happen. In her frustration, Drabble is hardly alone. No novelist of penetration is really content, any longer, with the punctuation of traditional realism. Drabble's sister, A. S. Byatt, writes in a style not dissimilar to Drabble's, which she calls ''self-conscious realism.'' (It is both too self-conscious and not real enough.) More acutely, English fiction since the war has veered uncomfortably between coarse social satire and narrow estheticism; between bastard versions of Dickens and Woolf, respectively. One can see that Drabble might find her inheritance a burden and be tempted into a homemade anarchy. But she seems to feel that having come to the end of the line she can merely fret at the terminus.


British author Margaret Drabble, born 1939

[Elizabeth (Alaska) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This has such an interesting opening paragraph.

Begin on a midsummer evening. Let them have everything that is pleasant. The windows are open on to the terrace and the lawn, and drooping branches of wistaria deepen from a washed mauve pink to purple. The roses are in bloom.

Drabble lets us speculate about the people, offering us options about what they do for a living. Soon enough we are told which of the options is the correct one. In any book, if we aren't told this kind of thing right off, yes, we speculate. It was sort of fun to think the author might speculate before actually making a decision - not that I thought she hadn't made that decision long before she actually settled into the writing.

This is the story of a family. Freida Haxby Palmer has sold the family home and purchased a rambling monstrosity on the cliffs in Exmoor. Her three children and their spouses have gathered on the midsummer evening to discuss whether or not their mother is even sane. They seem not to like their mother much. But heck, the son and two daughters turned out to be well-educated, mostly well-adjusted, affluent people. I couldn't see what they had to complain about. Also, Frieda taking herself off to get away from people sounded pretty darn good to me, so my sympathy was definitely with her.

I very much like Drabble's writing style. There were spots here and there I didn't much like what she had to say. At one point, she seems to disparage America and Disneyland in particular. Really? I grew up 3 miles from the original Disneyland, so I feel it is part of me. What's not to like? Anyway, that's not a big part of the novel, but let's just say that I was wary. This is strong on characterization, and as I turned the pages, I became more deeply invested in the novel as a whole.

Because of the rocky (for me) start, I thought this might just be a middling 3-stars. It improved with age. I'm happy to see I've picked up two other Drabble titles.

[Simon · Rating 4 out of 5]

An entertaining book about a willful and eccentric writer and her three adult children, in Britain in the 1990s. The treatment of the characters is clinically cold; they squirm about like specimens in a lab, and the narrator's constant collusion with the reader ("what do you think X does?," "I'm afraid this is really what they think," "we'll come back to her in a bit but first let's..." and so on) brings out this detachment from the characters even more. Almost inevitably (is this right?), such a treatment makes every single character unappealing, even the characters who don't make themselves unappealing by their selfish or self-aggrandizing actions. (As evidence of this, I initially wrote "even the one or two characters who don't" and then listed them. I found I had to keep adding to the list so that by the end, there seemed at least four or five characters who qualified, even though when I finished the book my superficial impression was that there were no characters in it who were not pretty awful.)

The book is both a family drama, a sort of "family in decline" story like Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family, but highly compressed in both the span covered and the telling of the story, and also a biting social commentary. A reviewer quoted in the blurb mentions Waugh, and having just read A Handful of Dust, I can say that the comparison seems quite apt - even down to the strangely whimsical and fantastic endings to both books. (The ending of Drabble's book seems even more incongruous to me than that of Waugh's.)

[Re philosophy/philosophers in fiction: book opens with extensive discussion of Rawls. In fact chapter 1 is, punningly, entitled "The Vale of Ignorance," a mash-up of Rawls and Bunyan.]

