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Summary
Summary
Candida Wilton--a woman recently betrayed, rejected, divorced, and alienated from her three grown daughters--moves from a beautiful Georgian house in lovely Suffolk to a two-room walk-up flat in a run-down building in central London. Candida is not exactly destitute. So, is the move perversity, she wonders, a survival test, or is she punishing herself? How will she adjust to this shabby, menacing, but curiously appealing city? What can happen, at her age, to change her life? And yet, as sheclimbs the dingy communal staircase with her suitcases, she feels both nervous and exhilarated.
There is a relationship with a computer to which she now confides her past and her present. And friendships of sorts with other women--widows, divorced, never married, women straddled between generations. And then Candida's surprise inheritance . . .
A beautifully rendered story, this is Margaret Drabble at her novelistic best.
Author Notes
Margaret Drabble was born on June 5, 1939 in Sheffield, England. She attended The Mount School in York and Newnham College, Cambridge University. After graduation, she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford during which time she understudied for Vanessa Redgrave.
She is a novelist, critic, and the editor of the fifth edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Her works include A Summer Bird Cage; The Millstone, which won the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize in 1966; Jerusalem the Golden, which won James Tait Black Prize in 1967; and The Witch of Exmoor. She also received the E. M. Forster award and was awarded a Society of Authors Travelling Fellowship in the 1960s and the Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1980.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The narrator of Drabble's teasingly clever new novel, like several of her fictional predecessors (in The Witch of Endor and The Peppered Moth) is a lonely, middle-aged woman disillusioned with her life and wary about her future. Betrayed and divorced by her husband, the smug headmaster of a school in Suffolk, and estranged from her three grown daughters, Candida Wilton moves to a flat in a rundown, slightly dangerous London neighborhood. To fill her days, she takes a class in Virgil, until the adult-ed building is taken over by a health club, which she joins for lack of anything better to do. The first section of the narrative is Candida's computer diary, in which she tries to make sense of the circumstances that have led her to this narrow place in her life, and her tentative efforts to reach out and make new friends. Though she apologizes for "the bleating, whining, resentful, martyred tone I seem to have adopted," Candida's account has the fresh veracity of someone who's a newcomer to London and to the state of being single. While Drabble paints her as sexually cold and maternally reserved, given to French phrases and snobbish assessments, Candida is a character the reader grudgingly admires as she tries to maintain hope that she can turn her life around. Then a small miracle occurs. A financial windfall allows her to take some of her fellow Virgil aficionados and two old friends on a trip to Tunis and Sicily, following the footsteps of Aeneas. Candida learns more about her companions as the trip progresses and gains some insights into her own behavior. The narrative takes several surprising turns, throwing the reader as off-center as Candida has become and proving that Candida herself has not been candid. But Drabble has: Candida's evasive account accurately charts the psychological territory of one who is suddenly cast adrift. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Drabble's shrewd and charming diarist-narrator escaped the prison of her unhappy marriage after the death of a student led to exposure of her head-master husband's affair with the girl's mother. Candida chooses not to stay in Suffolk and strangle in the web of gossip but rather to purchase a condo in a not altogether safe yet intriguingly multicultural London neighborhood. There she determinedly explores her new world and signs up for a class on Virgil's Aeneid. When the College for Further Education is transformed into a health club, she misses Virgil and the simpatico company of her fellow students and instructor. So she reconvenes the group, adds two demanding friends from her previous life, and convinces "the seven sisters" to embark on a pilgrimage to retrace the steps Virgil took in his tracking of Aeneas. And what a transforming journey it is. Drabble's prose is lustrous and enchanting, and her play on classical themes adds dimension to her discerning assessment of our digitized, global society, and the metamorphosis of a woman poised not for the expected capitulation to age and isolation but, rather, for splendid renewal. As in The Witch of Exmoor (1997) and The Peppered Moth [BKL F 15 01], Drabble creates a subversively witty novel that rivals works by Anita Brookner, Margaret Atwood, and Penelope Lively. --Donna Seaman
