Jerusalem the Golden

by Margaret Drabble

Brought up in a stifling, emotionless home in the north of England, Clara finds freedom when she wins a scholarship and travels to London. There, she meets Clelia and the rest of the Denham brilliant and charming, they dazzle Clara with their flair for life, and Clara yearns to be part of their bohemian world. But while she will do anything to join their circle, she gives no thought to the chaos that she may cause... In this captivating story of growing up and moving on, Margaret Drabble explores what it means to leave a disregarded childhood and family behind.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Novels, Contemporary, British Literature, Modern Classics, Classics

200 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1967

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

[Hugh · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting book, but very much a period piece. At heart it is another rites of passage story about a young woman from the North breaking away from her family and making a new life for herself in London, but it is also very rooted in Britain's class divisions.

The heroine Clara Maugham comes from Northam, which at times seems to be a caricature of the dirty northern industrial city, but one wonders how much of the supposed grimness is in Clara's mind, because when she visits her dying mother at the end of the book, the city starts sounding much more like Drabble's hometown of York.

Much of the first half of the book seems to be establishing Clara's character, as a grammar school girl whose mother has very strict ideas about everything and appears not to enjoy life. In the first chapter Clara, now a student in London, meets the magnetic Clelia at a poetry reading. Clelia is an artist, still living in her parents large house with her writer mother and poet father. Clelia's family is everything Clara aspires to be, and in the second half of the book she embarks on an affair with Clelia's unhappily married and equally charismatic brother Gabriel.

To be honest, reading at this distance, quite a lot of the book bored me, perhaps because I found it difficult to empathise with the selfish Clara who seems to treat life as an aspirational game (making her something of a proto-Thatcherite). I was also uneasy by Drabble's willingness to reinforce Southern prejudices against the North of England - at one point Clara surprises somebody by allowing a northern expression slip, a reminder that at that time English provincials were expected to turn themselves into middle class Southerners to fit into the world they aspired to.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

When you've just read a group of books together and then try and do a bunch of reviews - you realize the hopelessness of the star system - this also gets a 5 - but the book is in a different category to Ursula K le Guin's 'Left Hand of Darkness'. I mean 'Left Hand' is a classic. Drabble's early books are excellent - I've read everything I think from her early years. I have tried some of the later ones, and found them to be less engaging.

'Jerusalem the Golden' follows Clara from an unloving home in the north of England to her university days in London and her contact with a family there - who save her. Clelia - one of 5 children of the worldly and cultured Denhams is her first friend. The story's focus, however is on Clara's relationship with the brother Gabriel. Drabble accurately portrays the highs and lows of erotic love - the intimacy, the passion, the corresponding anxieties - she does it beautifully.

I also liked Phillipa's story - her neurotic outlook and its destructive effect on her marriage to Gabriel. Towards the end Clara acknowledges that she was looking for a way out of her drab background, unknown, unloved; and Gabriel uses Clara to break from his dead-end marriage, but love glosses over the needs of the two.

Drabble is an intellectual writer - you can see the effect of an Oxford education - but she convinces despite the tight maneouvering of her sentences for accuracy. Her profound statement that love provides growth ties the plot and the theme of her book together.

[Blair · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unfashionably middle-class and northern, Clara longs to escape her depressing hometown and dour mother. At university in London, she pursues a friendship with Clelia Denham, a charismatic girl from a wealthy, bohemian family, and proceeds to fall in love with Clelia’s married brother Gabriel. Jerusalem the Golden is a novel that captures class anxiety, the tenuous and rapidly shifting nature of ‘freedom’ for young women in the 1960s, and the longing for something beyond one’s existing experience. Yet I found the characters difficult to parse: aside from the symbolic nature of her yearning for ‘beautiful things’, which seems to entirely dominate her personality, who is Clara, really? There’s some great period detail, but also a sense of narrative distance/detachment that left me a little cold.

