MILLICENT BELL
267
Thatcher years which began with
The Radiant Way,
continued with
A
Natural Curiosity
in 1989, and concluded wi th
The Gates
oj
Ivory
in 1992.
As in these earlier novels, she asks us to interest ourselves in the lives of
some upper-class, well-educated members of that derelict elite whose
direction of the nation's destiny seems less and less secure. As the book
opens we find a family group gathered at successful lawyer Daniel Palmer's
country house in Hampshire; visiting for the weekend are his two sisters
and their husbands and children. Daniel is a representative moneyed "gen–
tleman" (no one uses this archaism anymore, of course) whose grandfather
was a Lincolnshire beet farmer. His brothers-in-law are newer assimilated
members of the ruling caste. There is Nathan Herz, a Jewish advertising
executive who is designing a program to "sell" a reduced National Health
program to the British public. And there is David D'Anger, a Guyanese
aristocrat who has been an academic and a journalist but has gone in for
politics and will soon be an MP for a marginal constituency in West
Yorkshire. The three men and Daniel's wife, Patsy, who occupies herself
unstrenuously with good works, his stylish sister, Rosemary, who runs an
art complex, and his other sister, Gogo, a neurologist, are playing a parlor
game proposed by David. It is called "The Veil of Ignorance" and requires
the participants to imagine a "just society" they would accept even if they
were denied any foreknowledge of their own place in it. None of the par–
ticipants, it turns out, really has any idea of the new social arrangements he
or she would be willing to push the button for on such terms, and the host
declares simply, "what I have I hold"-a condition which might be guar–
anteed, as his daughter, Emily, tells him, by willing into replication society
as it is, "stone by stone, leaf by leaf." For the others, even for David, who
sometimes has imagined the construction of a better human community
in his native Guyana, the Utopian impulse is only a fleeting idea. Perhaps
closer to the hidden reality of the present or to the probable future is the
fantasy game of the three couples' younger children who occupy them–
selves upstairs while their elders sit speculating below. Mter looking at
"video nasties" Patsy has been reviewing for a censorship board, they have
turned to "the Power Game," played with toy figures and directed by
David's gifted son Ben. In the course of the game there are "many wound–
ed, many tortured, many raped, many dead."
What the Palmer siblings are really gathered to discuss, anyhow, is
something else-what to do about their absent mother Frieda, who has
become more and more eccentric. Once a successful writer who made a
good deal of money, she has sunk her reputation by writing a huge his–
torical novel about Queen Christina of Sweden, refused to pay VAT
charges, abandoned her silver Saab when she found herself caught in a traf–
fic jam in the West End, and moved out to a dilapidated Victorian chateau