[Laurie · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘The Witch of Exmoor’ begins with the adult children of Frieda Haxby Palmer having a weekend together for the purpose of deciding what to do about their mother. She has, they feel, lost her mind or gone senile. The problem is, there is not one sign that she is incompetent, except by the standards of her upper middle class, consumerist children. What they call signs of a failing mind are selling the house they grew up in, suing the government over tax issues, making a public investigation and scene over a manufacturer of over processed foods, and moving to a rambling, falling apart white elephant on the coast far from ‘civilization’. And embarrassing them in the process of all that. That’s the worst; the embarrassment and the worries over what she might be doing with their future inheritance. Frieda doesn’t care what they think; she’s never been an attentive mother; when they were young, she was busy writing and earning a living, now they mostly bore her so she doesn’t bother with them. The only family members she cares to interact with are her son-in-law, who believes in social activism, and his son, who is bright and curious and has so far avoided becoming average. Her children feel she is a monster because of her past and current inattentiveness. They really have no idea how she spends her days and who her friends are.

The characters are close to caricatures: the moral-less lawyer, the good wife who hides concerns in a Martha Stewart existence, the bad child (drugs), the good child (does what her family wants), the poor man who has no chance at an equitable life because of the circumstances of his birth, etc. Frieda is the character who is best filled out; she is like a 1960s hippie and feminist who has grown into old age with her values intact; we find more and more about her as the book goes on, like peeling an onion.

The book is really less a family novel (although it is that) than it is a social commentary that is as apt today as it was in 1996. Britain is still trying to figure out how to fix the NHS, human rights are still being trampled everywhere. Corporations are still soulless entities who will do anything for a profit.

I really enjoyed this book. I wanted to know more about Frieda; she’s a woman with a sense of adventure, one whom I would like to sit down and have a drink and a good conversation with. She’s a real person in a cardboard world.

[Janet Gardner · Rating 4 out of 5]

While plenty happens in this book—including death, madness, drug abuse, and the keeping and unraveling of several secrets—it’s really not a plot-driven novel at all. Rather, it’s a novel of ideas. The characters talk a lot about big ideas, particularly how to define and/or move towards The Just Society, but they actually spend their time worrying about far more mundane things: their health, their jobs, and so forth. (This, of course, is part of the point: what we claim to believe and care about is not always reflected in what we think and do from day to day.) Drabble, through her large and interesting cast of characters, also looks at race and ethnicity, the meaning of “success,” country vs. city life, and the role of money in modern Britain. The main idea explored, though, is the long, often disturbing reach of family history. I thoroughly enjoyed this one; it redeemed Drabble for me after I started but couldn’t finish one of her other novels earlier this year.

[tamar · Rating 3 out of 5]

i liked the ending a lot. this book is very intense. british.

[Kimberly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Found the original tale for the scene with Emily and the hind (Chapter titled 'Hindspring'). It's the Grimm's Little Brother and Little Sister. Need to read that although it appears the main significance is, as guessed, that Emily will be Benjamin's protector.

p. 260 Emily the heroine is perplexed. She knows the hind had brought her a message, but what is it?…Perhaps she should advise Benjamin to turn Ashcombe into a bird sanctuary, a deer sanctuary. As human habitation, it is doomed. Those who stay there must stick or leap.

p. 281 (Last line of the book) 'Jump for it ("it" here is the third point of Hindspring!'*) cries Emily Palmer, as the tide comes in. And Benjamin D'Anger jumps.

* legend told on p. 259: the old tale of the noble huntsman who had in ancient times pursued a hind across the brow of the moor…towards the sea. At the perilous spot now known as Hindspring Point the hind had paused, glanced backwards at her lone pursuer (the noble knight)…and then with three mighty leaps had bounded down the cliff into the sea. There, legend has it, she swam away to the west, across the channel, and out of sight. The penitent knight had marked her tracks, and at each set of the hoofmarks of the hunted beast had planted a stone… commemorate her valour.

[Ana]

I didn't enjoy this book much. I actually skipped all the way to the end just to make sure I didn't want to read it. Not one I would recommend.

[Charlotte · Rating 2 out of 5]

The writing style of this book was quite interesting, but the story itself wasn't very engaging somehow. A rather unsatisfying read.

