Margaret Drabble
The Witch of Exmoor
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1996. Pp. 299. $29.99
Reviewed by Nora Foster Stovel

The Witch of Exmoor (1996) is a state-of-England novel about the Palmers, a middle-class family that extends to three generations and several social strata, beginning with Frieda Haxby Palmer, “the self-elected witch of Exmoor, the daughter of the Fens” (20). Frieda, a brilliant eccentric who climbed out of the social swamp up the ladder of literature through her study of Queen Christina, produced three upwardly mobile children, and retired to the mouldering mansion of Ashcombe on the coast of Hampshire, where she reigns as a recluse over a gothic welter of skulls and spiders. The novel opens on an idyllic pastoral scene as Frieda’s children and their families enjoy a dinner party at her son Daniel’s old farmhouse: “Begin on a midsummer evening. Let them have everything that is pleasant,” writes Drabble invitingly. “Let us say that we are in England, in Hampshire, and that we approach … the end of the twentieth century” (1). But the wary reader takes warning from the sign at the Palmers’ Old Farm: “beware of vipers breeding” (9).

The Palmer family, with its in-laws and hangers-on, represents a cross-section of contemporary English society: Daniel, a lawyer, with his wife, Patsy, and their grown children, Emily and Simon, the latter a student at Oxford; Rosemary with her husband, Nathan, a Jewish advertising executive, and their children, Jessica and Jonathan; and Grace, known as Gogo, with her husband, the political media figure, sociologist David D’Anger of Guyanese aristocracy, and their only child, the chilling Benjamin. “So there you have them,” the narrator intrudes: “The middle classes of England” (22).

But this “Last Supper” is scarcely a pastoral idyll: the family, bored with the problem of “What to do about mother” (4), play “Unhappy Families” (3), a game at which they excel. David D’Anger introduces his social game of “The Vale of Ignorance,” in which players imagine ripping off the veil to envision “the brave new world of Social Justice.” This dangerous game introduces not a Utopian vision, however, but a dystopic portrait of contemporary Britain, one that allows Drabble to indulge her leftist political views and to explode “the myth of rural England” (17) through this postmodernist pastiche, as “The rural England of the advertising commercial is superimposed on the palimpsest of the England of Hampshire in the 1990s, and that again is superimposed upon the reality of the past, the unknowable reality of history. The layers of image fade, fuse, fix, peel, wrinkle, part …” (18). Drabble’s family novel of manners turns out to be yet an­other state-of-the-nation chronicle.

Benjamin D’Anger, Frieda’s favorite, plays his own “Power Game.” As “Master of the Game” he dominates his acolytes, cousins Jessica and Jonathan, and dictates the disposition of Decapolis, a four-cornered city distinguished by the Island of the Dead and Siege House of Hope and Despair that suggests a microcosmic model of Drabble’s dystopic vision of contemporary Britain. One hopes “To float free of all this, to begin again. So heavy we become, and so entrenched. Our feet are stuck in the clay. We are up to the knees, no, up to the waist, in the mud of the past ...There is no future. There are no choices left. It has all silted up around us. We are stuck in our own graves” (20).

Frieda plays her own dangerous game with her progeny, summoning them to a “Timon’s Feast,” at which she feeds them meatless hamburgers. Later she dies mysteriously, falling off a cliff near Ashcombe into the sea, from which she is dragged days later, identifiable only by her dentures. The cause of her death-accident, suicide, or murder-remains mysterious. She exacerbates the family feud by leaving a will favoring her grandson Benjamin, plunging him into depression and suicide. But she has drawn up a new will, leaving everything to David D’Anger’s “Just Society.” Her family do not know if this is an idealistic impulse or the last laugh of “the witch of Exmoor” (9). Her past is pieced together, in postmodernist fashion, by Emily Palmer, who discovers her grandmother’s memoirs composed on her computer, still eerily running, replete with family secrets, such as the suicide of her pregnant sister Hilda, when she investigates Ashcombe for clues to Frieda’s fate.

Drabble has increasingly indulged a playful narrative game of the intrusive narrator, but here such playful interjections become serious, suggesting the arbitrariness of the fiction and depriving her characters of any illusion of autonomy. One reviewer accused Drabble of “political puritanism,” for she treats her characters “like criminals on authorial probation” put in “the stocks of fictional predestination and pelted with adjectives.” Certainly she judges her characters harshly, meting out dire fates: “Sorrow has come upon the Palmers, the Herzes and the D’Angers. They had seemed to be doing so well. It is hard to say which suffers most” (261). And she itemizes their sufferings. This is closure with a vengeance: “We are nearing the end. Soon we can go for the kill. Indeed, for the overkill. Frieda has killed Hilda, and we have killed Frieda, and Benjamin has tried to kill himself. There will be one or two more deaths, but not many. Some will survive” (250-51).

The novel is structured in eight chapters, whose titles-“The Vale of Ignorance,” “The Valley of Rocks,” and “The Cave of Gloom”-suggest an allegorical, Bunyanesque narrative of doom. The high point of the novel is a bizarre scene in which a hind, escaping from a throng of horses, dogs, and men, leaps through an open window at Ashcombe to seek sanctuary behind the sofa, launching an examination of cruel sports and reminiscences of English legends of harts and hinds, and hinting that perhaps there may be a miraculous escape from this pessimistic portrait of doom.

Upon completing The Witch of Exmoor, Margaret Drabble accepted a contract to revise her edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature, a task that will prevent her from pursuing her creative writing career for a couple of years. So readers will have to wait to see if she will produce another novel before the millennium that may offer us a blueprint for the next century.