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The Radiant Way #3
The Gates of Ivory
Liz Headleand receives a package from an old friend containing writing, drawings, and what appear to be finger bones, and soon she is on an adventure, determined to discover what her friend is trying to tell her. Reprint.
480 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
61 people are currently reading
343 people want to read
About the author
Margaret Drabble
160 books508 followersDame 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 46 reviews
June 8, 2025
A successful writer and a Booker price winner Stephen Cox, sets off to find an inspiration for his new play in some remote corners of Asia. In Bangkok he meets miss Porntip - who becomes his “bad angel” and the photographer Konstantin Vassilious - who will be the good one. Meanwhile in England his friends, Liz Headleand, Alix and Hattie Osborne go about their lives suddenly interrupted by the arrival of a package containing Steven’s notes and other materials, sent from the region of Asia where he has gone missing.
This book has the same qualities, that have seduced me before in Margaret Drabble’s writing. The slow, thoughtful pacing, the occasional meditations on everything from art and politics to human nature. Apart from the attempted search for Stephen, this is just like its predecessor “Radiant way”, an evidence of its time - documenting events, politics, books, theater and even language of the nineties.
I enjoyed it, but I have to add that it is not a book that can be rushed. It is a ”slow-read” and requires both time and attention. So maybe it is not your companion to be read anywhere and any time, but as I reflect on the experience, I believe that every now and then it is good to return to the times when although the world was already rushing, at least the writing was not.
This book has the same qualities, that have seduced me before in Margaret Drabble’s writing. The slow, thoughtful pacing, the occasional meditations on everything from art and politics to human nature. Apart from the attempted search for Stephen, this is just like its predecessor “Radiant way”, an evidence of its time - documenting events, politics, books, theater and even language of the nineties.
I enjoyed it, but I have to add that it is not a book that can be rushed. It is a ”slow-read” and requires both time and attention. So maybe it is not your companion to be read anywhere and any time, but as I reflect on the experience, I believe that every now and then it is good to return to the times when although the world was already rushing, at least the writing was not.
November 20, 2011
Gates of Ivory is one of Drabble's best novels, written when she was producing a series around the lives of three British women. The focus of this book is the whole notion of Good Time, Bad Time and the way that the complex, sophisticated life in Britain can co-exist with the Heart of Darkness type destructiveness of Pol Pot's time in Cambodia. Novelist Stephen Cox, mesmerized by the vision of "starting fresh" that he associates with Pol Pot, tries to penetrate the rural depths of Cambodia, and disappears. His friends and lovers in Britain eventually try to find him, and tragedy plays out -- intermixed with multifaceted relationships that are changing at the same time in Britain. You have to like Margaret Drabble, and the intellectual and complex world she builds in her novels. I do, and this novel works for me, and kept me captivated even as I was re-reading it. But the picture of Cambodia is, I also have to see, much less powerful and vivid than in Kim Echler's "The Disappeared."
October 18, 2020
The last of Drabble's Radiant Way trilogy and easily the strangest. Jammed full of ideas, slightly clunky metafictional tricks and lots of fantastic passages, it's somehow a bit less than the sum of its parts, thanks to flat characters and weird pacing.
August 15, 2011
Despite being the final novel in a trilogy, Margaret Drabble's "The Gates of Ivory," an incisive, precisely-written, remarkably-characterized book, stands solidly on its own. A mystery at heart, the book crystallizes a particular moment in time for a group of characters related, in some way, to writer Stephen Cox, from whom no-one has heard since he went off in search of the Khmer Rouge. The novel opens with psychiatrist Liz Headleand receiving a package containing a number of her friend Stephen's effects, including sketches, notebooks, and a couple of human finger bones. She must team up with Stephen's other friends and acquaintances to figure out where he is.
Before you start anticipating a rollicking adventure through the Cambodian jungle, be forewarned that this book has much more in common with Tolstoy than "Romancing the Stone." It's engagingly written, hopping between Stephen's adventures and Stephen's friends piecing together his exploits from their own memories and the contents of Liz's package. The pacing is much slower than one would find in a straight-out adventure story, with numerous meditations on atrocity, revolution, art, and human nature, but Drabble's thoughtfulness shines through her characters, even the flighty ones, to provide a gripping, thoroughly human story, even at a time where inhumanity seems in ascendance. This is wonderful piece of capital-L literature that I enthusiastically recommend.
