The Realms of Gold
by
Knopf, $8.95
In the best of ways, The Realms of Gold brings to mind a Victorian novel, full of intelligent human beings moving, with sense and sensibility, through circumstances that sometimes bend to reason and will and sometimes do not. The novel is, in a word, civilized. It introduces us to Frances Wingate, happily divorced, the mother of several children, and a very well known archaeologist, a woman comfortable, even a bit smug, in her success. Temporarily separated from her lover and attacked by depression, she rediscovers her own family—its members grown rather distant over the years—and eventually finds in that smallest of societies enough tribal customs, artifacts, and unfathomable behavior to puzzle the wisest of archaeologists.
Frances is herself descended on the one side from the Huxley clan and on the other from a tribe of brooding Midlands cottagers. It is this Victorian mixing of the blood that sets her off on her Grand Tour of self-discovery.
The author adopts a Victorian tone with us, too. She jokes and gossips with her readers about the progress of the plot; she admits to us that certain of her characters baffle her—as if they had life outside the confines of the novel. She even offers us a happy ending, complete with glimpses of the future (though she coolly slips in a note of tragedy, with devastating effect).
Idle comparisons aside. The Realms of Gold is thoroughly contemporary, an intelligent, artful, and affecting novel about modern people and modern disaffections. Fans of Margaret Drabble’s will expect nothing less, and they will have no cause to be disappointed.
—A. H.