≉ูグ஦Many Layers of Modern Novels
̿ A Conversation with Margaret Drabble ̿interviewer : Miho NagamatsuThe interviewer met Margaret Drabble in the morning ofSeptember 15th, 2011, at the British Library, and talked withher mainly about her recent novels for about two hours.
The day was sunny and their conversation proceededsmoothly. During the conversation Drabble admitted that
her way of writing had gradually changed since heryounger days.

Nagamatsu : You wrote your first novel in the 1960s,
didn’t you ? I think your way of writing was similar to thestyle of your other early novels. As for the first three novels,
you used first-person narration. In your fourth novel,
Jerusalem the Golden, you used third-person narration but inthe fifth novel, The Waterfall, you used first-person andthird-person narrative shifting. Did you have any particularreason for using narrative shifting ?
Drabble : Yes, I used double narrative because it was a33 Web ⱥㄒ㟷ᖺ June , 2012

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33person who wasn’t sure about the truth of her own stories .
So she tells one story in the first person and one in the thirdperson. But she’s having an argument with herself about
what is the truth. So she’s discussing the truth with herself
and that’s a mixture of first person and third person. Andlots of people do it now. It was quite unusual then. It was thefirst time that I had tried it.
㻺 : But when you were young, you were against such
experimental novelists as James Joyce or Virginia Woolf.
You said, “I hate books which are deliberately confusing. I
aim to be lucid.” 1 I think narrative shifting is some kind ofwriting technique.
D : I don’t think it is very complicated as a technique. Imust say I am a great admirer of Virginia Woolf. So it’s notthat I don’t admire her work so much, I was reacting against
a different kind of experiment that was going around in the1960s, not Virginia Woolf’s modernism. I reacted against akind of French experimentation. It wasn’t Virginia Woolf I
was reacting against, it was much more recent ways ofexperimental writing.
N : I see. After The Waterfall, you wrote The Needle’s Eye in1972, didn’t you ? In The Needle’s Eye you wrote about aworking-class person. In your 60s novels, all the heroines
1 The

Writer’s Place: Interviews on the Literary Situation inContemporary Britain, “Margaret Drabble,” ed. Peter Firchow
Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1974 117.

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belonged to the middle class. This is the first time you
focused on a working-class person. Then, you published TheIce Age in 1977 after The Realms of Gold . You wrote about
the condition of England in this novel. In your 60s novels,
you wrote about the lives of heroines only. They are somekind of Bildungsroman, I think. However, your writing
themes seem to have gradually changed since your 70s novels .
Why did you change your themes ?
D : Well, I was always interested in the wider society. When
we’re very young, it’s very hard to write a broad novel. I
think most young people write quite small narratives . But asI got older, I felt more confident to be able to explore a larger
section of society. So I felt it was a mission of growing older,knowing more people, knowing more people in different
parts, different walks of life.
N : Next, I would like to ask you about your recent novels.
You wrote four novels after 2000. They are The Peppered
Moth, The Seven Sisters, The Red Queen and The Sea Lady.
The Peppered Moth is a story of four generations. You wrote
about family, history and heredity. Compared to your earlier
novels, these themes are complicated. I’ve read The Seven
Sisters many times, and I feel it’s such an intricate novel.
What do you think ?
D : Well, it’s . . . yes. It’s a simple story about a woman wholoses her husband.
N : Yes, it’s a simple story from one point of view. But its
content is not so simple. It is a computer journal and in the35 Web ⱥㄒ㟷ᖺ June , 2012

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first chapter you used first-person narration. In the second
chapter you used third-person narration. If we focus on thecontent, there is a climax at the end of the second chapter.
But the novel doesn’t end there and continues. You spared
only about thirty or forty pages for the third and fourthchapters. But these two chapters are so condensed. You
named the title of the third chapter “Ellen’s Version” and you
used a different narrator here. Ellen pretended to havewritten this chapter, but actually the heroine, Candida
herself, wrote it. In the final chapter you used both firstperson and third-person narration. What’s more, Virgil’sAeneid, book VI, is present in the background. Its content isvery similar to that of his version of Aeneas’ visit to theUnderworld. You used a lot of techniques when writing it. Itseems as if there exists another novel within the novel.
D : Well, I’d forgotten till you reminded me that it has got
such a narrative complexity because the actual story is quite
simple: the woman leaves her house and goes on a journeywith her friends. But I suppose the narrative, the subject, is
her discovery of herself as an independent person. And herusing different voices is due to trying to find out who she is
now that she is alone. And of course all the voices are written
by me as a narrative for there are a lot of questions when wewrite a diary. Do we tell the truth in a diary ? Do we lie in adiary ? And what is the true story ? Or even in a diary, are
we trying to make ourselves look good or are we able to tell
the truth ? I think we can’t. And I think even in a diary, wedeceive ourselves. So this was . . . it’s an experimental novel.
It’s about a woman writing for the first time. She’s not awriter. She is trying to write. But of course, I am a writer. Iknow what she is doing.
N : I suppose because it was a diary, you used several
techniques. But in your earlier days you said, “I aim to belucid.” 2 This novel doesn’t seem to accord with your former
words.
D : We change. We grow older. We change our ambitions
and we change our narrative styles. We change our ways oflooking at the world. And my early books were very simple,linear. They just followed one line. This, I think, presents. . . I see this presents problems to non-European readers
because most European readers know the framework of thestory of Troy and Aeneas and that journey they go on, andthe idea is familiar to the Italians of course and most English
readers. So it is expecting from the readers that kind of
background knowledge.
N : As you say, the framework of the novel itself is simple.
It is about a middle-aged woman’s life before and aftergetting divorced. But the way of writing is so complicated, I
suppose. You used a lot of techniques.
D : Yes. That’s very true. It’s very difficult, when you areold, to write the simple narrative which you used to writewhen you were young without repeating yourself. So I