[Ruthie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Decrepit. The storyline of this book meandered along the edge of boring all the way from start to finish, without even offering a likeable character. Seriously. Not one. And to top it all off, we get a "heavenly" glimpse of the characters who were killed off - on some paradise of an island. It was interesting to hear their view of how they died, but still...

I gave it the second star because I do like her writing style. I like the remarks to the reader, and I enjoyed her vocabulary. I actually kept a dictionary with me when I read the book, and kept a list of all the words I looked up. There were 26 of them. (Not that I'll be using them in daily conversation...)

[Janet · Rating 1 out of 5]

One star - I really hated this book. I should have stopped reading this the many times I thought about but I kept going until the end - too bad, it was a waste of time. I not only didn't care about any of the characters, I really didn't like any of them. Boring plot, boring conversations, no one was happy & no one deserved to be.

[Velvetink · Rating 3 out of 5]

finished.......not quite what I thought it would be, review soon.

5.10.2010. Moving into the 2nd chapter. This is more like it.!!!!

Only into it to the first chapter...not grabbing me so far, but I am stressed = swapping to something to carry me away to the land of Nod. Get back to this one later.

(one of 24 books found today at 2nd hand shop...24 for $10!)

[L · Rating 4 out of 5]

The mess that is the Kindle version of this book drove me nuts! Page after page with the code #x2013, spaces in the middle of words, and more. It was a mess. None the less, and for reasons I really can't quite fathom, I almost couldn't put down this book.

[Simone · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had to stop mid book. I couldn't take the torture any longer. I kept giving it one more chapter to get good, but then I had to draw the line , shut the book and move onto something else.

[Shauna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, shoot, I'll have to make this brief since it's long overdue. Technically excellent, entertaining at times, for the most part I was pretty bored. Can't put my finger on why.

[Discoverylover]

I really tried to get into this book, but I've read 75 pages, and I'm really struggling with it, so I'm giving up.

[Jackie Conciatore Senter · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was too cynical for me. Didn't love any of the characters. The narrator/narrative voice was so detached...

[Jo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting, demanding but ultimately I felt the story lacked pace.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Drabble is a fantastic, writer. Clean prose that carries you forward effortlessly. She was dabbling in this volume with a bit of PoMo stuff, discussing what she should make of the character, what future she would give him. But it still is a very good novel, by an excellent writer.

[Sheri · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are a few interesting commentaries here about social class, family relationships, and especially the squabbling that goes on over inheritance. BUT in general I thought it was boring, lacking in suspense, and in need of a good editor.

First, there are several points in which Drabble contradicts herself. She describes Nathan as very ugly (pg 3) and then later as an attractive man (pg 17). Certainly we come to discover that he is a bit of a playboy, but how is it that he is simultaneously unattractive yet attractive? Personally, I did not find him compelling (either in physical description or as a character..he was a bit of a whiner). Another point at which Drabble needed editorial help was round about pg 90; she says that they write to Frieda, but then quickly back tracks to wondering if Frieda gets mail and when David and Gogo visit, they have a packet of things to give PRESUMABLY because they have no mailing address for Frieda. A third instance of this is when Frieda's car is referred to on pg 158 as a Saab after having been called a Volvo. Maybe Drabble was trying to make a point about the interchangeability of these high end machines, but I found it to just be sloppy, inconsistent, and distracting stuff for an attentive reader.

The veil of ignorance word game and the whole class consciousness throughout felt just too overdone. Yeah, these are upper middle class Brits who undeservedly have a higher social position than many other people (Will Paine for example), yeah they are educated and intelligent and aware of their undeserved position. But do they really talk about it this much? Do they think about it? Maybe David would (he is a sociologist), maybe Frieda would (she is a radical author), but Gogo and Rosemary, Patsy, Daniel, and Nathan would not ever think about or question their entitled position. Nathan, Freida and Belle end up in "heaven" (beyond the veil of ignorance, but still
contemplating it), which was not only disgusting to my agnostic mind but simplistic and unnecessary. Are we to understand that when Benjie jumps he will join them in the watery-bliss?