Before you start anticipating a rollicking adventure through the Cambodian jungle, be forewarned that this book has much more in common with Tolstoy than "Romancing the Stone." It's engagingly written, hopping between Stephen's adventures and Stephen's friends piecing together his exploits from their own memories and the contents of Liz's package. The pacing is much slower than one would find in a straight-out adventure story, with numerous meditations on atrocity, revolution, art, and human nature, but Drabble's thoughtfulness shines through her characters, even the flighty ones, to provide a gripping, thoroughly human story, even at a time where inhumanity seems in ascendance. This is wonderful piece of capital-L literature that I enthusiastically recommend.
November 2, 2014
"Drabble chooses to set a brief but resonant prologue on the border between Thailand and Cambodia, at the bridge that links Aranyaprathet with Poipet. Here two worlds are separated: Thailand's modern and relatively westernized orient and the horror of Cambodia's "sunlit darkness" (3). On one side is "Good Time" and on the other is "Bad Time" (365), terms borrowed from George Steiner's reflections on the Holocaust, and borrowed again by William Shawcross in his account of the Cambodian tragedy, a more recent, postcolonial holocaust." ('Investing in Conrad, Investing in the Orient: Margaret Drabble's the Gates of Ivory.' Journal article by Roger Bowen; Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 45, 1999.
Drabble's use of the knife-thin line separating ordinary everyday-ness from horror deeply impressed me when I first read this novel about a decade ago. She meant also to draw on the way that 'stories' come across the void, how the world living in the 'good time' of fulfilled dreams 'consumes' the stories of suffering elsewhere. That is the reference to the 'gates': in the Odyssey, in a Greek pun, Penelope warns the stranger to mistrust dreams that come through the 'deceitful' gates (ivory sounds like 'deceit' in Greek) and only to put faith in the 'fulfillment' gates (horn, same). But there is not only a geographic border between 'good time' and 'bad time'. Sometimes that boundary is merely temporal and contextual. For me, the metaphor is forever glued to the image I saw coming out of the Capital South metro on my way to work, of the plane framed flying too low in a bright blue sky, beautiful Fall sunlight shining on the marble and concrete and the only hint of 'bad time' a single man screaming into a cell phone on the sidewalk, attracting the attention of a policeman in front of the Madison Building. I skirted the same dreamscape in Russell Square. When I came back through King's Cross, having walked across half of London, the crowds getting on emergency service trains were subdued, sometimes silent, knowing that the main body of the station, where we usually stood slurping sodas and watching signboards and jabbering on phones, was now a morgue and triage station. A plane, hanging too low in the sky, a train that doesn't arrive -- the small disjuncture before the large. Any one of us could find ourselves in 'bad time', it's only a moment away from now.
Drabble's use of the knife-thin line separating ordinary everyday-ness from horror deeply impressed me when I first read this novel about a decade ago. She meant also to draw on the way that 'stories' come across the void, how the world living in the 'good time' of fulfilled dreams 'consumes' the stories of suffering elsewhere. That is the reference to the 'gates': in the Odyssey, in a Greek pun, Penelope warns the stranger to mistrust dreams that come through the 'deceitful' gates (ivory sounds like 'deceit' in Greek) and only to put faith in the 'fulfillment' gates (horn, same). But there is not only a geographic border between 'good time' and 'bad time'. Sometimes that boundary is merely temporal and contextual. For me, the metaphor is forever glued to the image I saw coming out of the Capital South metro on my way to work, of the plane framed flying too low in a bright blue sky, beautiful Fall sunlight shining on the marble and concrete and the only hint of 'bad time' a single man screaming into a cell phone on the sidewalk, attracting the attention of a policeman in front of the Madison Building. I skirted the same dreamscape in Russell Square. When I came back through King's Cross, having walked across half of London, the crowds getting on emergency service trains were subdued, sometimes silent, knowing that the main body of the station, where we usually stood slurping sodas and watching signboards and jabbering on phones, was now a morgue and triage station. A plane, hanging too low in the sky, a train that doesn't arrive -- the small disjuncture before the large. Any one of us could find ourselves in 'bad time', it's only a moment away from now.
