The Pure Gold Baby
December 2013
Margaret Drabble / Text Publishing
Early last year an essay addressing the murky territory of ‘Women’s Fiction’ appeared in the New York Times. Meg Wolitzer posited the existence of separate rules for ‘literature that happens to be written by women’, which ensure a relegation of their work to a lower realm, significantly amongst male readers. Sickly confections for covers, not employed for books written by a male author on the same subject, further alienated readers. This was followed with Maureen Johnson’s inspired tweet a few months ago, launching ‘Coverflip’, an initiative that invited the public to flip gendered book covers by redesigning them. The results, ludicrous and eerily echoing many modern book covers, highlighted the insidiousness of this form of marketing.
Thus Text Publishing has seen fit to bedeck The Pure Gold Baby, distinguished British author Margaret Drabble’s seventeenth novel, with a black-and-white photograph of a young woman gazing wistfully out a window, falsely evoking a sense of wartime romance. The story deserves a more elevated treatment.
The narrator, septuagenarian Nellie, is one of Drabble’s distinctive women; cerebral, of sly and acerbic wit (‘We didn’t know about cholesterol then. It hadn’t been invented.’ ‘I suppose we were asking for it, showing all that leg and accepting lifts from other people’s husbands’), a woman of her time. The young female narrators of Drabble’s earlier novels have ceded territory and, perhaps in what is a disavowal of youthful egocentrism, Nellie has chosen not to tell her own story but that of her good friend Jess, an anthropologist who embarks on an affair with a married professor in her early twenties, consequently having a child. In this way it is a revisit of the author’s earlier classic The Millstone, wherein narrator Rosamund, a female academic of the same era, becomes a single mother. Further parallels form because that book’s narrator is subsequently confronted with the bleak reality of a sick child when her baby Octavia is found to have a heart defect. Similarly, Jess is thrust into a parallel universe when it becomes clear that Anna, her adored and beautiful young child of sunny disposition, is a child unlike others. Hence Jess becomes not merely a mother but life-long carer.
Where it departs from the earlier narrative, beyond its more removed perspective, is in its sweep; Drabble chronicles societal and demographic changes from the sixties until now by focusing on a particular area of North London, Finsbury Park, and the trajectory of a set of friends over these decades. Alongside this is a textured, albeit disengaged study of parenting a child who doesn’t fit mainstream expectations. The Pure Gold Baby further enters the realm of cultural history as Jess becomes obsessed with historical and contemporary institutions, philosophies and methods of caring for society’s vulnerable.
A human portrait with interpolations into the ethics of methods of care, anthropology, missionaries, genetics, ageing and philosophy, this novel is intensely multivocal. At one dismantled rural asylum, Jess observes previous inmates’ initials carved into the tree trunks, ‘The grey bark has risen to enfold them, the sap has risen within them and swelled their lips, but still they speak.’ Drabble gives witness to them and to so much more in prose that often reaches the luminous.
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