The Millstone
£2.97
A first person account of being - Rosamund Stacey is the first person narrator of her own story in the Millstone by Margaret Drabble. Rosamund is a single mother - nothing strange about that, perhaps, at least in a twenty-first century Britain where now half of births are outside of marriage. But in the early 1960s, when The Millstone was written, unmarried mothers were not so common and it was a status to which considerable stigma was attached.Consequently, when Rosamund visits hospital for her regular check-ups, she is summoned from the waiting room with a call of Mrs. Stacey in an attempt to maintain the privacy of her status. She longs for the day - and not too distant - when her thesis on Elizabethan poetry will be complete and she can prefix her name with Dr., thereby avoiding the deception.The Millstone is written in Margaret Drabble s conversational, yet dense style. The characters are highly complex and seem to live their lives with a devotion to intricacy. Not much happens to them, however, and events are few and far between. Rosamund s life is a case in point. It was Cambridge, of course, followed by the relative comfort of a flat in central London, an apartment provided by her parents calculatedly close to the British Museum, where she does most of her research. She is definitely not the run-of-the-mill young lass who attends university nowadays, our Rosamund. She has a boyfriend at college, of course, but they never sleep together, not even on the occasion they jointly plan to accomplish the act.Rosamund is not really into sex, she thinks. She has a tendency to see herself as an object from without, and her observation of the absurdity of various aspects of being human lead her to a life slightly removed from reality, lived apparently at arm s length from experience. Though she sees quite a lot of Joe and Roger - both quite different but eligible males - the idea of anything other than a chat and a drink appals her. Each of the two men, of course, think that the other is the boyfriend and so are loath to raise the subject.Then, for some reason hardly known to herself, she takes up with George, a gay radio presenter, and sleeps with him. Just once. And yes, Rosamund is definitively pregnant. As ever, she cannot decide what to do and, even when she eventually plans her course, she is blown off onto a different tack. She has read that drinking a bottle of gin in a hot bath might do the trick. She sets an evening aside. And then, just as the bottle is opened, friends turn up, she offers them a drink and they share the otherwise-ntended gin between them.Rosamund is thus never really in control, despite appearing to have a strangle hold on her life. Circumstances always seem to conspire to prevent her getting precisely what she wants. But this is eventually seen as an illusion. Perhaps she does get precisely what she wants, but does not tell us, or herself.And so Octavia is born. The baby is a life that Rosamund contemplated ending, but when the child is ill, the thought of her coming to harm is too painful to admit. A friend, Lydia, moves in, shares the costs and sets about writing a novel. When this is complete, an unsupervised Octavia tears much of it up, though perhaps not disastrously. Rosamund reminds us that babies are persistent, not thorough, so most of the pages are preserved. It becomes the mother s trauma, however.Rosamund could be described as measured, always apparently in control, yet always feeling she is swept along with the tide. Passionate she is not. When George, who still does not know he is Octavia s father, says she might do well with a husband, Rosamund agrees, but only because it would be nice to have someone who could help to fill in the tax return. George is no better, since for his the purpose of marriage seems to be to provide someone to iron his shirts. It s all terribly British.But the characters are beautifully drawn, expertly pitched against themselves and their relationships. The Millstone, thus, explores motivation and achievement, and the relationship between selfishness and selflessness. In the end, we are who we are.
Lucky in work, unlucky in love - This moving short novel portraits the rude awakening of a young woman, who after making love with a silly bugger becomes an unmarried mother.The dreams of youth, I used to be so good-natured. I used to see the best in every-one , becomes my growing selfishness, this was probably maturity. Life would never be a simple question of self-denial again. There is also the chasm between the education s view of mankind and the facts of real life.Education was the cause of my inability to see anything in human terms of like and dislike, love and hate, but only in terms of justice, guilt and innocence , and the endurance of privation is a virtue. However as an adult, she is confronted with resentments breed so near the craddle, that people should have it from birth , facts of inequality, of the heart-breaking uneven hardship of the human lot. These things were as nothing compared with the bond that bind parent and child .As another woman in the novel says: I haven t the energy to go worrying about other people s children. I only have enough time to worry about myself. If I didn t put myself and mine first, they wouldn t survive. And finally, there is the unbearable burden of Victorian religion: the thought of sex freightened the life out of me. If Octavia were to die, this would be a vengeance upon my sin. In naturally flowing prose, Margaret Drabble paints a most human portrait of innocence and struggle for (emotional) survival, youth and adulthood and the mighty marks of religion (guilt) and unselfish education.A masterly written short novel.
A review: Margaret Drabble s Millstone - Drabble s Millstone is very well written and thoughtful yet a fairlyeasy read. Evocative of the London literary milieu of the 1960s, itfocuses on the discovery of identity and independence through a developingmother-child relationship. The protagonist s eloquent soul searchingmingles with an account of the more mundane side to motherhood. Interesting for those concerned with women s issues, the development offeminism and socialism, and the relationship of the classes. Perhaps thenovel s only fault is a slightly unbelievable main character. Anenjoyable and engaging read overall.
Readable, if dated - This is very much a book of the place and times (England, mid 60s). An intellectual, rather naive young woman gets pregnant at a time when unmarried mothers were very much frowned upon, and keeps the baby. (Hence the title.) Nevertheless the book is an insight into the times, is very well written, never drags, and captures all the characters just perfectly.
Intellectual girl facing reality of life - This is a touching story, one snapshot of an unusual woman s life written nicely, wittingly and intellectually. Facing the unpleasantry of reailty since having the baby (such as having to ask somebody something not because of herself but because of her baby), she seems to be learning a lot of things. I don t particularly like the fact that she s so ill-prepared for having a baby, but still she s all right and has the consious, loving personality. The whole naration from beginning to the end really fascinated me. Drabble s later books seem to become richier with more characters and more incidents (I guess that s what most writers head for as they become better writers), but I like The Millstone for its simplicity and narrow setting.