For Adults

By Paul Gray

THE REALMS OF GOLD

by MARGARET DRABBLE

354 pages. Knopf. $8.95.

There is no greater test of character than bad luck--except, British Novelist Margaret Drabble suggests, good luck. The heroine of her latest novel owns a cornucopia: money, a handsome London house, a triumphant career as an archaeologist, four well-behaved children, a liberating divorce and a sensitive lover. She is also afflicted with an abundance of 20th century guilt. What has she done to deserve all this? she muses. "Her grandfather had grown tomatoes and potatoes. Her father had studied newts and become a professor of zoology. And for herself, as a result of their labors, the world lay open."

Earlier Drabble characters should have had such problems. In six previous novels the author, 36, created a memorable gallery of oppressed females. To a woman, they were educated and sensitive beyond their stations in life, forced to exist in the shadows of horrendous husbands. Yet feminists have never embraced Drabble as a spokesperson because her heroines too often stumble from orthodoxy. They may leave their husbands--but they cherish their children, refusing to feel demeaned while changing nappies. They eagerly have affairs--but trust that the new men will fill an emptiness in their lives. Coasting through her mid-30s, Frances Wingate has achieved everything that her predecessors lacked.

Unalloyed success is hardly the stuff of gripping adventure, and Drabble wisely does not pretend otherwise. For plot, The Realms of Gold offers little more than the comical attempts of Frances and her professor-lover to reunite after an ill-conceived breakup. The tragedies in the book happen to others. A reclusive old relative of Frances' starves to death in a Midlands cottage; a nephew decides to leave the world he cannot take--and kills his infant daughter as well. Frances does not share this fatal pessimism. But she earnestly wants to know why she has been spared it.

Ideal Society. Frances is intelligent enough to ponder such elemental issues without becoming elementary. She knows that her present state is predicated on the past; her own archaeological work has helped swell the warehouse of history. Yet Frances also recognizes that she and her colleagues are digging for lies: "We seek a Utopia in the past, a possible if not ideal society. We seek golden worlds from which we are banished, they recede infinitely, for there never was a golden world, there was never anything but toil and subsistence, cruelty and dullness."

If, as Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living, what proof can Frances find that the examined life is any better? Her determination to stare down her own happiness makes Drabble's heroine both amusing and touching, an avatar of all those women in Victorian novels who tried to patch together their own ethical systems during the decline of official morality.

In its intellectual reach, The Realms of Gold is an unusually stimulating novel of ideas--and something more. It is rare entertainment, shuttling brilliantly between sandy African wastes and tidy English villages. Perhaps as well as any one now writing, Drabble can weave metaphysics into the homespun of daily life. Her characters may casually discuss Freud or chat about the latest research on the effects of heredity and environment. They also throw crockery at each other when angry, drink too much and wish that they could behave more sensibly than they do. At a time when most "adult" entertainment is a series of reductive immorality plays or overfleshed cartoons for the libido, this novel arrives as a glittering exception. It is conceived by an adult mind about adults for adults to read.

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