The life of a crown princess, a retelling in two parts
The Red Queen
By Margaret Drabble
Harcourt, 334 pp., $24
"The Red Queen" is an odd novel. You'd nearly say that it's two for the price of one, except the first part is not a novel at all but a reworking of a true story, while the second part is entirely fictitious.
Part one, "Ancient Times," is an account of the life of an 18th-century Korean crown princess who wrote her autobiography several times over in the years before her death in 1815. Margaret Drabble has worked from a translation of one of the surviving manuscripts ("The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong," translated and annotated by JaHyun Kim Haboush). She has retold it in the first person, inserting her own emotional tone, frequent asides, and many deliberate anachronisms. She is careful to acknowledge this in the prologue, as well as to add the intriguing declaration that the scholarly Haboush "does not endorse my interpretation."
The princess' story is completely compelling. It deals with her child marriage to the crown prince; her imprisonment within an elaborate, hermetically sealed world of court ritual and Confucian tradition; her husband's murderous derangement and her desperate attempts at concealment. These attempts are ultimately hopeless. When the crown prince's psychosis can no longer be hidden he is simply "removed" by his father, and the crown princess shifts her emotional attention to the new heir, her surviving son. It is a dreadful tale, told in the flat, unemotional voice of a woman who imagined the worst that can happen, then watched it slowly, inexorably come to pass.
It is a pity that Drabble is so insistent on her anachronisms and devices. She has the princess interrupt her own story with frequent asides on her studies in modern psychology and the genealogy of the royal houses of Europe; she even has her complaining of the quality of the cotton gloves they make you wear for research in the British Museum. Thus the integrity of the story is constantly broken into, slowing its pace and distancing our involvement. But Drabble is far too clever and postmodern to resist such touches and it could be that I am simply too much in love with sheer storytelling to appreciate them. There were certainly times when I was tempted to close the book and order Haboush's translation, but there were also times when I was grateful for Drabble's occasional fast-forwarding through the endless power struggles, dynastic expositions, and court intrigues. Sadly, the original story loses a certain impetus once the crown prince ceases rushing about with the heads of court eunuchs impaled on the end of his sword.
The second part, "Modern Times," is an entirely fictitious account. Exit prince bearing severed heads, enter Barbara Halliwell, a 42-year-old academic who is about to leave England to attend a conference in Seoul. A few days earlier, Barbara ("Babs") has been sent a copy of the crown princess' memoir, which she duly reads on the plane. The altered oxygen, the disorientation of high-velocity sedentary travel, her intense emotional engagement -- all these do their work. The dead princess takes partial possession of her consciousness and heavily influences her activities when she finally lands in Korea.
Babs is slightly ridiculous. Ambitious, pleasantly vain, a little snobbish, she is also oddly likable. There is a great deal of recognizable conference stuff that always just edges on the tedious, but also serves as a veil through which the shape of her tragic story can be glimpsed. And tragic it is, though Babs consistently flattens it in her very English determination not to indulge in melodrama. She has, like the princess, watched her only son die in infancy and her husband spin off into a psychosis due, at least in part, to the malign influence of a powerful and overbearing father. There are also indications that neither woman is as heartless as their voices might suggest. They have had the heart beaten out of them. Nonetheless, they remember its impulses, its vulnerability, and its pain.
Drabble is a very restless writer with a fine sense of the drama of even the smallest incident, so I am happy to follow Babs around her conference, to observe her faintly self-mocking maneuvering, to empathize with her anxieties as she beds the conference star. On the surface she rattles on, involved in her appearance, her paper (who did or didn't come to hear it), her small triumphs and disasters. At the same time, as the "envoy" of the crown princess, she brings the memoir to the attention of the aforementioned conference star. Together they fall under her influence; together they see the sights and walk the gardens that the crown princess once trod. And there is a denouement to this liaison that is perfect -- a perfect clich, subtly drawn, and just enough.
The many parallels in the lives of these two women give the book an interesting mirroring effect. Add to this Drabble's clear fascination with the princess' fascinating life and you get the imperative for the retelling of her story. The plot, which is gently elaborate and almost circular, is deconstructed even as it finally fully emerges: Back in London, Babs meets an author, Drabble, and tells her the princess' story. Drabble is hooked, as was Babs, as was the conference star. Thus the author becomes character-about-to-become-author. The threads are gathered, tied, untied. The princess is off on her journeys again.
Kerry Hardie is the author of "A Winter Marriage."
