the garrick year

The Garrick Year by Margaret Drabble (William Morrow, 1965)

I believe I first read this book in 1979, during my first year at Hamilton College, in Elaine Hansen’s Modern Women Writers class.  We also read (I think) Jerusalem The Golden, A Summer Bird Cage,  The Millstone, and The Waterfall (along with Tell Me a Riddle by Tillie Olsen and The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood) and I remember loving these early Drabble novels and admiring them for their focus on the intimate lives of young women during a time when women’s lives were changing.  A few weeks ago, when I emptied my bookshelves in order to install new floor-to-ceiling shelves, The Garrick Year ended up on top of one of the many piles I had placed on the floor, and so when I was looking for a book to read, there it was, and I thought it would be interesting to read it again 40 years later.

It was interesting: this is Drabble’s second novel, (following A Summer Bird Cage).  It’s the story of Emma, a bright and beautiful woman who is married to a charismatic and sexy Welsh actor, David.  They have two children: Flora, who’s 3 or 4 years old, and Joe, who is a baby.  The Garrick Year takes place during the spring and summer in an early ’60s year, and is mostly set in Hereford, a small town near the Welsh border where an eccentric American woman has funded a new regional theatre, and David is hired as one of the company that will inaugurate the theatre with a season of three plays presented in repertory.

So Emma, David, and the children leave London (where Emma had just been offered a fabulous job as a news reader on TV, which the move requires she sacrifices) for Hereford, where they rent a house in the village.  Emma begins an affair with the director of the company, an older, rather pompous gentleman, who intrigues Emma but whom she doesn’t find sexy, so she and her lover spend most of their time together motoring around the countryside in his Jaguar and having meals in restaurants, where Emma habitually orders several appetizers rather than an entree, flirting with him but not encouraging his physical advances.  Meanwhile, unbeknownst to her, David is having an affair with Sophie Brent, the youngest and least talented actor in the company, but the most beautiful.

Emma is a smart and engaging narrator, but she isn’t very sympathetic.  She’s selfish, entitled, rude, lazy, and her behavior with the director (what’s his name?  Farquhar or some other pretentious English surname) becomes tiresome and boring.  So there isn’t much narrative momentum in the middle third of the book, and I felt my interest steadily declining.  As if sensing this, in the book’s final third, Drabble suddenly overcompensates for the lack of action heretofore with a plane crash, a near drowning, and a car accident, all of which shock the plot into concluding rather hurriedly and easily.

But in the last few pages, as Emma looks back over the events of the summer and draws conclusions about her own and other’s behavior, the writing takes on a complexity and polish that transcends the floundering narrative and the book ends on a rich and wise grace note, which is, I think, indicative of the complexity, beauty, and wisdom of the books Drabble would soon write: The Needle’s Eye, Jerusalem the Golden, The Waterfall.

Paul Newman reads Margaret Drabble’s The Garrick Year