As other reviewers have mentioned, I found the narrator annoying. I disliked the 2nd person conversational tone "you might have guessed..." or "now we shall walk through the garden and into the night." Either be a narrator or be omniscient, but please do not condescendingly discuss my opinions with me AS A READER.

On the other hand, there were a few fine points of social commentary: Freida's rejection of modernity certainly is compelling; Drabble's description of the way that Benjie can feel his parent's begin to change their minds as they enter the cave tourist destination (pg 93) rings true both as a parent and (in memory) as a kid; Drabble's note that "greed and selfishness have become respectable. Like family jealousy, they are not new, but they have gained a new sanction. It is now considered correct to covet." is lovely, concise and accurate (in my opinion); Freida's questions on the continuity of one's own character through life is interesting.

Overall there are some fine points, but I think it could have been much better done and would have been much more readable with some editing.

[Stephen Hayes · Rating 4 out of 5]

We rejoined the City of Tshwane library, and I saw a bock by Margaret Drabble, and as
she was one of the editors of The Oxford Concise Companion to English Literature, which I bought 15 years ago and refer to frequently, I thought I had better read something written by her as well.

By the end of the first chapter, I wasn't sure I wanted to continue reading it, because it was all about ordinary people doing ordinary things. Ordinary middle-class people, that is. Actually fairly rich upper middle-class English people, that is, though one character had roots in Guyana.

It's about three siblings, their spouses and children, who have gathered to discuss their concerns about their mother, who has sold the house they grew up in and gone to live alone in a large and lonely house on Exmoor, the kind estate agents describe as "has potential" because it's in poor repair. Her children think she is crazy, but can't be bothered to go and see how she is getting on, because it's too far and too much trouble.

I thought that if I was going to be looking into the lives of ordinary people, I'd prefer to be doing family history research, because at least the people I'd be investigating were real people, rather than the product of some author's imagination. When I read fiction, I don't mind if the characters are ordinary, as long as extraordinary things are happening to them, but the things that were happening to this family seemed like very ordinary things. A sort of suburban Waiting for Godot. Banal thoughts, banal conversations, rather dull people. The only exciting thing is a children's game.

I don't much like reading about extraordinary people (Superman, Spiderman, He Man and the like). But I do like reading about ordinary people having extraordinary adventures. But the characters in the book didn't seem to be having extraordinary experiences -- at least for the first 150 pages.

Then mysterious things begin happening that rattle the comfortable birdcages, and their lives will never be the same again. To say too much about what happens would be a spoiler for those who haven't read it, and there are no Jack and the Beanstalk fantasy adventures. Everything that happens could happen in the everyday world, but they have a quality of being extraordinary nonetheless, and are as unpredictable to the reader as they are to the characters, except right at the end.

So I found the book more interested and enthralling as it went on, and well worth reading.

