Bent Out Of Shape

TITLE: THE GATES OF IVORY

AUTHOR: MARGARET DRABBLE

PUBLISHER: VIKING; 464 PAGES; $22

THE BOTTOM LINE: A final installment in a fictional trilogy on the way we live now.

THIS NOVEL, MARGARET DRABble’s 12th, concludes an ambitious project that the author began with The Radiant Way (1987) and continued in A Natural Curiosity (1989). Essentially, Drabble has been trying to counter the solipsistic bent of so much contemporary fiction, that wan parade of heroes and heroines talking to themselves — usually about themselves — and deaf to anything beyond the echoes of self-consciousness. Novels, particularly Victorian triple-deckers, once made room for the outside world, for the ways that history, politics, economics, etc., impinged on the lives of ordinary people. Are such narratives impossible now, or have most novelists simply quit paying attention to current events?

Like its two predecessors, The Gates of Ivory offers fascinating answers to such questions. For one thing, incorporating raw reality tends to bend a novel out of artistic shape. Drabble’s principal narrator, who sometimes seems omniscient and at other times just as confused as the characters in the story, wonders at one point whether it is even justifiable to extract a novel from the chaos of modern life. “A queasiness, a moral scruple overcomes the writer at the prospect of selecting individuals from the mass of history, from the human soup. Why this one, why not another?”

Without such choices, of course, a novel is inconceivable; no book can include everything. So Drabble’s central characters again include the three women, friends since their days at Cambridge, who have dominated the trilogy — Liz Headleand, Alix Bowen and Esther Breuer. But this time, most of the story belongs to Liz, a twice-divorced psychotherapist who lives comfortably in London’s St. John’s Wood. It is she who receives by mail an odd package containing notebooks, scrambled manuscript pages and what appears to be the skeletal remains of a human finger. She assumes that all this has something to do with her friend Stephen Cox, a respected novelist who set off some two years earlier, hoping to get into Cambodia and gather material for a play about Pol Pot. And it is she who finally decides to go to Cambodia herself to find out whether Stephen is alive or dead.

Liz may not know Stephen’s fate, but the reader is left in little doubt. Scarcely a third of the way into the story, Drabble’s narrator remarks, “But he will not die for a while yet.” Instead of suspense, the emphasis of this novel falls on what it feels like to be alive and aware at a specific historical period, in this case the first six months of 1988. And Drabble’s rather disjointed panorama of diverse characters caught in the amber of time produces an eerily convincing sense of life in a technologically advanced society, of the horrors that are reported electronically — say, from the killing fields of Cambodia — and those that may erupt immediately down the street or in the next room.

The Gates of Ivory can be read profitably with no knowledge of the novels that lead up to it. But Drabble’s trilogy, now complete, stands as an ungainly, brave and penetrating attempt to find a place for fiction in the matter-of-fact way we live now.