September 14, 2019
Finding Stephen Cox was the quest of Liz Headland. She was coruscating in The Radiant Way. I read about her friendship with two other friends whilst studying at Oxford. She helped them through difficult times--as a close friend and Psychiatrist. When faced with an insolvable dilemma, she said to them:" We were trained to think clearly at all times." This advice was helpful in my life. And it was my greatest thrill to be asked by her publisher to review "Jerusalem the Golden." Now I have met another brilliant writer: Josie Arden, who gave me "The Gates of Ivory"--to read to her as she is blind. Between reading her latest book: "Broken Ties of Time" and her award winning short stories: "This & That", I am struck by the similarities in Drabble and Josie Arden's theme: Family Ties. Read Margaret Drabble's book, and you will be mesmerised I love her brilliant use of adjectives, as when she speaks about a play she saw that was lauded and praised by the theatre critics. The corruption of the judges announcing The Best Play Award."The ineffable, intolerable, incomprehensible, unprecedented small-mindedness of not giving the award to Taboo, when everybody knew it was the only play of the year worth crossing the Charing Cross Road to see! I would say that Margaret Drabble is truly one of the very best writers of fiction today. The sister of ASByatt, she edited The Oxford Companion to English Literature--among dozens of books which have been widely praised by most literary giants.I can't wait to read "A Natural Curiosity"--the third book in this trilogy.This is a warm, intelligent and companionable book, meaty and of the earth rather than fashionably brittle.To sum up succinctly: Compelling narrative, psychological insight, generous human portrayal, acute observation. humour, horror, beauty and disgust. A masterpiece.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 25, 2021
I read "The Radiant Way" a great many years ago, and remember nothing about it. I have never read the second book in the trilogy, so came to this final volume without any real prior knowledge of the characters in it.
I enjoyed it well enough, but probably not enough to make me want to go back and read the first two volumes of the trilogy. There were some powerful passages in it, mostly in connection with Cambodia and the refugees from the horrors visited upon that tragic country by Pol Pot. The following seemed to sum up what little I know of the terrible situation in which so many people in refugee camps must find themselves:
She had watched others around her deal with their memories in this way, and in others. Some, like her daughter Sok Sita, had lost their wits. Some had cauterized the past with rage, and lived off anger and hatred. Some had been arrested as by a flow of burning lava in postures of bowed submission, of cowed despair: and now crawled around, bent and deformed. Some of the young fed off film-star dreams of escape. Playing ping-pong, they chattered of visas and papers that would never come. Some plotted revenge. Some went back across the border to join the resistance. Some lived for the moment, learning camp ways, learning to wheedle and exploit and profit, to scavenge and trade. Even here, there were objects to sell and recycle, there were unexplained arrivals of snakeskin and pig meat and musical instruments. Of late, a new supply of small carvings had begun to appear on the market. A lizard, a fish, a flower, a crocodile: antique or fake, who cared? They fetched a price.
I enjoyed it well enough, but probably not enough to make me want to go back and read the first two volumes of the trilogy. There were some powerful passages in it, mostly in connection with Cambodia and the refugees from the horrors visited upon that tragic country by Pol Pot. The following seemed to sum up what little I know of the terrible situation in which so many people in refugee camps must find themselves:
She had watched others around her deal with their memories in this way, and in others. Some, like her daughter Sok Sita, had lost their wits. Some had cauterized the past with rage, and lived off anger and hatred. Some had been arrested as by a flow of burning lava in postures of bowed submission, of cowed despair: and now crawled around, bent and deformed. Some of the young fed off film-star dreams of escape. Playing ping-pong, they chattered of visas and papers that would never come. Some plotted revenge. Some went back across the border to join the resistance. Some lived for the moment, learning camp ways, learning to wheedle and exploit and profit, to scavenge and trade. Even here, there were objects to sell and recycle, there were unexplained arrivals of snakeskin and pig meat and musical instruments. Of late, a new supply of small carvings had begun to appear on the market. A lizard, a fish, a flower, a crocodile: antique or fake, who cared? They fetched a price.
June 28, 2012
I was so confused about why I had this book - why did I request it on Bookmooch? - that I just looked through my emails to find out if I mooched it for a friend. I discovered I mooched another book I wanted and the moocher wanted two requests and Margaret Drabble seemed worth taking a punt on.
