My first attempt at reading Margaret Drabble was with her novel, ‘The Ice Age’, a book I found boring and stuffy and when I started to read The Radiant Way, my opinion of her wasn’t changing. Somehow I started to really get the story and now I have a different view of her.
The Radiant Way focuses on the lives of three middle-aged women; Liz, Alix and Esther and how they cope with the ever turbulent eighties. There are moments of happiness and depressive ones. However despite all that happens their friendship still unites them.
I’m sure we all have read novels like this before but what makes Drabble stand out is that there’s some twists and turns in the lives of all the characters that are quite unpredictable plus The Radiant Way (named after a tv documentary Liz’s husband directs) criticises the Thatcher government quite openly, so there’s a heavy political slant to the novel.
Style-wise its beautiful, whereas The Ice Age was umm drab, the prose here was elegant but with a dry sense of humour running through it.
A solid read
The Bobsphere 