The Needle's Eye by Margaret Drabble

First published: 1972

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: The late 1960’s

Locale: London

Principal Characters:

• Simon Camish, a successful barrister specializing in labor law
• Rose Vassiliou, Simon’s friend, a divorced mother of three
• Julie Camish, Simon’s unhappy wife
• Christopher Vassiliou, Rose’s former husband
• Emily Offenbach, Rose’s longtime friend

The Novel

Simon Camish and Rose Vassiliou both lead barren lives before they form a friendship. Simon has been reared in genteel poverty and has made a successful career in law through rigid self-control and habitual denial of his emotions; he hates but refuses to respond to the attacks made upon him by his wife, Julie. Rose has survived a sensational life. The daughter of wealthy but uncaring parents, she was sent abroad with considerable publicity to separate her from her immigrant lover, Christopher, but married him on her return, after her twenty-first birthday. She attracted renewed attention from the press when she gave away a large inheritance and insisted on living on the edge of poverty and rearing her children in a rundown section of London. Still later, the newspapers exploited the sensational aspects of her divorce.

Simon and Rose become good friends largely because they are so different. He has struggled all of his life to attain affluence and security, while she has eagerly thrown both away. He has become unable to express his emotions, while she cannot contain hers. He lives in misery with his wife and refuses to fight with her over their children, who he recognizes are being harmed by the domestic situation; Rose has divorced her husband. She feels great guilt over separating him from their children, despite the fact that their marriage had turned out badly, and Christopher had abused her physically and verbally, even after their divorce. In his visits to Rose’s shabby house, Simon feels great comfort and is able to relax, while Rose learns to lean on him for legal advice and to admire his self-denying steadiness. While both believe that they would enjoy being married to each other, no sexual element enters their relationship.

The action of the novel is precipitated by Christopher Vassiliou’s filing of a legal demand to take the three children from Rose. On the surface, the suit should be no threat to Rose, but as she warns Simon, her former husband acts on impulses which he refuses to abandon. Despite the support of Simon and of Emily Offenbach, who has been close to Rose since school days, Rose weakens under the strain. Eventually, faced with a new aspect of Christopher’s assault on her custody of the children, she tells Simon that the only way she can secure peace is to let Christopher win, although he has no suitable place to keep them. Christopher ruins his chances, however, by sending Rose a telegram informing her that he plans to take them abroad and out of the reach of British law. It is an empty threat: He only takes them to the home of Rose’s parents, who bitterly resisted the marriage of Christopher and their daughter but who have become close to Christopher, who now works for Rose’s father and is successful financially.

In the liveliest section of the novel, Simon leads Rose through the legal tangles of getting an injunction to prevent Christopher from taking the children abroad, involving other lawyers and a judge who must be tracked down on a holiday weekend. After the injunction is granted, they learn from a telephone call from Rose’s older son that the children are safe, and Simon and Rose decide to go to her parents’ country home to pick up the children. They are met by a contrite and friendly Christopher, and Rose is able to meet with her parents for the first time since her marriage. It is no reconciliation, since her parents continue to disapprove of her, but Rose, Simon, and Christopher spend the night in easy conversation, and they spend the next day picnicking by the shore with the children.

Within the next eighteen months, Christopher and Rose are reunited, although they are no more suited to each other than they had been previously. As a couple, they become friendly with Simon and Julie, and the latter seems to mellow, a development which makes Simon’s domestic life much more tolerable, although he is no closer to his children. Rose allows her life to become economically easier, and although she refuses to leave her depressed neighborhood, ironically the neighborhood itself is in the process of gentrification. She remains a friend of Simon, but they cannot be as close as they had been.

The Characters

The delineation of characters is the heart of Margaret Drabble’s achievement as a novelist. Both Simon and Rose are presented in complete detail; their unhappy childhoods, which made them the adults they have become, are described fully through flashbacks. Simon’s discomfort at his wife’s dinner parties is made clear, as is Rose’s preference for quiet evenings in her shabby living room over the social events to which she is still invited. Simon is depicted as an admirably moral man who willingly assists others but also as a man who cannot act on even his best impulses. When Rose tells him of her plan to surrender the children, Simon knows that there must be a way to dissuade her and to convince her to live with him, an arrangement which would make them both happy, but he allows her to leave his office without saying anything. At the end, he makes no objection to Rose’s reconciliation with Christopher, even though he knows that it will not make Rose happy.

