"The Seven Sisters" by Margaret Drabble

Candida Wilton, mother of three daughters, newly divorced from Andrew, has moved to a flat in Ladbroke Grove. She studies Virgil's Aeneid and enjoys going to a health club. Her London diary, as she slowly recovers from the trauma of her divorce, spreads her wings and meets new friends (Mrs Jerrold the Latin teacher, widow of a radio presenter who new all the old poets and musicians, the exotic Anais, and Cynthia Barclay, married to a rich homosexual) and entertains old ones (schoolfriend now best-selling novelist Julia, and fat, patronising, neurotic, virginal social worker Sally), forms the (slightly slow) narrative of the first half of the book. Much of the remainder involves the Italian trip she embarks upon with six companions, to visit the cave of the Sibyl at Cuma and to see Naples.

It doesn't really have a plot, as such. It is the study of a character. The narrator is an old lady facing old age; there is a sense of hopelessness and gentle despair, a sense of pointlessness. Human beings are not meant to live so long, one of the characters reflects. All Candida's purpose was to produce children: she has three daughters and she is estranged from them; so she has nothing to give her life any meaning except for her pastimes. And why go to the health club; what is there to be healthy for? It is the pilgrimage to Cuma that gives her life a little meaning, and that is manufactured from the poetry of a man who has been dead for nearly two thousand years. The book is gently bleak and gently nihilistic. What is point of all of this? it asks:

• "Do Good, do bad, do Nothing. I do nothing. Fainéant." (p 73) [Fainéant means idle or ineffective; but she is not idle.]
• "They sing in the dark and shore up the ruins. They play with tragic brilliance the endgame." (p 83)
• "She sits there waiting for God to call her home. I think her God never even noticed that she existed." (p 253)
• "There are a lot of nice middle-aged and elderly women about, at a loose end, and they are good at setting up little support groups for themselves. Not many of them end up in the canal." (p 267)
• "Our little, pitiful, feeble struggles. Sparrows and farthings, farthings and sparrows. Oh, we are the small change, and we know that." (p 267)

The sad old ladies theme reminded me of Anita Brookner's Brief Lives.

The author hints that the book involves some sort of Epic Simile: I kept trying to see how it paralleled Book VI of the Aeneid which describes Aeneas descending into the Underworld but I couldn't quite catch the metaphors. Perhaps the narrator, abandoned by her husband for another woman, is supposed to be Dido.A pre-pilgrimage visit to Mrs Jerrold the Latin teacher seems to  confuse her with the Cumaean Sibyl [prophetess]: she is described as having "the look of a gypsy or of a sibyl" (p 104) but this seems too obvious. After Candida has walked to the Sibyl's cave there is a section in which we learn about the narrator's death and funeral; later (spoiler alert) the narrator resumes the narrative since she hasn't died after all; this presumably symbolises Aeneas travelling down to the Underworld and then returning. The Seven Sisters travel on a ferry from Tunis to Naples: is this Charon's ferry or (ostensibly) the ships of Aeneas? In London, Candida (whose name is that of a yeast-like fungal parasite, is that in any way relevant?) sees mistletoe in the local cemetery and reflects: "The mistletoe ... is magical.  ... It protects against witchcraft and the Evil Eye. .... When its sap dies, its dry leaves turn bright gold in death. The doves of Venus perched upon the mistletoe. It is the Golden Bough that leads us safely to the Underworld. These strange plants ... are life, and they are death. I neither live nor die." (p 125). Lots of Virgilian references but I couldn't make them coherent.

It ends unresolved. As Candida says: "There cannot be a happy ending. There is nothing but the next effort, and then, after that, the next." (p 286)

There were lots and lots of memorable moments:

• "Reiki, aromatherapy, yoga, shiatsu. I don't even know what they are, but I distrust them." (p 6)
• "In those days I loved him, and one tends to overestimate the value of a loved object." (p 15)
• "Bodies are made for sex too, aren't they?" (p 35)
• "The amorous blackmail of grief." (p 49)
• "I am not the kind of person to have close friends who pop in, but I think I wish I were that kind of person, and the illusion of being it is better than nothing."
• "From time to time I looked at my watch, but the hands did not move. They had stuck. Time had come to an end." (p 127) I love, 'from time to time'; this experience, while walking through the rain, mirrors an experience she has in a sauna which she describes as a near-death experience in which she dozes off and wakes up to find that the grains of sand are no longer trickling through the sauna hourglass; they too have stuck.
• "The human heart is black, so kindness cannot have been the explanation for my deeds." (p 151)
• "She remembers Julia's contempt for those who make of marriage a Procrustean bed, and chops off their limbs to fit into it more neatly. They make marriage, said Julia, into a bed of blood. Instead, said Julia, of buying a new and bigger bed, or getting a different husband." (p 221)
• "I'm fond of Clyde, and I think he is fond of me, but nobody can pretend that what goes on between us is normal. It isn't abnormal, but it isn't normal. It's just, I suppose, inadequate." (p 266)
• "The irony is that as we near death, there are fewer people left to be sorry, fewer left to miss us. Nobody would care, nobody would mind." (p 276)
• "The cloying dead smell of menstrual waste in the unemptied bins of a public lavatory." (p 278)
• "Women are supposed to go on looking sexy when they are into their sixties. That's all very well for people like Julia, who like that kind of thing, but it's not very good for the rest of us, is it?" (p 278)
• "My body was lonely, and it never found company." (p 278)

June 2020; 307 pages

Margaret Drabble has written many novels and this, to my embarrassment, is the only one I have read. So far.

The Seven Sisters was written in 2002.

Her sister is the novelist A S Byatt who wrote (reviewed in this blog):

• The Biographer's Tale
• Possession which won the 1990 Booker Prize
• Ragnarok