[Allie Riley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Glorious. There were some aspects of Clara, the central character, with which I strongly identified (difficult family life, university providing a means of escape etc). Others, not so much (she is one of life's takers, it seems to me and perhaps incapable of love). The characters, in point of fact, were part of the great strength of this novel. We first meet Clara at the theatre in London with friends for a poetry recital. We learn that she comes originally from a Yorkshire town called Northam, which she was desperate to leave, and is spending her time at uni acquiring both friends and taste. The novel follows her deepening friendship with the charming Clelia and family, of whom she would no doubt be insanely jealous were it not for the great affection she feels for them. Deftly Drabble draws her story to its satisfying conclusion, revealing along the way that Clara is, perhaps, more like her mother than she knew or would care to admit.

Wonderful stuff. A swift, absorbing read which I highly recommend.

[Clare · Rating 4 out of 5]

I will admit that I was drawn to this book by the beautiful blue colouring of this cover. I knew that I wanted to buy a book by Margaret Drabble and ultimately my selection was purely cosmetic but I have often found this to be a helpful way of making a choice. I was brought up with the phrase 'Never judge a book by its cover' but I'm not sure this is always correct. I have discovered much literature, music, food simply from being drawn in by its aesthetic qualities. But I suppose this is an argument for another discussion.

Jerusalem the Golden is the story of Clara and it really is a coming of age kind of book. Clara is brought up in a stiflingly small town in the North of England. Her brothers are pretty non-descript and her father dies when she is around sixteen but it is her mother that is the true influence on her life. Her mother is a confusing and loveless woman, the antithesis of the person Clara herself would like to become. From witnessing her mother's small life and small mind, Clara is determined that she will escape; from her home town, her family and the mindset that she is terrified may be hereditary.

Once she has escaped to London, experienced life as she imagined it might be and finished University, she now has the problem of how to stay free and not return, as she believed her mother expects of her. Through a chance meeting, she befriends a family entirely opposite from her own - easy going, loving, successful, clever and it is this family that she projects her hopes onto.

I loved this book for the most part but found myself unsatisfied by the end and I'm not entirely sure why. Clara was quite an inspiring character and very thoroughly and specifically created by the author. She doesn't just want to see and do everything, to be a tourist of the world, she wants to experience everything first hand and to really sink into real life. She doesn't just want to see Paris, she wants to live Paris in order to truly feel alive. This was quite emboldening to read in this way as it mirrors my own feelings. I felt myself really rooting for Clara, feeling that if she can find a way to really live then so can we all. Then just over half way through the book, she diverted off in another direction, leaving me standing with my mouth hanging open thinking 'but, where are you going?'

Then I had to remember that this Clara is twenty two after all. Wasn't I myself a little full of extroverted self importance too at that age? So I followed her silently, watching, more intrigued by her than the feelings of comradeship I had earlier experienced. I guess she went the right way for her and I was pleased to see some kind of further insight into her mother and their relationship eventually but I guess it just wasn't the book I thought it was going to be, not that I'm really sure what that could have been. I had expected to Margaret Drabble to have all the answers, including my own, and she had a few, but she mostly only had Clara's. I will say however that I am eagerly looking forward to reading more of her work. There are some really beautiful analogies, some beautiful uses of language and imagery and the flow she uses is very interesting, occasionally jerky and then falling into great circles of language thematic with Clara's moods. These are certainly aspects to savour.

http://clarepenelopeafternoon.blogspo...

[Steven Langdon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Margaret Drabble's first truly sparkling novel, published in 1967, and winning her wide critical acclaim plus a major literary prize. Like so much of her later work it is an insightful and finely written plunge into the life of British women, caught between the hard-edged life of the industrial north and the intellectual and sophisticated world of better-off London.

Clara Maugham is the book's central character, and Clelia Denham is the figure who with her family comes to characterize the life changes that transform Clara's world. At once a careful social dissection, an impassioned and unpredictable story of romance, and a sad parable of generational misunderstanding, "Jerusalem the Golden" is also a book about the deep friendship between two women that transcends the gulf between them. And it is a novel about learning to live in a complex world, with verve and spirit.

This is a book that will leave you somewhat overwhelmed, for the emotions in it are strong and deep. But it is also a novel that will provide much insight into how women at a particular time and place in the complex texture of England experienced their world. An excellent read . . .

[Christian Schwoerke · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Her mother was dying, but she [Clara] herself would survive it, she would survive even the guilt and convenience and grief of her mother’s death, she would survive because she had willed herself to survive, because she did not have it in her to die. Even the mercy and kindness of destiny she would survive; they would not get her that way, they would not get her at all.”