I am finding it a slow read, partly because it is so late and I am so tired before I start reading at present that I often fall asleep after a few pages, The pace is slow, it is not a romping adventure, and while compelling in a strange way I would not call it gripping or exciting.
More later when I get further with it. I need to up my pace as I have another of Cotterill's charming books winging its way from Alderney to me shortly and I have to read and return that one. Oh and until I looked to see if others had reviewed this today I had no idea it was the final part of a trilogy. All to the good. Books should stand alone in my view.
Three or four stars? The writing is very fine, but the cutting back and forward between the stories of a group of people during a particular period left me sometimes searching back to recollect who the current subject was and their relationship to other protagonists.
I am sure a review I read mentioned a surprising or unexpected end with tragedy. I didn't see that as I thought the end was clearly flagged throughout. I enjoyed it but was left with a feeling of dissatisfaction. The book seemed to be part of the 'real life with lots of untied loose ends' genre which may reflect life but is not always the most satisfying literature.
I am finding it a slow read, partly because it is so late and I am so tired before I start reading at present that I often fall asleep after a few pages, The pace is slow, it is not a romping adventure, and while compelling in a strange way I would not call it gripping or exciting.
More later when I get further with it. I need to up my pace as I have another of Cotterill's charming books winging its way from Alderney to me shortly and I have to read and return that one. Oh and until I looked to see if others had reviewed this today I had no idea it was the final part of a trilogy. All to the good. Books should stand alone in my view.
Three or four stars? The writing is very fine, but the cutting back and forward between the stories of a group of people during a particular period left me sometimes searching back to recollect who the current subject was and their relationship to other protagonists.
I am sure a review I read mentioned a surprising or unexpected end with tragedy. I didn't see that as I thought the end was clearly flagged throughout. I enjoyed it but was left with a feeling of dissatisfaction. The book seemed to be part of the 'real life with lots of untied loose ends' genre which may reflect life but is not always the most satisfying literature.
June 27, 2022
The second time this month I’ve stupidly read a book without realising it is a sequel. That said, even if I’d read the preceding two books in this trilogy I sense I’d of still found this a bit of a drag. I probably enjoyed around one in ten pages, although I did find myself a bit invested for the concluding sections.
At least the flurry of names and insights into bit characters we’ve never met makes sense now I know it’s part of a trilogy. But in this book about loss, family legacy, Kampuchea, journalism/writing and random fragments of identity I was a bit puzzled by the way that tampons, the tampon industry at large, tampon usage, tampon tax and toxic shock syndrome were so clunkily shoe-horned into so many passages. I can understand why the theme of ‘tamponage’ in all its forms roughly fits with some of the themes here, but the majority of the tampon references felt very forced and peculiar. I’m going to have to read the other two novels to see if this concluding text presents a final stage in Drabble’s great tampon critique journey.
Anyway, I think it’s time I started reading back cover synopses while shnaffling books in charity shops- I dread to think how many books will be now ruined for me by this process. In fact, maybe I should just start a petition for big fluorescent numbers to be daubed on all front covers so I can still avoid spoiler heavy blurbs and synopses 🤔
At least the flurry of names and insights into bit characters we’ve never met makes sense now I know it’s part of a trilogy. But in this book about loss, family legacy, Kampuchea, journalism/writing and random fragments of identity I was a bit puzzled by the way that tampons, the tampon industry at large, tampon usage, tampon tax and toxic shock syndrome were so clunkily shoe-horned into so many passages. I can understand why the theme of ‘tamponage’ in all its forms roughly fits with some of the themes here, but the majority of the tampon references felt very forced and peculiar. I’m going to have to read the other two novels to see if this concluding text presents a final stage in Drabble’s great tampon critique journey.
