"Begin on a midsummer evening. Let them have everything that is pleasant." With these words the narrator of Margaret Drabble's latest novel sets up the characters that will be moved relentlessly around the chessboard plot. Some characters, like the grandchildren, serve as easily expendable pawns, some serve as knights or bishops. Frieda Palmer, the witch of Exmoor herself, serves as queen. But above the chessboard, obvious and often unwelcome, is the long arm of Drabble's narrator, determining the next move.
The obtrusive narrator is not a new strategy in the fiction of Margaret Drabble, but one that many of her fans might well wish she would move beyond. There is no doubt that Drabble, a successful novelist and respected critic for three decades, has a gift for spinning engaging fiction. Well-developed characters whose relationships and reflections intrigue the reader are the hallmark of even her earliest fiction from the 1960s. But her more recent novels, The Realms of Gold, and the trilogy The Radiant Way, A Natural Curiosity, and The Gates of Ivory, introduce a narrator who subverts that old-fashioned narrative, leaving emptiness and dissatisfaction in its place. The Witch of Exmoor, her first novel in five years, continues to mine the same vein. But in this latest offering, she has also stopped providing her readers with the well-developed characters they look forward to.
As in the game of chess, all the players in this novel are placed upon the board at the beginning. The three grown children of Frieda Palmer, their spouses, and their children are described in superficial detail: hair, eye colour, build, placement in the family order, occupation, activity at the moment of observation. By the end of the introductory chapter, they are as developed as they are likely to get in this novel. What brings them together on a midsummer evening is Frieda, who has retreated permanently to a dilapidated folly on the edge of the sea. "Although it is no laughing matter, the thought of their mother sliding into the sea, on a dark night, has its comic aspects. They elaborate, and I am sorry to say that they laugh," says the narrator, directing the reader to judge these characters as she does. The effort of judging, though, presumes that the reader is psychologically involved enough to care about these cardboard cutouts. That is an unearned presumption. The narrator's intrusions constantly distance the reader from becoming involved with the story that is unfolding.
"You have not guessed quite right about Nathan," the narrator tells us, presuming we have guessed at all about the occupation of this character. "You will never guess what Gogo does, when she is not being sister, wife, daughter, mother. I had better tell you." Descriptions completed, the narrator tidies up introductions, saying, "So there you have them." The reader can almost hear the narrator dusting off her hands, task completed. But not quite. Tongue in cheek, the narrator continues to fill in the game board: "We have forgotten about Simon and Emily. Where have they gone?" And of course, every fictitious middle-class family needs a dog, which the narrator obligingly supplies: "She is an elderly, overweight Dalmatian. I don't suppose you need to know that. I don't suppose the Palmers need a dog. But they've got one."
Mother Frieda, of course, does slide into the sea on a dark night, leaving a revised will that bequeaths all her money to Benjamin, one of her five grandchildren, for no apparent reason. As one of the characters remarks, "It's one hell of an old-fashioned plot. Wills, legacies, inheritance tax, capital gains tax. A real old nineteenth-century property plot." Benjamin's despair at this burden, and the others' disappointment, carry the plot forward to its inconclusive and unsatisfactory closure. Along the way, Drabble interweaves some of the large questions of life. Can one construct a theory of justice that doesn't favor oneself? Can a just society exist or will it inevitably collapse in a Rev.-Jim-Jones-style cyanide-induced débâcle? Is the pull of history too great to allow a new world order? Is there individual choice? But these questions do not marry comfortably with the narrative line of the novel, which the narrator, while frequently interrupting it, is unwilling to abandon completely. The resulting novel is a lamination of nineteenth-century plot, twentieth-century postmodernist structure, and sociological musings.
The Witch of Exmoor is unsatisfying because, I believe, Drabble acknowledges but has not resolved the conflict between form and content. Gifted with the ability to tell a good story and longing to explore aspects of contemporary life, she finds herself using a form, the realist narrative, that assumes the existence of meaning in the universe and significance in events as they unfold. But the society in which she situates her novel, England at the end of the millennium, is not the society of Jane Austen, in which manners and morals imposed an order. It is a society in which her characters are all-too-familiar with stories of quotidian violence, domestic abuse, random and meaningless death. As the novelist B. S. Johnson (with whom Margaret Drabble has collaborated in a group novel) has remarked, it was possible in the nineteenth century "to believe in pattern and eternity, but today what characterizes our reality is the probability that chaos is the most likely explanation; while at the same time recognizing that even to seek an explanation represents a denial of chaos."
Seeking an explanation is one of the primary purposes of fiction. That leaves the contemporary omniscient narrator with no choice but to keep seeking in the face of chaos. One of the last characters to be introduced in this novel is Will Paine and, as the narrator explains, "we have not met him before because he is shy. It is as simple as that." At the same time the narrator regrets that Will will not meet another of the characters, who would surely have found him interesting. "But there you are: you can't control everything." Trumpery indeed, but a trumpery that underscores the conflict between form and content that Drabble continues to face in this most recent fiction.

 Judith Walker is a freelance writer who lives in Vancouver.