The narrative voice in this social-realist bildungsroman is compelling, if a bit disassociated. So, while the intimate third-person narrative is privy to Clara’s thoughts, there is an arch formality about the recounting of her impressions, thoughts, and memories. Drabble employs a measured and almost clinical way of describing Clara’s thoughts and actions—detailing social and personal vectors so that the narrative appears almost to be a case study. Adding further to this impression is the book’s time and place—England in the late 50s and early 60s, still sloughing off the effects of the long post-war austerity. So, what is it that happens to a bright girl brought up in repressed emotional and depressed economic circumstances when books and education offer up a chance to escape?

Clara early on nurtures a vision of a symbolic, unknown Jerusalem, a world other than the one she knows, golden with possibilities she does not yet fathom. Experiences are to be sought, and the details recorded; her young life is the accretion of new sensations, though the end is indistinct, characterized most clearly by what this vision will not entail: the deadening, moribund world of her upbringing. As much as the novel is a striving towards something, it is also a novel of escape. Clara means to leave far behind her mother and all the narrow, circumscribed thought that have come to characterize her mean, close, coldly solitary world.

Much of Clara’s emotional development is done slowly, incrementally, even when she’s in London, at university. Her chance encounter with the Clelia and the rest of the Denham family is the catalyst for a larger quantum experiment in defining the characteristics of the Jerusalem she seeks. The extraordinary Denham family seems vastly different from her own experience, to be filled with caring and loving parents and siblings, everyone interested and devoted to one another, willing and eager to share thoughts and feelings, able to converse easily and openly. As part of her sentimental education, Clara undertakes an affair with the married brother, Gabriel.

After a week-long fling in Paris with Gabriel, Clara returns on her own to London, unsure what to make of the carefree mess she made of things in Paris. A sense of consequences comes back to her quickly when she finds waiting for her news that her mother is lying in hospital with cancer. The muddle of her recent actions, her inchoate impressions, and unresolved feelings are all easily subject to an instinctual falling back into old patterns of thought and being. Her mother’s impending death is a divine recompense for her transgressions; she is a wicked daughter.

The novel ends with Clara dismissing guilt, even as she and her mother can only connect at their customary level of dour iciness. Happenstance affords Clara an escape back to London, as Gabriel contacts her and offers to collect her and return her to university. There is the novel’s penultimate paean to the open road and opportunities to indulge in whim. While the swinging 60s in England were seen to be a period inhabited by young free spirits, there were also those, like Clara, who helped to define this period of dis-inhibition not out of an innate joie de vivre, but out of grim determination.

Only one quibble in this short, absorbing novel: the narrative is wholly with Clara for its duration except in its 7th chapter when it enters into Gabriel’s thoughts, and then for a short period into his depressed wife Phillipa’s thoughts. This brief, five- or six-page digression from Clara’s perspective appears a mistake. The social-realist, clinical voice of the narrative is not solely a feature of Clara’s way of perceiving the world; it now somehow belongs to these other, different sensibilities. As for what information is conveyed in his digression, there is nothing that a reader could not have already inferred. Drabble’s momentary exploration of Gabriel and Phillipa’s interior selves muddles the identification of narrative tone and voice with Clara.

[Esther · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh Goodreads doesn't have an image of the wonderful 1969 Penguin paperback edition I picked up at a bookshop in Clitheroe (Lancashire, UK) which is a design classic. Now not wishing to sound like I'm judging a book by its fabulous cover, this was superb. Maybe it had personal resonance - its about a girl Clara who leaves her boring drab hometown and moves to London for university and meets many bohemian characters and has an illicit affair with a married man (erm can't relate to that bit, ok) Its a short read, barely 200 pages and I finished it on the train today hungry for more. Drabble is one of my favourite writers, as the Yanks say, in the same ballpark as Iris Murdoch.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was impressed with the word-power of Drabble. Her juxtaposition of the vast difference of Clara's home life(Few books worth reading, as reflected in the vast library of books in ~Clelia's home)And the conversations in both these places were brought to bear upon , and reflected in their content--was apparent--and revealed the disproportionate class and culture.This book is so well written, and tells its story so vividly and with such interesting human detail, I was transported with delight. I cherish the time I spent reading it.
You are what you read.

