Charlotte Moore

The past is always present

issue 12 August 2006

‘Nothing was over. Nothing is ever over.’ Thus muses Humphrey Clark as he travels towards the small windswept northern port of Finsterness, scene of formative childhood holidays. Humphrey, a reclusive marine biologist, is on his way to collect an honorary degree. Much more significantly, at Finsterness he will re-encounter Ailsa Kelman, his childhood companion and later — secretly, briefly — his wife.

The idea that ‘nothing is ever over’ provides the momentum for this, Margaret Drabble’s 17th novel. As young adults, Humphrey and Ailsa believed that they had found a perfect, time-cheating happiness together. This failed; now, in their sixties, they try to protect themselves from emotional pain, Humphrey by reducing his life to the four walls of his study, Ailsa, a flamboyant feminist polemicist, through her exhibitionist love-affair with the media. Ailsa once famously displayed an aborted foetus — her own? Humphrey’s? — on a chain round her neck; notoriety gives her a stage presence that masks her insecurity.

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