268
PARTISAN REVIEW
on the Exmoor coast, having cut off communication with everyone. Her
discreetly callous children are worried that she may do something crazy
with her money such as donating it all to some bizarre cause or-worse–
giving it all to just one of them at the expense of the others. Their fears
are justified. Mter she is found drowned at the foot of her cliff it turns out
that her will does leave everything to grandson Ben. An earlier will is
uncovered revealing that she had planned to provide his father with fund–
ing for a Guyanean "just society."
Drabble does not quite know how she wants us to feel about Mad
Mom Frieda. On the one hand she appears-with her attachment to crank
ideas about the environment and diet, her idiosyncratic feminism (which
was the reason she wrote about Queen Christina), and her sentimental rad–
icalism (which made her take David's talk about the just society more
seriously than he meant it)-to be a dotty relict of the radical sixties, a time
when she was young and neglected them for the sake of her own self–
development. But she may have also been intended, as the title of the book
suggests, as a mythic being in touch with the spirits of the air. Of course,
the house of England is not, for Drabble, Howard's End. Frieda hardly
resembles E. M. Forster's Mrs. Wilcox, who left a healing legacy of sym–
pathy for the human family. The Palmer children go on much as before,
though Nathan Herz dies, also drowned, the victim of a long-cherished,
secret love for a dead girl, and talented Ben almost dies, overburdened by
irrational guilt for having been made his grandmother's heir. In the end,
this frail inheritor of her dubious legacy acquiesces in beingjust like every–
one else.
It seems that Drabble herself doesn't believe very much in what she is
doing. Her novel's plot ravels out into unlikely and irrelevant incident, like
the account of Nathan's hidden obsession or Rosemary's seizure of death
fears when she discovers that she is suffering from elevated blood pressure.
Worst of all, there is the tailing out of the story at the last when young
Emily, alone at the abandoned Exmoor mansion, confronts a band of dogs
and hunters and saves the deer who has bounded into the parlor! It is still
true that Drabble's descriptive .prose occasionally erupts into a grim poet–
ry, as when Frieda's moor seems infected by a pervasive degeneracy as she
walks there with her dog, passes a sick cow and a dead calf, and then,
a creature more dreadful than the calf. It was a sheep. Its matted pelt
hung off it in lumps to trail upon the ground. The wool was yellow–
white and stained with blotches of rusty red, the
dirty
dull red of
dried menstrual blood. Its face was thin and shorn and quivering, its
body shapeless beneath its ragged outgrowths.
It
gazed at the woman