[Gary Murning · Rating 1 out of 5]

Around two thirds of the way through and I've had enough of this questionable classic. I found the characters—Clara in particular—unutterably unlikable (not something that would usually stop me, but in this case, there simply wasn't enough to hold me) and, frankly, depressingly clichéd. It offered me nothing new, nothing I haven't already encountered in other, possibly superior, novels.

Sixth form chic. Tedious.

[Declan Hickey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dips in the middle, but there are moments of brilliance, especially the ending.

[Philip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jerusalem The Golden by Margaret Drabble was published over fifty years ago. Reading it now, for this particular reviewer, is the equivalent of reading Arnold Bennett in the same year that Margaret Drabble’s novel was written. Bennett’s quintessential late Victorian and Edwardian identity was then and remains almost foreign territory to the contemporary reader, but – even given the fifty year time shift – one might expect that the reader who actually experienced the 1960s as a teenager might suffer no culture shock whatsoever in reading Margaret Drabble’s essentially 1960s novel. That assumption, however, would be quite wrong.

The mechanics of Jerusalem The Golden’s plot can be described without spoiling the experience of reading the book. Clara is a lower middle-class girl growing up in Northam, which is clearly not far from Margaret Drabble’s own Sheffield, despite being described as being fifty miles or so further from London than its real-life manifestation. Clara clearly rather despises Northam. In her third person narrative that always feels like it wants to inhabit the first, Margaret Drabble has her principal character regularly refer to the dirt, the lack of sophistication and general ugliness of the place, factors that convince Clara – and no doubt the author herself – that life should transfer to London at the first opportunity.

Clara’s family is far from dysfunctional, but then the jury might be out on this because it hardly displays any function at all. Mrs Maugham, Clara’s mother, seems to live her life at arm’s length behind a wall of collected prejudice and panic if experience gets too close. Clara seems determined not to be like her mother.

Clara is successful at school but ignores received opinion as to what she might study, preferring her own judgment to the conventional pragmatism of offered advice. Before she leaves school, Clara has already shown significant signs of maturity. Not only does she develop an obvious but inwardly not perceived independence and individuality, but she also matures physically, developing an early and fine bosom, which she soon realises can be used as a source of power.

In London, where she attends university, Clara meets to unlikely-named Clelia, whose family turns out to be precisely the kind of befuddled, messy, propertied, sophisticated, if rather unclean lineage that would forever be diametrically opposed to her own Maugham household. One feels that if Clara’s mother were invited to the Highgate pad of the Denham family, her nose would turn up in silence as she reached for a mop to disinfect the floors. Strangely, Clelia is rather similar to Clara, both physically and personally, though we do not appreciate this until late in the book, when consciously or otherwise Clara seems to morph into the very identity of her friend.

Clara is a thoroughly credible 1960s character. This misunderstood decade, for most people, was not about free love, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll or protest. Ideologically, it may have become so, but day to day life was school uniforms, dance halls largely segregated by sex, social conservatism and conformity, allied to a newly won, for most people, glimmer of opportunity for self-betterment. Clara exhibits the values of her age, but also gnaws gently at the edges of the constraints, as the era appeared to expect one ought. She surprises herself on a school trip to Paris, but she does retain total control, a facility she learns to cultivate.

And it is this aspect of Clara’s character – its desire and ability to control, to extract exactly what she wants from life in general and circumstances in particular that comes to the fore. Clara desires, Clara gets. She is always self-deprecating, but she even learns to use this flawed confidence to focus attention and facilitation from others when she needs it. Gradually Clara is revealed as someone who ruthlessly uses her physical, personal and intellectual advantages to achieve precisely what she wants, despite the fact that she often tries to deny any conscious plan.

