The Pure Gold Baby
Margaret Drabble
[Canongate]
In many ways, The Pure Gold Baby could not differ more from the Sylvia Plath poem (Lady Lazarus) from which it derives its title. In this, her eighteenth novel, Margaret Drabble stays true to form. While Plath’s poem is a violent, electric engagement with atrocity, death and rebirth, encapsulating the intensity of the moment, Drabble concerns herself with the story of intertwined lives, creating a gentle narrative spanning over half a century, in which ‘nothing and everything happens’. The novel tells the story of Jess, a young anthropologist struggling to singlehandedly raise a daughter in 1960s London. Her ‘pure gold baby’ Anna is diagnosed with an unspecified learning disability, and Jess is supported by a network of friends in the neighbourhood, all also women raising young families. The tale is narrated by one of these friends, with the result that there is at times a distance and a disconnection from the story’s characters and emotional content.
It’s a sometimes laboured examination of the shifting attitudes of a specific time and place, with Drabble’s typically anthropological focus. At times there can be a cold emphasis on these ‘social issues’ at the expense of characters and plot. As a reading experience it’s benign, gentle, and interesting, if a little bland. Drabble’s pure gold baby certainly does not – in the words of Plath – ‘melt with a shriek’.
Words: Liza Cox