Guardian Review
Almost 40 years separate Margaret Drabble's latest novel from her first, A Summer Birdcage . While I was reading The Seven Sisters I couldn't help thinking aboutthat earlier book. Both bring an inexperienced woman to London, where she has to pit her wits alone against the metropolis and to learn her strengths and weaknesses in an alien environment. But what a difference there is between these two women. About 40 years separates not just the creation, but also the age of these heroines. Sarah, in A Summer Birdcage , comes fresh out of Oxford, while Candida of The Seven Sisters is feeling her way back into life after a late divorce. While Sarah was full of the irrepressible energy of youth, Candida is full of the regrets and ailments of age. Their characters are similarly antipathetic. Sarah is ambitious and articulate - as she puts it, "high-powered", and cruel to those who fall below her standards. Candida is just the sort of colourless woman that Sarah would look at and dismiss in an instant. But the most important thing that distinguishes the two women is the solidity of their creation. When Drabble created characters like Sarah, she was on sure ground. Whether you liked them or not, you felt that they were substantial; they seemed to be pushing their way into life. And through them Drabble conveyed something of the tics and tangles of the middle classes in late 20th-century Britain. Even if you had never read a Drabble book at all, you knew that this was what she was famous for - the Hampstead novel, as it became known. She convincingly captured the self-satisfied buzz and energy of a particular milieu. In comparison to that assured mimicry, Candida is a weightless being; her past is sketchy, her future uncertain, her voice generalised, her character vague. While Drabble forged her reputation on producing articulate, self-confident heroines, in Candida she has tried to go to the opposite extreme. The result is an artificial construct, as though even Drabble is not quite convinced by her own creation, but is doggedly trying to put together her story none the less. The very first sentences - "I have just got back from my Health Club. I have switched on this modern laptop machine" - are a good example of the dragging prose that has resulted. Although the book is not long, this style of writing makes it tiring to read. There is no push in its prose style, no pull in its plotting, to impel the reader along. The paragraphs jolt slowly down their tracks. They sometimes seem almost robotic, stuck together in series of one-clause sentences. "Some of my schoolfriends did. They worked in bookshops and in cafes. Some of them even had holiday jobs at Butlins. But my mother wouldn't let me. She thought shop work wasn't ladylike. She had never worked. She didn't expect to work." When she tries to get into Candida's head, Drabble seems to be imitating a well-known idea of how a provincial elderly woman would speak. "The surface of the pavements is shocking . . . Sony Walkman is just a phrase to me . . . I've been nervous ever since I had my bag snatched." Such plot as there is relies on the usual wish-fulfilment of novels about middle-aged, solitary women. Although Candida is at first alone, poor, shabby and depressed in London, she swiftly acquires a large amount of money, a circle of friends, better looks and clothes, and the attentions of a couple of pleasant single men. The story-teller, in such a tale, seems to be bringing to life the blandishments of a magazine agony aunt: get those teeth fixed! Go to an evening class and meet interesting people! Invite your new friends to join you on a trip abroad! And yet the book is not as predictable as this summary might suggest. Because, despite her accretions of good fortune, Candida never blossoms. Drabble was always good at creating rather heartless characters who could shrug off emotional ties. Candida is one of those cold fish and take her freezing asides on her own children: "Did I want children? I don't know, I loved them, when they were little, in a programmed biological manner . . . My oldest daughter, Isobel, is a very self-centred and avaricious young lady." Somehow one expects a novel to jolt such a narrator into warmer life, or to provide an explanation of her diffidence, but Candida remains merely disengaged. The only passion that Candida confesses to is a deep interest in Virgil's Aeneid . The social circle that she creates for herself has its beginning in some rather unlikely classes on Virgil at an