Rose is a fascinating character. Her rejection of her family, her determination to marry Christopher and to give away her inheritance, demonstrate strength of character as well as a moral compulsion, acquired through the woman who was her nurse during Rose’s childhood. At the same time, Rose is in many ways weak. She has no compunction about imposing her troubles on Simon, she knows that she had helped precipitate Christopher’s violence by her own shrewishness, and she gives way too readily to her emotions. Despite these weaknesses, she is finally an admirable character, with her own consistency. Her reconciliation with Christopher is a manifestation of her willingness to sacrifice her own happiness to the well-being of others, in this case her children, whose lives can be calmed only by such a resolution. It is the same self-denial that led her to give her inherited money to an African school.

Christopher does not appear directly until the second part of the novel, but he becomes clear through his long talk with Simon and through Rose’s recollections of her marriage. The child of immigrants, he genuinely loved Rose and did not marry her for her money; like Rose, however, he had lost the original passion by the time they were able to marry. Frustrated in marriage, he devoted his energies to making money and eventually ingratiated himself with Rose’s hostile family, sharing his father-in-law’s fascination with the ways of making money. While capable of neglect, he genuinely loves his children and enjoys the excitement they feel in his expensive car, even while he also enjoys the knowledge that in exciting them he is making Rose’s life more difficult.

The minor characters are also individuated in interesting ways. Julie Camish, like Rose, grew up in a wealthy family but has reacted in a totally different way. As a child, Julie was indulged in every way by nouveau riche parents, until she was shocked when her father totally refused her demand to go to an art school. She realized that Simon was the best she could attain, and she had, in effect, forced him to marry her, as Simon is fully aware. Using her family’s money as well as Simon’s, as he becomes successful and affluent, she tries to find security in buying new clothes, new decoration for the house, and a big new car. She constantly makes and abandons new friends. Miserable herself, she tears at Simon, in public and in private. Only at the end does Rose’s friendship seem to bring her some maturity. Such other characters as Rose’s older son Konstantin, her friend Emily, and her father, as well as Simon’s mother, are equally distinctive.

Critical Context

The Needle’s Eye is a novel very much in the tradition of Henry James. Drabble’s technique is to present dramatic scenes, separated by long passages of exposition in which the omniscient narrator takes the reader into the thoughts, memories, and impressions of her two protagonists, a method which places much more emphasis on character than on action. The third-person narrator is also free to make comments about the folly or wisdom of the characters’ actions and to provide information about the interior lives and the desires of other characters.

In attitude, also, Drabble is in the Jamesian tradition. Human life is rich with possibility, but too much is beyond the reach of those who have chosen their own destinies; they can only struggle with life and hope to become content at last with what they can salvage. Rich and poor are equally captives, and neither money nor poverty can provide assurance or freedom to choose. Like the characters in James’s later novels, Rose and Simon learn much, but knowledge brings them only the ability to accept their lives, not the freedom to change them.

Bibliography

Davidson, Arnold E. “Parables of Grace in The Needle’s Eye,” in Margaret Drabble: Golden Realms, 1982. Edited by Dorey Schmidt.

Dixson, Barbara. “Patterned Figurative Language in The Needle’s Eye,” in Margaret Drabble: Golden Realms, 1982. Edited by Dorey Schmidt.

Lay, Mary M. “Temporal Ordering in the Fiction of Margaret Drabble,” in Critique. XXI (1980), pp. 13-84.

Rose, Ellen Cronan. “Things That Have Never Been Written About: The Needle’s Eye,” in The Novels of Margaret Drabble: Equivocal Figures, 1980.

Sadler, Lynn Veach. Margaret Drabble, 1986.