A Natural Curiosity by Margaret Drabble
A Natural Curiosity, the novel from which I borrowed the name of my blog, is the middle volume in a trilogy that begins with The Radiant Way and ends with The Gates of Ivory. I’ve been a fan of Margaret Drabble since I was in high school, when I picked up a copy of The Realms of Gold at the library, more or less by chance. I first read her trilogy as it was coming out in the late ’80s and early’90s, and now that I’m rereading it I find it just as funny and strange and insightful and compelling as I did the first time. I’m not sure why it isn’t on everybody’s list of great works of the 20th century.
The trilogy centers around three well-educated Englishwomen in their forties and fifties: a psychiatrist, a social worker, and an art historian. Liz Headleand, the psychiatrist, is the first among equals, and The Radiant Way begins with a grand Tolstoyan party that she throws in her Harley Street home on the eve of 1980. Liz takes center stage in the last volume, which largely concerns her search for her friend Stephen Cox, a writer who has disappeared while on his way to Cambodia to research the life of Pol Pot.
I had remembered the middle book, A Natural Curiosity, as being a thin transition between the fatter volumes that begin and end the trilogy, and I was pleased to return to it and see how well it stands up on its own. Like most of Drabble’s novels, it is notable for its odd coincidences and authorial interjections. These drive some critics crazy, but I enjoy them, and they correspond to my sense of the unpredictable and unknowable way the world works. This is from page 141 of A Natural Curiosity:
Secrets, pigeon-holes, little plots. As a solicitor, Clive Enderby is aware that there are far more family secrets in the world than most people know of — well, if they knew of them, they wouldn’t be secrets, would they? People don’t want to think about these things. So they don’t. People want to believe in an ordered, regular world, of faithful married couples, legitimate children, normal sex, legal behaviour, decent continuity, and they will go to almost any lengths to preserve this faith. Any suggestion that ‘real life’ is otherwise tends to be greeted as ‘melodramatic’ or ‘implausible’.
Solicitors know better.The police know better. Social workers know better. Doctors, especially since the emergence of AIDS, know better. The subplots fester, break out, infect strangers. Dark blotches spread. Life is more like an old-fashioned, melodramatic novel than we care to know.
