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the witch of exmoor
BY MARGARET DRABBLE
---- ---- ---- ---- BY JO-ANN MORT why haven't British novelists exposed the inequities of post-Thatcherite England as Dickens challenged the injustices of Victorian times? That's the question Margaret Drabble posed last year in the British Observer, and "The Witch of Exmoor," with its marked Dickensian overtones, appears to be Drabble's attempt to do just that. "The Witch of Exmoor" is about what happens to the squabbling Haxby-Palmer clan when its matriarch, Frieda Haxby-Palmer -- the renowned author of a book titled "The Making of War" -- very suddenly decides to sell the family house and move to an isolated, ramshackle hotel on England's southwest coast. There she will presumably write her memoirs. That's also where, her heirs soon discover, she has significantly rewritten her will. The Dickensian overtones that Drabble injects include not only the theme of inheritance, but Frieda herself -- she's a Mrs. Havisham-like character who seems drawn, quite endearingly, from the pages of "Great Expectations." From the first sentence of this rich yet rather raw novel, Drabble establishes a 19th century-style omniscient narrator for her contemporary tale, and her ominous warning -- "Let them have everything that is pleasant" -- puts you on notice that something decidedly unpleasant is certain to happen. The Haxby-Palmer offspring inhabit a familiar Drabble terrain. Daniel and his sisters Rosemary and Gogo live in trendy London neighborhoods or the Hampshire countryside; they summer in Tuscany or the South of France and they vote Labor. Gogo's husband, David, runs as a Labor MP. This bunch is mostly well-meaning, but not as likable as you might expect. Drabble successfully chips away at the family's façade to show how the siblings, who appeared close enough to weekend and vacation together, become consumed with suspicion and ill will after they realize that their inheritance may have shifted out from under them.
David, a blending of "East and West," seems to hold the key to the future; Drabble clearly feels that England's fate in the next millennium will be determined by a society composed of immigrants from former British colonies. Drabble also interweaves a theme about the difficulty of creating a just society, though its entry into the plot is less successful than the rest of the book. David the Laborite says: "In practice, it's very difficult to design a society in which there's no bottom of the heap." Yet he tries through his political deeds, and he is aided by a bequest from Frieda. "The Witch of Exmoor" appeared in England before the Labor Party victory; doubtless, the fictional David would now be serving in Tony Blair's government. Indeed, her fictional MP would have his chance to try to make an unjust society more just, but Drabble appears to question how successful he could be at such an effort, largely because of the blinders worn by his relatives, who refuse to see the wreckage all around them.
Jo-Ann Mort, a member of the Dissent magazine editorial board, recently completed a novel.
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