Anyway, I think it’s time I started reading back cover synopses while shnaffling books in charity shops- I dread to think how many books will be now ruined for me by this process. In fact, maybe I should just start a petition for big fluorescent numbers to be daubed on all front covers so I can still avoid spoiler heavy blurbs and synopses 🤔
Read
May 25, 2018With the scene widening to Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia, this novel might stand on its own, but it’s better enjoyed as the conclusion of the trilogy with The Radiant Way and A Natural Curiosity. It’s 1988--Liz, Alix, and Esther are back, mostly Liz, and Konstantin Vassiliou, who was a child in The Needle’s Eye, represents the coming generation along with Liz’s stepsons. Narrative technique is more involved than in the earlier books, combining the usually omniscient, often intrusive narrator with the first-person voice of Hattie Osborne, acquainted with Liz through Stephen Cox. Hattie is the one who says “Everything links up,” and links are everywhere, including to Stephen’s travels in 1985 and to mysterious fragments of text that could be Stephen’s inventions. For a reasonably alert reader, the book offers many rewards.
November 26, 2024
A very good final book in this trilogy. Maybe not really action-packed, but it was a moving story, with a strange Heart of Darkness/Under the Volcano feel.
January 1, 2013
I finished this book, the third in Drabble's trilogy, while on vacation in Maine ... vividly recall that I had forgotten to take a nightgown and read the book "in the altogether" in my hotel room at night. The things one remembers ... Drabble had been a favourite of mine since The Millstone. The Gates of Ivory is her greatest book, brilliantly dark, yet human perservance, hope, whatever it is, shining through. Not sure how she does it, but she's an absolutely marvellous writer. This began for me a fondness for books about people disappearing ... yes it's got Conradian overtones, but there's nothing wrong with that! Recommend if you want a read that somewhat challenging but ever so worth it.
April 18, 2020
Abandoned a hundred or so pages in. In 50 years time it might be quaint but I found the 1990s setting tedious. Were we really like that? Or did we think people like that were smart? Irresponsible, sexually free, rebellious in a sort of teenage way, and all this in grown up adults. I sort of remember when this was a thing and we admired it in others. Now it just makes for a dreary book.
February 9, 2010
I have the 1991 hardcover edition.
November 18, 2011
Tired, tedious and despite a few parts that were very good, just too much work for too little reward.
fic-guided
July 12, 2020The Gates of Ivory is the conclusion of Drabble’s ‘Headland Trilogy’. The Radiant Way (1987), the first in the series, begins with a chaotic end-of-decade party in Harley Street. It is 1979 – the ‘Ice Age’, as Drabble calls it. England is a frozen corpse of what it once was. There are some two hundred guests – many of whom flit past the bemused reader’s gaze, never to be seen again. Specifically, the party introduces three ‘highly selected’ and self-made women – contemporaries at Cambridge in the early 1950s and now middle-aged. One, Alix Bowen, wants to ‘change things’. An evangelical Leavisite, she teaches English to prisoners and has chosen to live in quintessentially provincial Northam (Sheffield). The second of the trio. Esther Breuer, wants to ‘know things’. She is a Jewish émigrée art historian and connoisseur. Liz Headland is a psychotherapist who wants to ‘make sense of things’. Liz is London-based (although Northam-born).
The long ensuing narrative follows these three lives, centrally Liz’s. The process begins with her second divorce and the painful memory of being abused in childhood by her father. Life, we gather, is no ‘radiant way’ (Drabble’s title refers to the simplistic imagery of a popular children’s reading book in the 1930s). Running alongside the five years of The Radiant Way’s panorama is the career of the Horror of Harrow Road – a serial killer inspired by the Yorkshire Ripper. Alix comes within a hairsbreadth of being one of the Horror’s victims. He is eventually discovered to be a rather mild fellow living in a flat above Esther. After he is put away, Alix visits him regularly to advise on such things as vegetarianism and his Open University degree.
A Natural Curiosity (1989), the second book in the trilogy, is a tighter effort, covering a few months in 1987. The focus is firmly on Alix, whose sleuthing uncovers the something nasty in the woodshed that made young Paul Whitmore the Horror of Harrow Road.
The allusion in the title The Gates of Ivory is to Penelope’s declaration in the Odyssey about false dreams (or fictions) coming through gates of ‘traitor ivory’, while true dreams come through gates of horn. The narrative centres on Liz Headland’s Marlovian quest into the heart of Cambodian darkness. Her Kurtz is Stephen Cox, a Booker-winning novelist with whom she had a pregnant conversation at Bertorelli’s in January 1985, recorded long ago in The Radiant Way. Liz’s obsession with Cox is triggered by an enigmatic parcel of his literary and possibly human remains (in the form of human finger bones). Why he went to Cambodia is a mystery: to research a play on Pol Pot is his unconvincing ‘alibi’. And why Liz should choose to follow him to the most dangerous country on earth is another.
