Margaret Drabble has always been a favourite of mine. But NOT this time.
I hate this book (2 stars cuz of her writing skills). I have a brain-damaged daughter (now age 54) who is definitely GOLD to me. But real life is so different. This book is a jumbled up cartoon. I hate even paragraphs that make rearing & living with a brain damaged child - a comforting, joy-filled "piece of cake". A passive child who never causes a speck of fuss and smiles all the time because she is heading no where, has no ambitious drive. Ooo, the more I think of this book the more outrage floods me. Perhaps that's the gig--to take our minds off the real world's outrages. ( )

The story of anthropologist Jessica Speight and her developmentally delayed daughter could have been much more than came out. The biggest mistake Drabble made was to make the narrator a friend (Nellie) who tells the story from the outside. The result is so far removed from the real experience that it sound superficial and indifferent.

What happened to the old creative writing class adage "Show, don't tell" in this book? There is a minimum of dialog or immediate descriptions of incident. Nellie does not convey Jess's emotions about having a handicapped child.

In short I was bored stiff and disappointed. An experience writer like Drabble should have known better. ( )

not much happens in this novel. Jess has a mentally challenged daughter who is the pure gold baby. This novel is about their life together told by a third person who is a friend. A started skipping pages three quarters of way through this novel. ( )

Drabble takes advantage of being in her seventies to write a novel with a very long time-base that has nothing at all of the constructed feel of an historical novel about it. It's rather like what she does in the Headleand Trilogy, following a set of female friendships over several decades, but stretched out to something like fifty years.

At the core of the story is the relationship between anthropologist and journalist Jess and her daughter, Anna, who has special needs and has to be cared for constantly. Jess has a group of women friends, including Eleanor the narrator, who all move in the same North London liberal middle-class professional world, and mostly have children of the same age. Drabble uses this to look at the way attitudes and behaviour in the group change with age and changing times (there's a lot of "...which we then still believed to be healthy"), but also as a frame on which to hang wider reflections on historical change. Through Anna, and contacts Jess makes as a result of caring for her, we learn about the ways attitudes and professional practices around mental health changed between the R.D. Laing era and Austerity, and we also move outside the strict timeframe of the book to look at - for instance - the different ways various famous writers dealt with having a "mad" family member (Jane Austen's family doesn't come out of the comparison well!).

Jess is an anthropologist for a reason, of course, and there's also a thread in the novel about our attitudes to Africa and how they have changed - Livingstone and Mungo Park are important offstage characters in this, and there are various present-day African characters who flit in and out of the story.

On the other hand, this also seems to be a novel that puts the whole idea of ageing and historical change into doubt, since Anna, the charming and lovable centre of the story, is also a person who doesn't develop emotionally or intellectually, and who doesn't experience time in the way a "normal" adult would.

I always enjoy Drabble's writing - she has a marvellous way of telling us things she feels we ought to know without ever seeming to lecture us. But this was a little bit less satisfying than some of her others, perhaps because she felt inhibited in what she could do with the character of Anna without appearing intrusive or patronising?

---

Perhaps the real mystery of this book is in the cover-art. David Bailey's 1962 photograph of Jean Shrimpton in New York is admittedly rather lovely, but since the story has absolutely nothing to do with New York, models, the swinging bit of "swinging sixties", or streetcars, it's not easy to see the relevance. Odd, when this is a book where quite a number of significant photographs play a part in the story, that they should hit upon one that doesn't... ( )

This is a graceful novel that explores the theme of support by family and friends through a lifetime. It is a moving account of Jess and her care for her daughter Anna, who has a medical condition that means that she can never live a solely independent life. Margaret Drabble’s touching book follows them from the 1960s for over 50 years and delicately highlights the continuing aid given by their family and friends, both adults and children and how this reward of friendship and help is returned by Jess and Anna which leads to a positive sense of community in their north London area.