Margaret Drabble’s style throughout is both complex and backward-looking. Clara could easily be a character from fifty years earlier – an Arnold Bennett society debutante, aware of social niceties, protocols and conventions, but needing to make her own way through life’s challenges. But Clara is always ready to assert her presence in a way a woman from fifty years earlier might not have done and thereby she achieves her ends, often irrespective of any potential damage done to others. Her potentially self-destructive success in achieving her wishes is increasingly quite disturbing. Hers is an individualism that also could easily become self-defeating, as evidenced in the author’s assessment that Clara “thought nothing of” being sick in a Paris toilet when she decided to leave her married lover behind. We are left thinking that there is something unsaid to follow. And, if that were to be the case, perhaps a more general parallel with the 1960s decade is possible, in that it might have felt like a liberation for the individual, but also that it might eventually have threatened something that was both longer lasting and longer term. One feels by the end that Clara is set for some pretty rude awakenings.

[Alex Ankarr · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you're going to read a Drabble - your life is short. Do you really have the time? Think! Consider!

But if you have that much time you're willing to just piss away, then this is probably the one.

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Social climbing, Sheffield and London, bohemians, suburbia, sex: so incredibly Pulp circa 1994 you can almost hear the stylophone.

[Katherine · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just finished (re)reading this book moments ago—it's been ten years since the first time—and though I'd been going to give it three stars, it got me in the ending, and I'm going to assign four.

It is a coming-of-age story about a girl who grows up in an emotionally stifled, middle-class home in the north of England. As she grows up, Clara turns out to be both smart, sexy, and sensual; she also has good instincts about people. Because of these qualities, she's able to leave her depressing town and family, and move to London, where she attends college. Feeling her way, and relying on those instincts, she meets a Royal Tenenbaums-like family, first befriending the artsy, charming, and precocious daughter, Clelia, who is just a few years older than herself. Clara's friendship with the Denhams opens up a new world to her, a world of taste and beauty and kindness and quirky aristocratic ways and intellectual excitement and most of all, love: they're the family she never had, the family she always wanted for herself, the kind of people she hardly dared to dream might really exist.

The reader keeps expecting something to go terribly wrong for Clara, but the truth (I hope this isn't too much of a spoiler) is that nothing truly does. She keeps on feeling her way, acting with more and more integrity and daring, and life keeps rewarding her for it. Toward the end of the book, she returns to her hometown and has a kind of reconciliation/grieving moment for her past, particularly her mother, whose extreme bitterness with life is the fate that Clara seems, as the book ends, to have been both shrewd and lucky enough to avoid. I found the lack of catastrophe in the book charming and unexpected and moving. It's nice to read about a strong woman who doesn't get punished for her strength, and it's even nicer to read about a woman who develops strength; it's a process I don't think gets written about too much, at least not when it comes to young ladies. (If I'm wrong, please suggest me relevant titles to read, because I like this plot.)

The moments when I was thinking 'three stars!' mostly concern lengthy descriptions of interior décor, with attendant aristocratic fawning; moments of datedness; and a seventy-page flashback after the first chapter, which tells the entirety of Clara's life story up to the point when the action of the book occurs. It's clear much later why it had to be told, but when I was in it I kept flipping forward and thinking, 'Really? Seventy pages before we can get back to the story?' There is also something about the Denhams' wonderfulness that, like the wonderfulness of the Tenenbaums themselves, initially charms but then begins to grate. But it doesn't grate too much; all in all, Jerusalem the Golden is a tightly focused, classic version of the young-person-goes-to-the-big-city-to-make-good story, one that's permitted to have a very happy, even inspiring ending.

And though I had moments of doubt, I now applaud myself for wishing to re-read it.

[Cloé · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was drawn to this book after reading and loving Drabble's The Millstone, which, I have to admit, I preferred to Jerusalem the Golden. It took me a while to get into this last book, but I did eventually find the story enjoyable.

I was initially hesitant due to the book's style, which I find a little pompous. The rather convoluted sentences do, however, very much match Clara's personality, and through them, Drabble makes her main character come to life.

The novel follows Clara, a young woman from the North of England, as she escapes her home town and goes to study in London. It explores the opportunity of self-advancement given by the post-war welfare state and questions whether breaking away from one's family is truly possible. Doing so, it shows how class impacts so many aspects of our daily lives, from our thoughts to our actions and relationships with friends as well as family.

I enjoyed the centrality given to the exploration of Clara's relationship with her friend Clelia, but was a little disappointed when that plot line is almost entirely abandoned towards the latter part of the book, when Clara starts dating Clelia's brother Gabriel.