In her journey to the interior she encounters horrors almost beyond imagining. Descriptions of torture and mass killings abound. One account of eating live monkey brains will put the reader off variety meats for a day or two. Much other blood is spilled in protracted descriptions of menstruation. This is a novel which does for those unmentionables, the used tampon and sanitary pad, what PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT did for liver. It is all worlds away from the West End party where the story began.
Drabble’s trilogy has never, I think, received proper recognition as one of the most monumental, and unblinkingly depressed, achievements in twentieth-century fiction. You’ll need a fortnight – and a regular supply of cheering drink – to read it. Stock up and do so.
The long ensuing narrative follows these three lives, centrally Liz’s. The process begins with her second divorce and the painful memory of being abused in childhood by her father. Life, we gather, is no ‘radiant way’ (Drabble’s title refers to the simplistic imagery of a popular children’s reading book in the 1930s). Running alongside the five years of The Radiant Way’s panorama is the career of the Horror of Harrow Road – a serial killer inspired by the Yorkshire Ripper. Alix comes within a hairsbreadth of being one of the Horror’s victims. He is eventually discovered to be a rather mild fellow living in a flat above Esther. After he is put away, Alix visits him regularly to advise on such things as vegetarianism and his Open University degree.
A Natural Curiosity (1989), the second book in the trilogy, is a tighter effort, covering a few months in 1987. The focus is firmly on Alix, whose sleuthing uncovers the something nasty in the woodshed that made young Paul Whitmore the Horror of Harrow Road.
The allusion in the title The Gates of Ivory is to Penelope’s declaration in the Odyssey about false dreams (or fictions) coming through gates of ‘traitor ivory’, while true dreams come through gates of horn. The narrative centres on Liz Headland’s Marlovian quest into the heart of Cambodian darkness. Her Kurtz is Stephen Cox, a Booker-winning novelist with whom she had a pregnant conversation at Bertorelli’s in January 1985, recorded long ago in The Radiant Way. Liz’s obsession with Cox is triggered by an enigmatic parcel of his literary and possibly human remains (in the form of human finger bones). Why he went to Cambodia is a mystery: to research a play on Pol Pot is his unconvincing ‘alibi’. And why Liz should choose to follow him to the most dangerous country on earth is another.
In her journey to the interior she encounters horrors almost beyond imagining. Descriptions of torture and mass killings abound. One account of eating live monkey brains will put the reader off variety meats for a day or two. Much other blood is spilled in protracted descriptions of menstruation. This is a novel which does for those unmentionables, the used tampon and sanitary pad, what PORTNOY’S COMPLAINT did for liver. It is all worlds away from the West End party where the story began.
Drabble’s trilogy has never, I think, received proper recognition as one of the most monumental, and unblinkingly depressed, achievements in twentieth-century fiction. You’ll need a fortnight – and a regular supply of cheering drink – to read it. Stock up and do so.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
July 3, 2021
Jag bara älskar Margaret Drabbles stil och litterära universum. 1980 hittade jag 'The Millstone' från 1960-talet och läste sedan i snabbt takt de flesta av hennes 1960-70-talsromaner, fram till 'The Middle Ground' (1980). Men sedan tystnade hon och jag tappade tråden, tills jag hittade denna, återutgiven på svenska så sent som 2014. Och visst är det en fantastisk tidsbild av Kambodja- katastrofen som chockade oss på 1980-talet. Samtidigt som 1980-talets Yuppies gjort sig av med alla gamla ideal. Ordväven som tycks få med allt som rörde sig i huvudet på en mängd olika vilsna människor. Ja den allenarådande vilsenheten hos majoriteten.
Och så visar det sig att detta är tredje delen i en trilogi. Hur kunde jag missa del 1 och 2?