[Okenwillow · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amateurs d’action et d’intrigues complexes passez votre chemin. Amoureux de la perfide Albion, ce roman est pour vous. Pour peu que vous soyez amateur d’ambiance so british, de personnages antipathiques, et de sociologie britannique, ce roman vous comblera du début à la fin. Car l’auteur nous dévoile ici un pan de la société britannique de fin de siècle (du XXe, hein !) au travers d’une famille de parvenus qui ont bien profité de la célébrité et de la richesse de leur mère, un auteur reconnu d’ouvrages sociologiques et historiques. Tout le monde en prend pour son grade, les institutions, les politiques, ainsi que les personnages eux-mêmes, les trois enfants Palmer, de véritables affreux, d’antipathiques enfants gâtés pourvus de conjoints plus ou moins bien placés dans la vie. Mais ce n’est pas leur faute, car leur mère, Frieda Haxby Palmer, vieille dame excentrique à la retraite, est elle-même une affreuse bonne femme. Cette dernière décide de s’exiler sans raison apparente et à la surprise de tous dans une vieille bâtisse en décrépitude avancée, au bord d’une falaise, loin de tout. Mais Frieda, qui n’a de compte à rendre à personne, et encore moins à ses rejetons qui l’indiffèrent, envisage d’écrire ses mémoires, de cracher sur le papier son histoire et celle de sa sœur décédée. Le roman est foisonnant, alors que finalement il ne s’y passe pas grand-chose, du moins en apparence. Car ici rien n’est important, mais tout compte. Le secret de famille passe au second plan. Les petits et grands soucis des enfants Palmer et de leurs pièces rapportées sont un détail du tableau de peint Margaret Drabble, de même que la retraite inexpliquée et de la vieille Frieda, de son désir d’écrire ses mémoires. L’indigne mère passe pour sénile aux yeux de ses proches, pauvres individus bas du front à qui il faut une explication pour tout. Frieda, son désir d’isolement, ses enfants nantis et leurs aspirations, son passé marqué par sa propre mère et sa sœur, tout autant de détails et d’aspects qui finalement n’ont de sens que dans un ensemble, dans un tableau de famille avec tous ses aléas et ses sentiments refoulés ou absents. Un portrait de famille comme une autre dans le fond, où les personnages sont au bout du compte plus nuancés qu’il n’y paraît.

[Elysia Fionn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes it's difficult to review a book, because there are so many levels on which to assess it. For example, I really enjoyed reading this book - but more because of the author's writing style than the actual plot. See? It almost doesn't make sense.

The ending. The ending was disappointing. But I enjoyed Drabble's way of getting there. I liked her turn of phrase. Especially the way she weaves little hidden homages to Hamlet everywhere. And I'm not talking about "To be or not to be" sown into a conversation - nothing that obvious. There are many little phrases, references, and words that someone who has connected deeply with Hamlet will see sparkling in the text like little bits of mica on a sandy beach. Anyone who loves Hamlet as I do, and sprinkles its magic into their book, wins my heart at least a little.

"I could never write a book!" - So many people say that. The thing is, writing a book is not the hard part. It's ENDING the book (in a logical yet satisfying way) that poses the real challenge. I have written a book, though it's not (yet) published... and I can tell you - the ending is what's both key and killer. This story had so many great little nooks and crannies, and I just think the ending was one of those "easy outs" that so many authors take when they've been bashing their keyboards for over a year and they just want out.

That being said, I cannot wait to find another Margaret Drabble book and dive in. I mean - DRABBLE! How can you have a name like that and not write good stories? Apparently this book is just her latest in a whole string of works, which always makes me happy when I find someone I like. More!

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two-thirds of The Witch of Exmoor is about successful author Frieda Palmer and her relationship with her three children and their spouses.
Frieda, who decides to move to a ruin of a house in Exmoor to examine her life and write her memoirs, is considered "cracking up" and "eccentric" by her family. There are discussions over who should be looking out for mother. Frieda is merely independently living her life and not caring much what other people think of it.
While her children think her "crackers," Frieda is much more rational than they. Her daughter, Rosemary Herz, and her son, Daniel, both have lives that are falling apart in one form or another. Some of this disintegration has to do with work and some with problems with their children, but they are yet to learn that.
Her daughter, Grace D'Anger is married to David, a very successful politician, and is the mother of Benjamin, Frieda's hands-down favorite grandchild. None of them have to worry about money so they selfishly worry about themselves with little thought for their children.
Then Frieda vanishes and her children are thrown into a tizzy. They fear she is dead, but they are guiltily relieved she will no longer be a potential embarrassment to them. Then the games begin, a bit prematurely, over Frieda's will.
If there is one thing I could have wished for this novel, it would have been that it had been entirely about Frieda and merely mentioned her insipid children. A prequel would be welcome as Frieda is a fascinating character.

