A Web of the Way We Live Now THE RADIANT WAY

By Paul Gray

This novel marks another step in one of the most interesting careers in contemporary letters. It has taken a while for that shoe to drop. The Middle Ground, British Author Margaret Drabble's ninth novel, appeared in 1980 and underscored a process that had begun several books earlier: a movement away from the narrow, intense psychological portraits of her early fiction (A Summer Bird-Cage, The Garrick Year) toward panoramas of realistic characters placed in a recognizable society. Drabble's progress was retrograde, running against the modern notion that fiction should be deep and singular rather than broad and general. Her models -- Dickens, George Eliot, Trollope, Arnold Bennett (whose biography she wrote in the 1970s) -- were either considered unfashionable or inimitable.

And then, after The Middle Ground, silence. Drabble busied herself preparing a new edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature, which was published in 1985. This task, though eminently worthwhile, raised a troubling question. Had Drabble given up her struggle to reclaim some of the public world, the intricate web of the way we live now, as the proper province of fiction?

The author's tenth novel suggests that she was not stymied at all; she was merely waiting for current events to provide her with enough material for a new book. The Radiant Way is, among other things, a chronicle of some five years of British life under the sway of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and & the Tory party. Drabble's fictional characters must cope on a regular basis with a changing political landscape. They are spirited, intelligent, opinionated and hardly passive, but their destinies are not under their own control. Government budget cuts can render them redundant, cost them their jobs; violence unleashed by growing class tensions can threaten their privacy and their lives.

Three heroines, living in London and in their mid-40s when the decade of the 1980s dawns, provide a focus for Drabble's tumultuous plot: Liz Headleand, twice married and a successful psychotherapist; Alix Bowen, ditto and a believer in socially useful work like teaching English literature to female criminals; Esther Breuer, unmarried and a dilettantish specialist in the early Italian Renaissance. Although they have taken different paths, Liz, Alix and Esther share a long friendship and common bonds dating back to their student days at Cambridge in the 1950s. "These three women," Drabble notes, "it will readily and perhaps with some irritation be perceived, were amongst the creme de la creme of their generation." What have time and circumstances done to the best and the brightest?

The answer is: plenty. Liz, for one, throws a New Year's Eve party for 200 guests on Dec. 31, 1979, and learns that Charles, her husband of 20 years, plans to divorce her and marry a lady with a title. Maybe it is just as well. Now a stuffy television executive, Charles has left the '60s and '70s, his pioneering documentaries and his idealism, not to mention Liz, behind: "A male world, a world of suits and ties and speeches, of meetings and money. Charles had conquered it. First he had mocked it, then he had exposed it, then he had joined it, and now he represented it." But Liz can support herself in the new economic climate: "She is not threatened by cuts in public spending, by the decline of the National Health Service, by the new and growing emphasis on privatization: her income is derived from a judicious blend of public and private practice."

Not so Alix, who watches her part-time jobs topple in a crusade of cost cutting and bears witness to the demoralization of her husband Brian, a true son of the working class who has moved upward through teaching adult-education courses into white-collar unemployment. She muses, "Brian would turn sour. Already he had become unreasonable; later, he would, like everyone else, become sour." Esther too must face straitened circumstances, once the funds for her occasional lectures on art and evening seminars dry up.

These characters struggle with their fates against a crowded background: rising joblessness, the Falklands war, national strikes by steelworkers and miners, inner-city race riots, the appearance of AIDS. What is more, Drabble's heroines can secure scant sanctuary for their domestic lives amid the din of external change. Alix finds the severed head of a former student on the front seat of her battered old Renault; Esther discovers that she has been living for years in an apartment one floor below a mass murderer. Liz, the best insulated of them all by virtue of financial well-being, must still unearth a childhood secret that the past, perhaps mercifully, had hidden from her long ago.

In its attempt to include everything, The Radiant Way consistently reads like an odd hybrid, soap opera grafted onto newsreel. Formal purists may complain, with some justification. The book is undeniably awkward at times, a grab bag of facts and fancy sealed only by the author's extensive curiosity and imagination. But it not only engrosses; it works. History seems to be speeding up. Maybe Drabble's next novel, and its invaluable perspective on what has happened, will be less than seven years away.