Det är också som en tanke, att jag återfann just denna bok, nu när jag (så sakteliga= håller på och äser om många av Conrads böcker. När 'Elfenbensporten' skrev var Conrad mycket omdebatterad, på grund av den postkoloniala kritiken kring rasism. Så naturligtvis måste den debatten finns med i romanen, som är en mångfaldig tidsbild. Liz suckar över rasism och obegripligheten i t ex 'Mörkrets hjärta' (som tilldrog sig i Kongo i mörkaste Afrika). Dessutom är 'Elfenbensporten' faktiskt ett slags variant på 'Mörkrets hjärta' av Conrad, eftersom Kambodja på 1980-talet är ett sådant mörkt djungelområde hundra år senare, nu i sydöstasien, lika oroande, obegriplgit och ogripbart för förståndet. Den mörka omedvetna skuggan i människans medvetande.
Så vad betyder titeln? Elfenbensporten? Tydligen har 'Portar av horn respektive elfenben' varit en metafor som använts inom litteratur ända sedan Homeros dagar, för att skilja på sanna, faktiska drömmar och de falska. Den hårfina skillnaden, som ligger i visioner som är sanna, möjliga att arbeta mot, i motsats till de självbedrägerier vi ägnar oss åt, drömmar som aldrig blir mer än illusioner, undanflykter.
Det är romanens tema både globalt, vad gäller en nations om Kambodja med försöker att återgå till ett gyllene paradis, men också vad som sker på personlgia nivåer inom de olika karaktärernas liv.
Drabble är alltid så litterärt sofistikerad, hur är svårgripbart det kan kännas när man läser romanen, så finns det mycket metaforer att gräva i.
Och så visar det sig att detta är tredje delen i en trilogi. Hur kunde jag missa del 1 och 2?
Det är också som en tanke, att jag återfann just denna bok, nu när jag (så sakteliga= håller på och äser om många av Conrads böcker. När 'Elfenbensporten' skrev var Conrad mycket omdebatterad, på grund av den postkoloniala kritiken kring rasism. Så naturligtvis måste den debatten finns med i romanen, som är en mångfaldig tidsbild. Liz suckar över rasism och obegripligheten i t ex 'Mörkrets hjärta' (som tilldrog sig i Kongo i mörkaste Afrika). Dessutom är 'Elfenbensporten' faktiskt ett slags variant på 'Mörkrets hjärta' av Conrad, eftersom Kambodja på 1980-talet är ett sådant mörkt djungelområde hundra år senare, nu i sydöstasien, lika oroande, obegriplgit och ogripbart för förståndet. Den mörka omedvetna skuggan i människans medvetande.
Så vad betyder titeln? Elfenbensporten? Tydligen har 'Portar av horn respektive elfenben' varit en metafor som använts inom litteratur ända sedan Homeros dagar, för att skilja på sanna, faktiska drömmar och de falska. Den hårfina skillnaden, som ligger i visioner som är sanna, möjliga att arbeta mot, i motsats till de självbedrägerier vi ägnar oss åt, drömmar som aldrig blir mer än illusioner, undanflykter.
Det är romanens tema både globalt, vad gäller en nations om Kambodja med försöker att återgå till ett gyllene paradis, men också vad som sker på personlgia nivåer inom de olika karaktärernas liv.
Drabble är alltid så litterärt sofistikerad, hur är svårgripbart det kan kännas när man läser romanen, så finns det mycket metaforer att gräva i.
December 3, 2018
Margaret Drabble's Novel "The Gates of Ivory" is a slow burner, for sure. Set in the late 1980's in an educated, upper middle class London, and South East Asia. The plot hops frequently between time and place.
The Novel is doused in mysterious realism. Throughout the multitude of adventurous snapshots and anecdotes that Drabble evokes, the reader is rewarded with a liberal development to the key characters and some provocative visual imagery - notably between the contrasting worlds of conflict and exoticism of the Far East.
A large number of characters are introduced, in particular for the London segments of the novel. Two of the story's main characters and contributors to the various forms of narration (Elizabeth and Hattie) are both middle aged English women of a similar ilk. This at times could be misleading for new readers entering the trilogy, trying to ascertain who is who, and where they fit within the big picture.
Drabble has a keen awareness of the geography and history of South East Asia and is a socially sympathetic author focusing on how people cope, inter-relate and impact within the varying settings - whether its in the comfort of London suburbia, or the more gritty, hair-raising locations of Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia. Her future oriented moral compass readily acknowledges the key issues of the day like climate change that have belatedly been thrust into the forefront of our concerns some thirty years since the book was written.
