Many of you will remember that I pledged to read Margaret Drabble novels during 2024 – hoping for at least one a month. The Waterfall is my fifth Drabble of the year. I’m sorry to see that this one seems to be currently out of print, and wasn’t among those that Canongate reissued a couple of years ago. My blogging has been so erratic that I haven’t even reviewed all of them, however although I have really enjoyed them all, the book I read last month, Jerusalem, the Golden, was the one I have enjoyed least. Still I am constantly impressed by Drabble’s skill as a writer, her narrators are realistic, though not always likeable – and in this case not entirely reliable.
The Waterfall is described as one of her most experimental novels – it is a literary novel of course, and quite a slow read, although I didn’t find it difficult. I found Drabble’s prose immersive and her narrator quite compelling – though typically she is a flawed and sometimes irritating character. The novel is told in both the first and third person, the point of view is always that of Jane Grey – the central character – but the switching from first to third person perhaps allows Drabble to play with the reliability of the narrator.
“Learning was so dangerous: for how could one tell in advance, while still ignorant, whether a thing could ever be unlearned or forgotten, or if, once known and named, it would invalidate by its significance the whole of one’s former life, all of those years wiped out, convicted at one blow, retrospectively darkened by one sudden light?”
This is a novel about love – the love a woman, Jane feels is such a necessity it becomes all consuming. The novel opens just as Jane is about to give birth to her second child, shortly after having been left by her husband. Jane’s marriage to Malcolm has not been happy, and she is quite glad to see the back of him. She has a small son Laurie and within the first few pages, gives birth to Bianca. While Jane is in bed recovering from the birth of her daughter, she is cared for by her cousin Lucy and her husband James. They take it in turns to stay with Jane, as they themselves have three young children. Very quickly an intimacy develops between Jane and James that considering she has just given birth feels rather inappropriate, in more ways than one.
“She was prepared to spend all the rest of the evenings of her life alone, but the next night, after the midwife and Lucy had left, she was surprised to hear a knock on the door. She had to get up and go down to open it, and she found James standing there on the step. She was weak with relief at the sight of him: she had been afraid as she descended the stairs that it might have been her husband. She tried to conceal her relief, but she was so overcome that she could hardly stand.”
James continues to spend time with Jane and the children, long after she has ceased needing support, the two locked in a passionate affair – which Jane seems to have convinced herself that Lucy knows all about somehow. Drabble portrays this relationship wholly from Jane’s point of view and reveals how for Jane there is an intense sexuality in her feelings for James – which are so very different to how she had felt about Malcolm. Jane is a poet, though she hasn’t published anything recently, she is often crippled by self doubt and feelings of inadequacy. Her love for James is transcendent in how it makes her feel – she shrugs off any lingering feelings of guilt, convinced she is right, putting any negative feelings right away from her. It is interesting in how there are subtle differences in aspects of the first and third person narratives, as if the truth is told from the third person perspective, while Jane, in her first person narrative is more protective of herself and less honest about what is going on, and who James really is. He fixes a couple of simple things in the house for Jane and promptly acquires almost legendary status – while gradually the reader begins to see him as more feckless. There are references to Jane Eyre and Rochester – as Jane insists on seeing James as her romantic lead.
“She felt she was taking part in some elaborate delicate ritual, and that if she broke some small unknown rule of it, by a false word or touch, by a treacherous mention of Lucy or Malcolm, by a murmur of indignation at his leaving, by a too willing acceptance of that same leaving, then he would be taken from her, she would forfeit him for her unwitting transgression.”
Along with her powerful depiction of a love affair – and Jane’s love for James is wholly convincing at least. Drabble is realistic about the daily minutiae of motherhood and modern life. The atmosphere she creates between Jane and James in the early pages of the book is beautifully done. Again we see a beautifully crafted and realistic relationship between a young mother and her tiny children. We know a crisis must come, and it is well highlighted in some blurbs. An accident – occurring a good way through the novel – forces their affair into the open, and the consequences have to be faced.
I thought this was an enormously impressive novel about love and obsession, it is a shame that Canongate didn’t reissue this one – I see from Goodreads that it has divided some readers, but perhaps that is the sign of a good book.