Margaret Drabble and the present tense

I’m usually not a fan of the present tense in fiction. It might be great for screenplays or crime fiction, where action in the moment is everything, but it can seem artificial if not done really well, and it can be an awkward anchor when you want to introduce a flashback or a thought about the future. 

Margaret Drabble, though, glides in and out of the present tense so fluidly that I rarely even notice, and achieves effects that might be available in no other way. Here’s a short example from The Gates of Ivory.

Stephen Cox sits strapped into his Club Class seat at Charles de Gaulle Airport waiting for take-off on the Air France flight to Thailand and Vietnam, with his new discreet professionless passport in his pocket. He does not regret handing over his key and his rent book and his last will and testament to Hattie Osborne. One should obey impulses. His impulses had not enabled him to comfort Hattie in the way she most needed, but an empty apartment, however small, was an acceptable offering. He wondered how she would get on with his mysterious and philanthropic landlord, the aptly named Mr Goodfellow. And would she remember to give the bank the note he had scribbled requesting cancellation of the standing order for rent? It did not matter much, one way or the other. The rent was very low, and Mr Goodfellow was too honest to allow himself to be paid twice over.

He had told Hattie he had no idea how long he would be away. He said this to everybody. It was the truth.

Drabble often starts a new scene with the present tense, as she does here. The little jolt of immediacy helps remind the sleepy or inattentive reader that we’re in a new place now, with a new character. But although she may drop the present tense inside a paragraph, she often continues with it for many pages. She may be somewhat more likely to use the past tense for past events, and somewhat more likely to use the present tense for scenes of great emotion or violent action, but she’s far from consistent in this. It seems that she shifts tenses by feel, in the way that people I met in Zimbabwe would shift from English to Shona and back again in their conversation, based on which language fit the subject best.

Earlier today I put down a novel after laboring through a couple of chapters of careful writing-school prose where every verb was active (sometimes too active) and every sentence studded with clever observations. Reading Drabble, who has long since earned the right to play with the conventions of the novel, makes me feel I can breathe again.