Time and Tides

A couple of human organisms adapt to love as an endangered species.

THE SEA LADY

By Margaret Drabble

Harcourt. 345 pp. $24

Margaret Drabble's new novel about a renowned marine biologist and a famous feminist critic is a study of evolution, but it's also a convincing example of intelligent design. Almost the entire story takes place while two people who haven't seen each other for decades travel by separate trains to a town in northern England that they haven't visited since childhood. It's hard to imagine a more static plot ("Are we there yet? Are we there yet?"), but while these two characters sit stuck in their seats for almost 300 pages, Drabble draws us into the past, "through the metamorphoses of time," laying out the significant moments of their lives like a set of fossil records, complete with fascinating signs of progress and inexplicable missing links. It's a thoroughly enchanting blend of scientific erudition, social satire and domestic comedy from a novelist who continues to surprise us.

The language of marine biology washes across every page of The Sea Lady, sometimes in discussions of discoveries and controversies, but more often as witty metaphor. Drabble notes in the acknowledgments that her inspiration for this story came from serving as a judge of a science book contest, and we meet her heroine, a flamboyant woman in her 60s named Ailsa Kelman, officiating at such an awards ceremony. "She appeared to have dressed herself as a mermaid," Drabble begins, "in silver sequined scales. Her bodice was close-fitting, and the metallic skirt clung to her solid hips before it flared out below the knees, concealing what might once have been her tail." In the ocean room of a London museum, she announces the finalists while standing beneath "life-size models of sharks and dolphins." With cameras rolling and the audience hushed, "Ailsa Kelman shimmered and glittered as she approached her watery climax."

Meanwhile, Dr. Humphrey Clark has already boarded a train and started to feel waves of anxiety and regret. He's been invited to a new university in Ornemouth to accept an honorary degree for his life as a marine biologist. He pursued his career when it was still possible "to be a serious scientist and to adopt a quasi-mystical approach to the natural world. It was still possible to regard the sea as a sea of faith." The train ride provides him ample time to consider the ebbing of his life. "How can he think for one moment that he has a hope, a chance, a possibility of redemption?" the narrator asks, giving voice to the currents of Humphrey's despair. "He must learn to face the silence of the ending. The bell tower condemns him. The bell tower mocks him."

Humphrey lived in Ornemouth for several years as a boy during the war, and the trip back, "like the salmon going up the falls," reminds him of barefoot summers when "the richness of the unknown world was almost unbearable to him." These reminiscences are brilliantly drawn, full of charm and humor and the poignant intensity of childhood hopes and fears. "Humpy" -- an unfortunate nickname -- was passionately devoted to another boy before their seaside antics were disrupted by the arrival of a bossy little girl named Ailsa Kelman, who "had spread like an infestation of algae." We gradually learn the extent of that infestation over the course of the novel as Humphrey travels -- unknowingly -- toward a reunion with the remarkable and outlandish woman Ailsa has become.

Once Ailsa "had been as beautiful to him as a zebra shark," Drabble notes, but that was years ago before "she had blotted him out" to begin a meteoric career as a public personality, a feminist provocateur, a ubiquitous (some might say, vulgar) cultural critic. "She has worn an aborted foetus on a chain around her neck, and submitted to a cervical examination on television. . . . She has appeared in court as a witness in defence of oral sex, risqué art galleries, sodomy and sin." We even get to see Ailsa deliver an iconoclastic lecture on Byron and Delacroix that substantiates the claims made about her wide-ranging scholarship and theatrical flair. All of this comes across in Drabble's marvelous tour of the 1960s, '70s and '80s. The genius of her prose is an ability to be incisive and satiric without sticking her characters on the end of a pin the way her older sister, A.S. Byatt, does in her own brilliant but increasingly impersonal novels. Drabble likes these people, no matter how obnoxious they can be. She appreciates their secret frailty and sympathizes with the anxieties that ripple beneath their confidence.

How nice it would be to end here in a little flurry of praise, but there's something very odd swimming in the depths of this novel. Forty pages in, after the introduction of both characters, the narrative breaks off: "The Public Orator pauses here, to take stock of what has happened so far. The Orator, a withdrawn, black-gowned, hooded, neuter, neutral and faceless figure, confronts choice." This figure -- not exactly the narrator -- intrudes periodically throughout the novel ("The Public Orator pauses here" again), and he even seems to enter as a character toward the end. But it doesn't add much, except a touch of rather dated postmodernism, innovative in, say, Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," but a weary intrusion now. By the end, the novel tries to deconstruct itself, which is like watching a fish eat its own tail: "We were brought up to believe that stories have meanings and that meanings have stories and that journeys have ends," the Public Orator announces. "We were brought up to believe that there would be an ending, that there would be completion. . . . But now we know that that's not true." But in fact, it is true, as this novel about the complicated reunion of old friends makes charmingly clear. Begone, Public Orator, and let us enjoy the stories and the meanings of these two remarkable people. ·

Ron Charles is a senior editor of Book World.