Having reviewed A.S. Byatt’s ‘The Virgin in the Garden’ last year, I decided to return to the work of her sister, Margaret Drabble.

Our only previous encounter involved ‘The Garrick Year’ (1964) which I tackled in the sixth form, during the hot summer of 1976, almost exactly half a century ago.

She was born three years after Antonia, in 1939, the second of four children belonging to John Frederick Drabble and Kathleen, nee Bloor.

Like Byatt, she attended a Quaker boarding school in York and Newnham College, Cambridge, where she studied English Literature.

Almost immediately afterwards she married the actor Clive Swift (1936-2019), best known as Hyacinth’s long-suffering husband in ‘Keeping Up Appearances’.

Swift had also read English at Cambridge and both became members of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Drabble mostly understudied or played ensemble parts, before becoming pregnant. She was also beginning to write ‘The Garrick Year’.

She had three children with Swift: Adam (1961), Rebecca (1964) and Joe (1965). Rebecca died of cancer in 2017.

Swift and Drabble divorced in 1975 and, in 1982, she married the biographer Sir Michael Holroyd (b. 1935).

‘The Needle’s Eye’ was Drabble’s sixth novel, published in 1972, a few years before the disintegration of her first marriage.

The title alludes to words attributed to Jesus in St Matthew’s Gospel:

‘It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.’

It deals with the relationship between Simon Camish and Rose Vassiliou.

He is an introverted lawyer from a poor working class background; she is an impulsive heiress who has renounced her wealth.

Simon is married to a monied but unsympathetic wife and they have three children.

Rose is divorcing her husband, Christopher, born poor to immigrant parents. Despite efforts by her parents to dissuade her, she married him as soon as she returned from an absence they enforced.

Christopher has been guilty of violent domestic abuse, driven by his conviction that her money should benefit their family rather than being given away.

She lives as a single parent, also with three children, in an unfashionable part of London, somewhere ‘behind Alexandra Palace’.

Christopher is eventually accepted by Rose’s wealthy parents, who have all but disowned her. He now seems to want custody of their children.

Simon and Rose are opposites attracting. The symmetry between their backgrounds is potentially significant.

They seem destined to form a relationship, but it never comes to pass.

At one critical moment, a dead stoat hanging from a tree is the disrupting factor.

Rose eventually returns to live with a partly reformed Christopher, but they argue endlessly. Meanwhile, Simon’s wife becomes more conducive, and the two families become friendly.

Much of the book is preoccupied with the internal thought processes of its two leading characters. The plot is distinctly secondary and largely flaccid. The reader is left waiting in vain for something decisive to happen.

This is essentially a novel of ideas, prompting reflection on whether we can truly escape our childhoods, our social class and economic backgrounds.

But the absence of resolution is frustrating and disappointing: the novel is impaired as a consequence.

TD

August 2026