adult education college, and the trip she and her friends go on is a pursuit of sites from Virgil's creation. These moments of confrontation with Virgil have clearly provided much of the inspiration for the novel, and yet because they are never emotionally knitted into Candida's own life, they seem somehow tacked on. It is after Candida tracks down the Sybil's cave in Cumae that Drabble provides the book's only jolt of surprise. She brings in another voice to explain that Candida is dead, and then Candida's cool voice returns, to explain that the second narrator was her own fiction and that she is still very much alive. In a richer fictional world, the faked death of the narrator would be the emotional centre of the novel. But here, no emotional turnaround occurs to match the formal gesture. "I am just one of those small, insignificant, unfinished people," Candida says grimly at one point. Drabble has managed to capture this sensation of insignificant life, but without forging it into significant fiction. Natasha Walter is the author of The New Feminism (Virago). To order The Seven Sisters for pounds 14.99 plus p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 066 7979. Caption: article-drabnew.1 The most important thing that distinguishes the two women is the solidity of their creation. When [Margaret Drabble] created characters like [Sarah], she was on sure ground. Whether you liked them or not, you felt that they were substantial; they seemed to be pushing their way into life. And through them Drabble conveyed something of the tics and tangles of the middle classes in late 20th-century Britain. Even if you had never read a Drabble book at all, you knew that this was what she was famous for - the Hampstead novel, as it became known. She convincingly captured the self-satisfied buzz and energy of a particular milieu. It is after [Candida] tracks down the Sybil's cave in Cumae that Drabble provides the book's only jolt of surprise. She brings in another voice to explain that Candida is dead, and then Candida's cool voice returns, to explain that the second narrator was her own fiction and that she is still very much alive. In a richer fictional world, the faked death of the narrator would be the emotional centre of the novel. But here, no emotional turnaround occurs to match the formal gesture. "I am just one of those small, insignificant, unfinished people," Candida says grimly at one point. Drabble has managed to capture this sensation of insignificant life, but without forging it into significant fiction. - Natasha Walter.
Kirkus Review
Following The Peppered Moth (2001), a novel based on her mother's life, Drabble goes even closer to the bone in a tale of late-middle-aged discontent. Recently dumped for a younger woman by husband Andrew, Candida Wilton is angry, estranged from her three daughters, and, as an abandoned housewife with no skills or prospects, disinclined to be patronized by overbearing Suffolk neighbors like Sally. She moves to a shabby section of London and begins studying The Aeneid at an adult education center; when it's shut down, she warily joins the trendy health club that replaces it. The first half, "Her Diary," offers Candida's bitter but often sharply funny observations of her smug ex, her status-seeking offspring, health-club members, and other residents of the new, multicultural London. Readers may agree when she writes, "What a mean, self-righteous, self-pitying voice is mine," but this long, grim opening section skillfully sets up "Italian Journey," the hesitantly happy description of a trip taken by newly affluent Candida (an unexpected pension windfall) to Tunis and Naples. She's following in Aeneas's footsteps under the guidance of the elderly Mrs. Jerrold, who taught the defunct Aeneid class. Other companions include childhood chum Julia, a bestselling novelist past her commercial prime; cheerfully hedonistic Cynthia, married to a wealthy gay art-dealer; and the loathsome Sally. All seven are no longer young, each wondering what Julia bluntly asks: "So what is the point of us?" Candida: "The solution to the problem is death." Part Three suggests that this may be the author's final answer, though her middle daughter angrily refutes many of Candida's previous assertions. Almost everything we thought we knew gets upended in Part Four, where Candida has built a new life and offers cautious hope for her future. Tough-minded, uncompromising, and not always a lot of fun. But Drabble's longtime admirers will cheer to see the author of The Needle's Eye and The Ice Age once again following her muse into uncomfortable places.
Library Journal Review
Lucinda Wilton pulls up stakes and settles into a dreary walk-up apartment in London for the adventure of her life. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
