The Radiant Way by Margaret Drabble

First published: 1987

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Satire

Time of work: 1980-1985

Locale: London and the town of Northam in northern England

Principal Characters:

• Liz Headleand, a psychoanalyst who learns that her husband is leaving her for the boring Lady Henrietta Latchett
• Alix Bowen, Liz’s friend from college
• Esther Breuer, a close friend of Liz and Alix at college
• Charles Headleand, Liz’s second husband, a television executive
• Brian Bowen, Alix’s husband
• Shirley Harper, Liz’s younger sister
• Jilly Fox, Alix’s brilliant but ill-fated student
• Rita Ablewhite, the mother of Liz and Shirley

Form and Content

The Radiant Way, which has no chapter breaks, switches back and forth from one character to another and has an omniscient narrator who intrudes occasionally in a neighborly way to comment on the course of events. The narrative voice beguiles in its wit, allusiveness, and erudition. Symbols and myths pop up, and the clamor of public affairs and politics rumbles in the background, but the unfolding lives of Liz Headleand, Alix Bowen, and Esther Breuer evolve into a loose structure around which details fall into place.

Most of the action takes place in London, but Northam provides structural and thematic contrasts. The novel opens with the Headleand’s splashy New Year’s Eve party for two hundred guests from London’s professional circles, and the scene shifts abruptly to Northam, where Shirley Harper is grimly entertaining her husband Cliff’s brother and his wife, Cliff’s parents, and Brian Bowen’s father. Brian’s kind and likable father contrasts with Cliff’s disagreeable mother, whose every sly complaint grates on Shirley exactly as the old harridan intends. Such comic scenes recall the novels of Jane Austen, whom Drabble invokes at one point with the observation that “Jane Austen recommended three or four families in a country village as the thing to work on when planning a novel.”

No beginning, middle, and end shape Drabble’s account of five years in the England of the Margaret Thatcher era. Liz Headleand endures Charles’s abandonment of her in divorce and a wrenching removal from her fashionable Harley Street address. Her mother dies, and in rummaging through her mother’s closet she finds newspaper clippings that clear up the mystery of her fatherless upbringing and her mother’s long withdrawal from the world: Her father had apparently killed himself after committing a sex offense.

Alix Bowen suffers no painful divorce and discovers no skeletons in the family closet, but her worries about Jilly Fox climax in a visit to Jilly’s awful flat, or “squat,” as the homeless call a lodging in a dilapidated, unused building. Obscene and nightmarish murals cover Jilly’s walls, and she dismisses Alix, insisting that her life is over. When Alix leaves the squat, she discovers that neighborhood delinquents have let the air out of her tires. Returning the next day, Alix comes upon a crowd around her car and finds Jilly’s severed head on the front seat. She has become the latest victim of a serial killer known as the Harrow Road Horror.

Esther Breuer lives in the dangerous neighborhood of the murders, but is indifferent to the mean streets all around her; the discovery that the murderer lives in the flat above her stuns her. Her independent ways encourage alliances with unconventional people, none of whom is more unconventional than the Italian anthropologist Claudio Volpe, who serves for years as her platonic consort. Claudio studies werewolves, an eccentric preoccupation, perhaps, but a harmless one until he gives a scholarly lecture in which he describes straightforwardly his meeting in the Bulgarian forest with a werewolf who led him to his village. Esther and Claudio’s sister have been good friends for years, and after the Harrow Road murders and Claudio’s death soon after, Esther goes to Italy, where she spends most of her time engrossed in her studies of art history.

After leaving Liz, Charles Headleand settles in New York with Henrietta Latchett, but something goes awry with his television production plans among the Yanks, because Christmas of 1985 finds him at Liz’s new house in St. John’s Wood with all of their children. The hope that he had invested in The Radiant Way, his television production of twenty years earlier, has come to nothing. Strikes plague the country, and Charles has swung to the political Right. The Left has failed, and a new mood has arisen.

Context

Margaret Drabble has written a dozen novels chronicling the lives of modern women, works that are always closely observed and sincerely felt. One of her earliest novels, Thank You All Very Much (in America, The Millstone), presents the plight of a highly educated young woman who finds herself pregnant by a man she has no interest in marrying. Indeed, he does not even know that she is pregnant. Drabble’s sympathetic treatment of this theme is fixed in a larger context: As the unwed mother-to-be makes her way through the British system of socialized medicine, she realizes the many day-to-day obstacles faced by people of lesser education and resources. As an account of a young woman’s loss of innocence, The Millstone typifies Drabble’s concern with a human predicament that always overlaps with other people’s struggles to get on in the world.

This all-important social context in which Drabble situates her characters puts her more in the “great tradition” of F. R. Leavis than in any variety of feminism. In fact, Liz studied under Leavis at Cambridge and looks back with great pleasure on his dating classes, which involve taking an unidentified scrap of quotation and homing in on its date and author. Drabble studied at Cambridge and must have excelled at dating exercises.

Alix Bowen, in December of 1983, questions herself about her feelings on the state of affairs in London. Her answers are perhaps Drabble’s answers also: Although London is a more dangerous place than it was in 1979, it is probably not the Tories’ fault; although Brian thinks that a Labour government would have improved things, Alix has changed her mind from five years ago and no longer thinks so. Although the Metropolitan Police are probably corrupt, a Labour government would be able to do little to halt a largely inevitable decay. Although the left-wing groups mean well, they may be “positively encouraging the growing inequality of the society they claim to wish to redeem.” Despite all these doubts, Alix still calls herself a socialist.

Two later novels continue the characters of The Radiant Way:A Natural Curiosity (1989) finds Liz and Shirley learning more about their family background, and Alix caught in a familiar liberal dilemma; The Gates of Ivory (1991) takes Liz on a harrowing search for Stephen Cox in Kampuchea (Cambodia).

Bibliography

Duguid, Lindsay. Review of The Radiant Way. The Times Literary Supplement, May 1, 1987, 458-459. Praises the honesty and social consciousness of The Radiant Way but says that the “highly wrought prose” renders the political concerns “strained and unconvincing.”

Gray, Paul. Review of The Radiant Way. Time 130 (November 16, 1987): 87. Stresses the depiction of Thatcher-era England in this “odd hybrid, soap opera grafted onto newsreel,” that “engrosses” and actually “works.”

Hulbert, Ann. “Maggiemarch.” The New Republic 197 (December 14, 1987): 38-42. Sneers at Drabble’s “version of the emerging Social Democratic sensibility” and her “portentously detached and cliquish” style. The novel reveals no empathy, only smugness, and it revels in a “hackneyed symbolism.”

Stuewe, Paul. Review of The Radiant Way. Quill & Quire 53 (April, 1987): 33. A sour judgment on The Radiant Way as a feminist’s delight but “a pretty dismal trip” for other readers.

Updike, John. Review of The Radiant Way. The New Yorker 63 (November 16, 1987): 153-154. Rousing applause from another master novelist. Notes Drabble’s “chummy” way with her readers and praises “her lively mind showing its incidental erudition, its epigrammatic flair, its quick-witted impatience and impudence.” Mostly, however, Updike praises “her earthiness—her love of our species and its habitat—and her ability to focus on the small, sweaty intersections of mind and body, past and present.” These qualities make The Radiant Way “a rare thing—a novel we would wish longer.”