[Susan]

Two-thirds of The Witch of Exmoor is about successful author Frieda Palmer and her relationship with her three children and their spouses.
Frieda, who decides to move to a ruin of a house in Exmoor to examine her life and write her memoirs, is considered "cracking up" and "eccentric" by her family. There are discussions over who should be looking out for mother. Frieda is merely independently living her life and not caring much what other people think of it.
While her children think her "crackers," Frieda is much more rational than they. Her daughter, Rosemary Herz, and her son, Daniel, both have lives that are falling apart in one form or another. Some of this disintegration has to do with work and some with problems with their children, but they are yet to learn that.
Her daughter, Grace D'Anger is married to David, a very successful politician, and is the mother of Benjamin, Frieda's hands-down favorite grandchild. None of them have to worry about money so they selfishly worry about themselves with little thought for their children.
Then Frieda vanishes and her children are thrown into a tizzy. They fear she is dead, but they are guiltily relieved she will no longer be a potential embarrassment to them. Then the games begin, a bit prematurely, over Frieda's will.
If there is one thing I could have wished for this novel, it would have been that it had been entirely about Frieda and merely mentioned her insipid children. A prequel would be welcome as Frieda is a fascinating character.

[Rebecca Burke · Rating 4 out of 5]

I want to give St. Margaret the best rating but don't want to steer newbies to this book of hers. Better to stick with her earliest novels or her trilogy. The Witch of Exmoor has many fine moments, chiefly its characterizations and sharp social satire of the upper middle class in English society. Alas, the disjointed narrative becomes irritating. She has some things she wants to tell you about the state of modern England, and I am totally open to hearing those things, being political myself. But she introduces far too many characters into this story, and the result is lots of lost opportunities. I would have loved to read a story about almost any of these characters except the young guy who ends up in Guyana, who is not terribly interesting (is naivete ever interesting? That's his chief characteristic.). And unfortunately, he's more important to the story than he should be.

If you love Drabble, you'll still enjoy this book. Her smart observations about contemporary life are astringent, chilling, and probably true. That's why I read her--the complexity of her thought. But I wish she had a better grip on her narratives. I think, looking back, that I've most enjoyed those books of hers that hone in on just a few characters.

Bottomline: she's brilliant. You will enjoy this if you like to be challenged and want a kind of state-of-the-world synopsis in your stories.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is my first Drabble since The Ice Age almost 30 years ago. While the plot was interesting enough to hold me, the tone drove me nuts. The entire book was written with an unseen, offstage narrator ("and now we look at the D'Anger family" or "here is Gogo") and all I could hear was a mash-up of the "Mutual of Omaha"'s narrator and one of those plummy BBC voices. Very distracting. Had that not been there, I'd have given this four stars.

It was also distracting - unintentionally so - to have a major character be from Guyana, and to have Rev. Jones and the People's Temple mentioned, during the 30 "anniversary" of the mass suicide. However, that shouldn't affect other readers, since this was the week of the retrospectives.

Overall, I liked the book. I've got The Gates of Ivory somewhere on Mt. Bookpile and I'm looking forward to reading it. That will be the true test of whether I continue to find, and enjoy, her works.

[Bill FromPA · Rating 4 out of 5]

An odd narrative voice, somewhere between the 19th century intrusive narrator and post-modernist "remember this is a story I'm making up". It works to organize what seems like loosely knitted material. Narrative tone in the last section reinforces the tell-tale compression of the pages. The characters sometimes seem like mere mouthpieces for the ideas - mainly about what constitutes a just society and individual mobility against predetermined class trajectories. Something of a "state of England" novel, especially as regards the fate of National Health Service.

Also noteworthy about the stylistic decisions is that, while Drabble follows the point of view all the main characters at various points in the story, including some of the characters that die in the course of the novel, she never does so at the time of death. The reader learns of the deaths in the past tense through third person omniscient narration.