Overall I thought it was a good read, which I'd recommend if only for the glimpse it offers into what 60s life in the UK might have looked like for young white middle class women.

[Elizabeth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jerusalem the Golden is the story of a person learning to leave behind the place she comes from. The writing is beautiful and makes the ordinary extraordinary. I found this mirrors the search and mission the protagonist, Clara, makes of her life. She is deeply flawed as is practically every character we meet. The bursts of gaiety against the backdrop of anguish, unfulfilled pursuits, and self-interest remind me a lot of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (which I loved). The writing is akin to a Fitzgerald's but with less attention to plot and more ornate explorations inside our main character. I enjoyed it and would read another of Drabble's books in the future.

[Charlotte · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this but it turned out to be more appreciation than enjoyment - an appreciation of Drabble's skill as a writer, of her quite brilliant portrayal of a naive northern girl, disgusted by the drab ordinariness of her upbringing and lusting for the thrillingly chaotic, bohemian complexity of upper class life. This was so well done it will stay with me. As a novel however I found it, and all of its characters, overwhelmingly unlikeable and the feeling on finishing it was one of relief.

[Bruce · Rating 5 out of 5]

By the ambitious use of her brains and her good looks, Clara Maugham escapes from a dismal home in the north of England to the delights of London and Paris. By the sympathetic use of detailed characterization Margaret Drabble portrays an unusual social climber. What Clara desires, and goes about obtaining, by whatever means necessary, is not social position and prestige, but companionship, compensation for an emotionally sterile childhood.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written in the 60s but doesn't feel dated in any respect. A good insight into the social climate of the times, and in particular the results of opening up educational prospects to the lower classes. The development of the lead character Clara is fascinating, and while her behaviour is questionable at times this doesn't alienate the reader in any way.

[Suzammah · Rating 2 out of 5]

The really affected language was laid on rather thick, as was the idea that the main protagonist was an underdog; this was rather unconvincing. A nice enough tale. Even though it was written and set afterwards, this could almost be a prequel to the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie with Clara Maugham growing into Brodie's shoes.

[Af · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's undeniable chick-lit, but an amusing read. At times I even suspected bits of the funny-for-being ridiculous parts were deliberate...

[Rosaline Hawkins · Rating 2 out of 5]

Beautifully worded but not much happened.

[Kayla Hertz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Achieves true formal perfection. Overwhelmingly impressive and masterful. Not the most pleasurable read in the world, though unputdownable from the second half.

[Kevin Keller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didn’t really do it for me. From the plot, should have been a fun read—small-town girl goes to college, gets pseudo-adopted by a rich and intellectual family, starts an affair with their gorgeous, married son, and goes on a trip with him to Paris—but most of it was disturbing and saddening. Nobody ever enjoys anything. The protagonist responds to pleasurable events by having headaches that last for days and throwing up. She’s obsessed with her mother! That’s sort of the point of the book, but eventually it gets very tiresome.

Clearly influenced by Iris Murdoch: one character, a dreamboat, is caught reading a Murdoch novel during work hours. I prefer Murdoch, but also am maybe being a little harsh on this book.

[Jim · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is my third Drabble—preceded by The Golden Child and The Millstone, in that order—and I’m not sure I’ll be in too much of a rush to read another which is not to say that any of the books are bad books because they’re not but I’m not finding myself captivated by her in the same way as Anita Brookner keeps my interest despite ploughing a similarly narrow furrow. If I do go back to her I’ll be choosier and avoid books where the protagonist is a northerner out of water, not that I can’t relate. Some writers have a hard job letting go of the past and Drabble’s clearly still working through her family issues in this one which I don’t mind but I would’ve hoped that one book would’ve been enough to get it out of her system but who am I to judge?

Clara Maugham comes to London from the fictional town of Northam somewhere up north. Hard to say whether her family is archetype or caricature but they seem to embody the worst qualities of northerners: humourless, reserved, undemonstrative, socially awkward. When Clara moves to London she just marvels at everything but is especially drawn to a glamourous young women called Clelia Denham who embodies everything Clara aspires to be. Oddly the two become friends in that strange way friendships develop out of thin air—always amazes me how that happens—and soon Clara is absorbed into Clelia’s life and is introduced to her siblings, Amelia, Magnus, Gabriel and Annunciata.

