Margaret Drabble's new novel is her largest and most serious work - a further
deepening of the awareness and intensity that were gathering force in her
previous novel, The Waterfall. Now, in The Needle's Eye, emotional
entanglement and confrontation are seen in inescapable connection to the bonds of money:
Money impinges, either as the bruisings of poverty or as the isolations that accompany luxury.
It warps identity: it tragically confuses the issues of responsibility and love.
The landscape of The Needle's Eye is almost Jamesian in its view of the coinage of emotion.
If Simon Camish likes Nick and Diana's expensive apartment, it is because he remembers
his childhood home as having been "too severely worn," too close to the subsistence level.
He is now a wealthy labor lawyer, through the sacrifices his mother made for him - and
through the money he has married. Guilt and mistrust are familiar emotions, and he has
reached that point where he guards his coldness, "polishing it like an old stone."
It shocks him, then, meeting Rose Vassilou, that he finds himself feeling tenderness
for this rather plain young woman who alternately displays anxiousness and a quiet elegance.
Rose is an eccentric, indeed notorious, heiress who, ten years before, at twenty-one,
had publicly defied her parents to marry a penniless man, then had written away her immense
fortune with one check and willed herself into a shabby but rigorous poverty.
Now she needs help, help to protect her children; and Simon, mysteriously drawn to her,
agrees to give it - an embarrassed acceptance that leads to totally unforeseen shiftings
of the heart. Simon, too long accustomed to experiencing in silence his wife's frustrated
anger, unable to confront his dubious motives for having married her, bungles his attempt
to tell Rose he loves her. And Rose cannot keep things straight: her moral conviction
that wealth is a sin, the endless confusions of everyday living without enough money,
the tortured question of where to place blame for the dreadful violence in her marriage.
Loyalties get complicated; decisions are made, and erased. Things, simply, change.
Rose's parents, once violently opposed to her marriage, now side with her
ex-husband - while he and Simon, presumed enemies, talk happily through the night as Rose falls asleep on the couch...
What emerges finally through Miss Drabble's meticulous and thorough rendering of her characters' desires and defeats is the incompleteness of life, and its absence of resolutions. The moral realism, the truth, with which she approaches their struggle for some kind of peace with their compromises, mark her maturity and power as a writer.
Margaret Drabble lives in England with her husband and three
children. The Needle's Eye is her sixth novel.
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