July 2006: The Red Queen

The New York Times Book Review
by Richard Eder
October 10, 2004

'The Red Queen': Babs Channels Lady Hyegyong

It is the arranged union of a camel and a sheep: acrobatic positioning, guided shoves and a mediocre prospect for progeny. ''The Red Queen'' inserts the voice of an 18th-century Korean princess into the midlife crisis of a modern British academic, a woman whose assiduous scruples and self-chastising desires will be familiar from other novels by Margaret Drabble.

Her latest splits sharply in two. The first part, rewriting the memoir of a historical figure known (in the most recent of several translations) as Lady Hyegyong, is a stark and brutal drama set in the court of imperial Korea. The second is a genial contemporary portrait of Dr. Babs Halliwell, a person of swoony compulsions, struggling intellect and half-guilty but reasonably efficient ambition, who reads a copy of the memoir on her way to Korea, where she is to deliver a paper at a conference.

Babs feels herself possessed and transfigured by the harsh life and dryly combative spirit of the princess (never a queen, in fact). Despite being a professional woman at the start of the 21st century, Babs believes that she and her predecessor share certain qualities: each is independent yet susceptible, assertive yet vulnerable. In a preface, Drabble, confessing to have been similarly moved by the real princess' memoir, announces that she will explore this connection by turning her story into ''a novel, of a kind,'' since ''for better and for worse, writing novels is what I do.'' Babs Halliwell will serve as Drabble's alter ego -- until Drabble herself turns up as a character late in the book.

Attempting to tow the 200-year-old story into the present, Drabble has the princess pop up as a ghost with a surprisingly contemporary perspective -- alluding, among other things, to deconstruction and the Internet. In fact, this pretty well unhitches her voice; it's just too heavy a haul. As for Babs Halliwell, she never does seem to be transformed by her reading, despite the kinship she asserts with the princess (each lost a son and each had a deranged husband) and despite Drabble's insistence that Babs is being nudged by that tenacious specter.

It's possible, though only partly, to put this rather forced linkage aside and consider the stories separately. The princess tells of a life frozen less by the capricious tyranny of her father-in-law, King Yongjo -- the most rounded figure in a two-dimensional world -- than by the destructive rigidity of a terrifying court ritual. Taken from her family at the age of 10 to be a candidate for marriage to Sado, the royal heir (himself only a child), she goes through an endlessly estranging process of elaborate selection and grooming. Once she is chosen, the grooming goes on to include defloration at the hand (actually the brutal finger) of a court lady. In the life that follows, there is little but ordeal. And ordeal turns to horror as the princess' husband goes violently mad, provoked by the humiliations inflicted on him by his father -- who finally has him locked into a rice chest, where he dies after eight days of agony.

The vortex of destruction that consumes Sado provides real suspense and horror to the flat lines of the princess' story. The court is a court of roles, not characters; she herself is little more than an emblem of stoic plight. This might not matter, except that Drabble has chosen to break up this friezelike chronicle with the jittery comments of today's ghost. What we lose, then, is the shock of the past, the journey back to encounter its difference, its strangeness, its gaps. Instead of time travel, we get a time travelogue.

After the rigid chill of the princess' story, Babs Halliwell's voice emerges in a pleasurable rush. And here the rueful irony and humor, edging toward slapstick, that Drabble uses both at the expense and in defense of her contemporary female clerisy is as bracing as ever. When Babs struggles out of bed on the morning of her journey, she's swimming up a Niagara Falls of compulsions. She has three or four fail-safe wake-up systems. Her taxi has been ordered long before it's needed. At Heathrow, she sits quivering for two hours before she can board the plane: ''No, she has not forgotten her passport, or her ticket or her medication. . . . They are inanimate and inert, and they will stay where she put them. She is a rational woman and she knows that they will stay in their places.''

Aboard the plane, the princess' ghost, having chosen Babs to publicize her story, grumbles from the hand luggage where her memoir has been tucked. Through the long flight to Seoul, the princess nags at Babs to get it read, even though, being unused to airplanes, the princess feels a bit woozy. (Having an airsick ghost fits nicely into Babs's mix of scattiness and purpose.)

In a dither at home, the professor is dither cubed among the confusions and scheming of an academic conference, and even more so trying to explore a foreign city. She does manage to visit some of the sites where the princess lived and tells her story to a Dutch sociologist, the one international celebrity at the meeting. Aloof, godlike, not only does he unbend and attend -- reverently -- but he takes Babs to bed for most of three perfect nights of loving, intellectual communion and expert sex. Then, having threatened to turn into a gauzy middle-aged fantasy, the story droops, rallies and ends.

The subtitle of ''The Red Queen'' is ''a transcultural tragicomedy.'' It implies an intention the author has announced but hasn't carried out, despite working hard to argue that the human condition is universal and writing about it goes beyond time-bound constraints. What we are left with are two narratives entirely separate in style and content, and two voices that never really connect. As for tragicomedy, there's no breath of humor in the princess' stiffly told story and hardly a splinter of irony. And while Babs Halliwell has certainly experienced her share of pain, hers is the voice not of tragedy but of comedy and errands.

Richard Eder writes book reviews and articles for The Times.