Go to the first chapter of "The Witch of Exmoor"

Go to Chapter One

A Cauldron of Troubles

Acclaimed by some as a latter-day Jane Austen and belittled by others as a "women's novelist," Margaret Drabble has weathered the usual penalties of success. But over the past decade, the criticism has been harsher. Among other things, reviewers have sneered that Drabble's Booker Prize-winning sister, A.S. Byatt, is the better writer.

Never one to mince words, Drabble doesn't seem to be making much effort to win her countrymen over. Five years after the publication of The Gates of Ivory, which concluded a trilogy, she has brought us a tart and knowing peep show of Britain's privileged middle classes -- to which most of her critics belong.

The Witch of Exmoor opens at a dinner table where the extended Palmer family whiles away the evening hours over a slab of mature cheddar, red wine and the sort of competitively intellectual banter fostered at Oxford and Cambridge High Tables. Their parlor game, based on Harvard professor John Rawls's "Theory of Justice," is played by "unimagining everything that you are and then working out the kind of society which you would be willing to accept if you didn't know in advance your own place in it," what Rawls calls the "original position" of choice in which "you don't know who you are or where you stand . . . . Your eyes are veiled by the veil of ignorance. And from this position you have to examine the first principles of justice and decide what they are."

The game, which forms a backdrop for the entire novel, is intended as more than entertainment; it's meant to serve as a distraction from the compelling rounds of Unhappy Families the Palmers insist on playing. For the family's most influential member, the renowned author Frieda Haxby Palmer, has run off. And as her son, Daniel, surveys his pleasing surroundings -- "his lawns, his Aga, his wife, his dissenting children, his deliquescent Brie, his three empty bottles" -- he knows they are threatened not so much by the unlikely construction of some alternative society as by the whim of a fickle and vindictive old lady.

Of course, there are some real worries for the well-to-do in these post-Thatcher days of health-service cutbacks and unreliable pensions (resulting in crass expressions of "family rights of interest in family money"); but there is a more delicate matter at hand: Frieda is writing her memoirs, which threaten to reveal that the Palmers "turned themselves into members of the English middle class by sleight of hand." Their accents, their manners and their pretensions date back no further than to Frieda herself. After her, they slithered up the social ladder. One wrong move, and she can bring them all tumbling down behind her.

And Frieda is reveling in conspicuously wrong moves. The self-proclaimed Witch of Exmoor is camping out in a derelict hotel on a cliff overlooking Somerset's smugglers' coast. That and certain other impulsive decisions -- taking up smoking, battling Her Majesty's government over taxation, abandoning her Saab in a traffic jam -- suggest more than genteel eccentricity. Perhaps even madness. So daughter Gogo, her husband, David, and the favored grandson, Ben, are dispatched as family envoys to the West Country to assess the situation and report back.

There's some genuine humor in watching the old lady repeatedly upstage her family. She always has had the upper hand. The problem is that, while the complacent Palmer descendants make for vivid and accurate social portraits of our times, they evoke little sympathy. There is correspondingly little dramatic tension in Frieda's vicissitudes -- or in the series of disasters and untimely deaths that ensue. We never really understand the old lady's motives, why she plans so very deliberately to dismantle the gracious facade behind which her offspring have grown up: "As the Witch of Endor raised Samuel to terrify Saul, so she, the Witch of Exmoor, will raise Gladys Haxby, Ernest Haxby, Hilda Haxby, Andrew Palmer. Her nice clean ambitious well-educated offspring will be appalled by their hideous ancestry." And, while the veil of ignorance prompts a wry and perspicacious piece of social criticism, it is ultimately a distraction. An irritatingly imperious narrative voice compounds the sense that we are being taught a lesson here.

In the end, The Witch of Exmoor's very strengths are its downfall. With its allusive style, caustic wit and sharp insights, it is a very clever book. But, just like the conundrum from which it draws its inspiration, it sometimes feels more like an intellectual exercise. A straightforward game of Unhappy Families would have been better entertainment, and perhaps won back some of Drabble's fans.

Frances Stead Sellers is an editor of The Washington Post's Outlook section.