This is an illuminating read that should appeal to readers who like to envisage parallel universes and crave these narratives to explore the reasons for our existence.
The Novel is doused in mysterious realism. Throughout the multitude of adventurous snapshots and anecdotes that Drabble evokes, the reader is rewarded with a liberal development to the key characters and some provocative visual imagery - notably between the contrasting worlds of conflict and exoticism of the Far East.
A large number of characters are introduced, in particular for the London segments of the novel. Two of the story's main characters and contributors to the various forms of narration (Elizabeth and Hattie) are both middle aged English women of a similar ilk. This at times could be misleading for new readers entering the trilogy, trying to ascertain who is who, and where they fit within the big picture.
Drabble has a keen awareness of the geography and history of South East Asia and is a socially sympathetic author focusing on how people cope, inter-relate and impact within the varying settings - whether its in the comfort of London suburbia, or the more gritty, hair-raising locations of Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia. Her future oriented moral compass readily acknowledges the key issues of the day like climate change that have belatedly been thrust into the forefront of our concerns some thirty years since the book was written.
This is an illuminating read that should appeal to readers who like to envisage parallel universes and crave these narratives to explore the reasons for our existence.
August 1, 2017
A book about the mores of the North London artistic set, effectively taking the piss out of their pretensions whilst ostensibly being about the disappearance of a 'Booker winning' writer in Cambodia in the early 90's. It effectively skewers the puffed-up self-aggrandisement of it's targets whilst also taking the piss out of the 'Chomskian' stupid anti-American left whose warped logic saw them support the genocidal Khmer Rouge because the Americans were against them. The fact the stupid leftist ends up as he does as a result of his Pol Pot fanboy worship only serves as more of a just deliverance. As a result of the research it is credible and I saw Cambodia/Thailand or Vietnam frequently whilst reading it. The characters are believable for the time and it is disappointing that for far too many on the left the same delusions about foreign policy continue. Well-written and entertaining.
September 14, 2018
What an incredible novel
An amazing read! Have read the last of the trilogy first - will the other two live up to this one? Extremely prescient, almost psychic in her treatment of the end of the eighties as a kind of personal and political watershed. And what a superb portrayal of the chattering classes!
An amazing read! Have read the last of the trilogy first - will the other two live up to this one? Extremely prescient, almost psychic in her treatment of the end of the eighties as a kind of personal and political watershed. And what a superb portrayal of the chattering classes!
May 20, 2020
The poet looks back to the days of innocent history when one man could interrogate one skull. Nixon, the poet says, has no liking for the philosophic skull, which smiles back. He prefers the seven-ton bomb which destroys the lot. No more questions, no more hesitations, no more singularities. Big numbers. Mass destructions. Mass grave. Ash, not bone. The twentieth century.
July 19, 2025
Excellent, like the Radiant Way ...
I liked these books for their tight plotting, excellent writing, & generally admirable nature.
I recommend them to everyone; they are as much a joy as I read them now on Kindle as they were when I first read them on paper many years ago.
Wonderfully well done, marvellous magical Margaret.
I liked these books for their tight plotting, excellent writing, & generally admirable nature.
I recommend them to everyone; they are as much a joy as I read them now on Kindle as they were when I first read them on paper many years ago.
Wonderfully well done, marvellous magical Margaret.
March 11, 2023
I really enjoyed this trio of books and they 'stayed with me' so I need to reread asap. I'm having trouble getting large prints which I now prefer and may have to stick with the tiny print in the paperbacks I now own. I read them all originally from Stretford Library.
May 25, 2017
Excellent topic. Liked the multiple plots. Strong writing with intelligent use of English vocabulary.
January 4, 2019
Trilogy huh? Why, I didn't know that. But the story is good. A worth reading. So I have to search the 1st and 2nd books.
January 18, 2020
I hope I have time to re-read this marvelous book some day
March 11, 2021
Drabble is today's Jane Austen. She describes every day life with humor and sympathy. In this book she tackles our struggle with reconciling the disparities in human experiences.
May 24, 2021
I tried but the characters did not seem as interesting in her descriptive writing. Had to stop.
December 11, 2022
I found the characters boring.
May 13, 2023
Great story,, love the writing, although quite horrific in places. A thought provoking read.
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