At first I thought that something might develop between Clara and Clelia, especially since Drabble mentions crushes on girls earlier in the book, but, no, Clara ends up falling for Gabriel:

The fact that he was already married was to her merely an added enticement, for she had always fancied the idea of a complicated, illicit and disastrous love. She had up to this point spent much time gratuitously complicating various perfectly straightforward affairs with her own contemporaries, in the hope of discovering the true thick brew of real passion, but her efforts had not had much success; she had lacked the ingredients. And after her acquisition of Clelia, earlier that year, she had detached herself entirely from her one thin, current attempt at intrigue with one of her professors: an intrigue which she had fostered more for its lack of orthodoxy than for any progress that it might be expected to make.

So that when Gabriel knocked upon her door, she was positively waiting for him. And she knew as soon as she set eyes upon him that he was what she wanted.

From this point Clelia practically vanishes from the narrative despite the two women being virtually inseparable and I found that a bit annoying even if when one is in love everything bar the thing loved fades into the background.

The book covers a year in Clara’s life (discounting flashbacks) and so she doesn’t have much time to grow emotionally but it’s clear that there’s no going back even though she is compelled to return home briefly in the book’s last chapter; there we get to see how much she’s changed even in that short a time but we also see how important it is that she stays away:

‘I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me why you didn’t come any earlier,’ said her mother, after another long pause.

And Clara, who had been toying with the idea of saying, I was in Paris with a man, as some desperate final appeal to that young woman leaning on a gate forty years ago, found naturally that such an appeal was impossible, against nature; and equally impossible was the only other possible reply, which would have been to answer this dull uninflected demand in kind, by saying, ‘No, I am not going to tell you.’ Freedom abandoned her, the pitiful ineptitude of freedom, and she found herself once more, as of old, basely prevaricating, terrified into deceit, mumbling shamefully on about examinations, and having been away on a course, and not having received messages.

The “woman leaning on a gate” was her mother. Before she visits her mother Clara finds some old photographs and notebooks and gets a surprising insight into the woman her mother might’ve been but who she would dismiss now just as she would dismiss Clara’s chosen life path.

Her mother’s world is one preoccupied with appearances. Oddly although Clara looks as if she’s escaped from all that the truth is, at her core, she probably hasn’t:

‘I don’t feel free of it,’ she said. ‘It’s a part of me for ever, I don’t want it to be a part of anyone else. I can’t be free, but there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be thought to be free, is there?’

Of course we never learn what happens to Clara. She won’t end up with Gabriel, that’s pretty much a given, but she may end up with someone like him. What she’ll never end up is being Clelia no matter how much she imitates her.

There’s some wonderful language in the book—I especially enjoyed “he lived in London in perpetual fear of surprisal”—and that goes a long way with me but I do have to say that I found myself losing interest when Gabriel moved centre stage. I think that might be why I preferred The Millstone. I’ve read several times that Clara is one of Drabble’s least sympathetic characters and despite her upbringing I never found myself rooting for her as I definitely did for Jeanette in Oranges are Not the Only Fruit.

[Jonny Lawrence · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another classic from Drabble! Funny, sharp, incisive — much as in some of Drabble’s other work I’ve read, I find myself captured by the characters whose ideas and identities seem to gel very much with my own experiences of the world / society

[Katie Hunter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful, rich writing - I really enjoyed it:)

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review to come perhaps. Although I'm not sure if I have much to say. It was an interesting novel though by far unexceptional. Drabble's writing and language are a pleasure, however.

[Estelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a short novel, so not a burdensome read. It provides a great texture of 1960s Britain, showing how the post-war welfare state helped to aid social mobility. Class also has a geographic element in this novel, with the working class industrial north contrasted against the affluent, intellectual south. The main character is not someone you necessarily like. She's more interested in thinking the 'right' thing than thinking for herself. Similarly, she also seems to view others as commodities in her own social advancement rather than foster real emotional connections. Despite this, she is also a character many people (including myself) from provincial backgrounds would identify with; her thirst for sophistication, experiences and a life richly lived. This is a solid coming of age novel, though in my opinion, not a masterpiece.