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2 The Writer’s Place 117.
Many Layers of Modern Novels

37suppose with each novel you find new problems for yourself .
You create new problems. You find a new way of treating
material. I think it’s just a natural way or process of growing
older. Life becomes more . . . life is many-layered. When
you’re young, you have just one straight aim. And life seems
clear. You have an ambition and an idea. And as you getolder, life has many layers of memory and history and I thinkperhaps my novels have become more difficult because there
are so many layers of memories to do with this.
N : By the way, you are on good terms with Doris Lessing,aren’t you ? She got the Nobel Prize in 2007, in the year she
published The Cleft. I suppose you know the Irish novelist,Anne Enright. She published The Gathering in 2007. These
two novels were published in the same year. I think The Cleft
is totally different from her former novels. She has mainly
written about women’s lives and social matters. But in thisnovel she wrote about the beginning of human beings and weare bemused by it. The Gathering is also an intricate novel
like The Seven Sisters. Have you read it ?
D : Yeah, I did. It’s about a family in Dublin. Sort of tragicfamily of . . . and there’s a lot of memory, lots of going back. . . back in time.
N : Recently, I have been reading The Gathering andwhenever I read it, I always think of The Seven Sisters. They
are similar, not in the narration. Both seem to have anothernovel within the novel.
D : It is very difficult now to write a simple novel because

post-modernism destroyed the simple novel. People started towrite in a layered way and it’s very hard to go back. It isvery hard now to write a simple narrative . When I wasyoung, I didn’t worry about narrative techniques, I justwrote. But now even a young writer starting now, a young
literary writer, will be confronted with all these difficulties
about choices of narrative techniques. The literary novel has
become quite self-conscious. We worry about technique anda lot of novelists, most novelists, use multiple viewpoints,multiple narrative systems . . . some of which I find very
difficult, some of which I find quite boring. But it’s very
fashionable now, that kind of narrative layer.
N : You published The Seven Sisters in 2002 and Lessing
published The Cleft in 2007. In that year she got the Nobel
Prize and Enright’s The Gathering got a Booker Prize . I
think all of these novels are so intricate . When novelists write
novels, I suppose these days they are thinking of writingtechniques. When The Gathering was nominated for theBooker Prize, Enright said something like “I don’t write
straight novels.” 3 Judging from her words, I can assume it isa difficult novel.
D : But I think she also meant to say, “It’s not a happy
book. It’s about a very unhappy subject matter. It’s difficult

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3 Cf., “Anne Enright, ‘I Bring All of Myself to a Book,’ ” The

Man Booker Prizes, 8 July 2011 http㻦㻛㻛www㻚themanbookerprize㻚com㻛perspective㻛articles㻛99.
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39and it’s unhappy.” And I think she was saying, “I can’t write
a happy simple book, I can’t do that.”
N : I suppose another reason she writes difficult novels isthat James Joyce or John Banville has influenced her. They
are Irish so she has to be conscious of them.
D : Well, Joyce had an enormous influence on all Irish
writers and he influenced Banville. There’s a whole traditionof Irish literary writing but without Joyce, it wouldn’t exist.
It was Joyce who created that tradition. Any Irish writer isaware of that.
N : Once you said, “I don’t want to write an experimental
novel to be read by people in fifty years.” 4 But these days
your writing style is similar to that of experimentalists. Don’t
you think so ?
D : Yes, yes. I admire James Joyce. I mean, it’s not that I
don’t like his work. I think it’s quite a dangerous novel. AndI suppose my own work has become more experimental. But. . . yes, there was one branch of experimentalism that I
really didn’t like, which was the French 1960s and 1970s. But
even about that I’ve slightly changed my mind. I mean, as wegrow older, we re-read things, discover different things. Youdecide something you liked when you were young, you don’t
like any more, and then discover a new way of writing. So
we develop all the time. We go on and on. Even when we’re
4 Bernard

Bergonzi , The Situation of the Novel
Macmillam, 1970 65.

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old, we go on changing. And Doris Lessing is a very good
example of somebody who moves through many, many styles,
through realism, to science fiction, autobiography, historicalfiction. She has written dozens of books. They’re in very
different styles.
N : I think I now understand a lot more about your present
writing style and present writers’ difficulties in writing
novels. Thank you for explaining it to me.
D : Thank you.
Ọᯇ⨾ಖ஑ᕞዪᏊ኱Ꮫ෸ᩍᤵ

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