Cold Comfort

By Paul Gray

THE ICE AGE by Margaret Drabble

Knopf; 295 pages; $8.95

Typically, Margaret Drabble's heroines have been wry, intelligent women pitting their vivid psyches against their drab or otherwise unsatisfying outer lives. Her eighth novel alters this formula. Characters, female and male, no longer have the luxury of pursuing self-fulfillment or fretting about personal unhappiness. They are too preoccupied with current events --with the drama of England's economic decline, featuring a cast of millions of involuntary bit players.

Drabble focuses on a much smaller group, all of whose lives have been unpleasantly affected by political realities. Anthony Keating is recuperating from a heart attack. A go-go property speculator during the flush '60s, he has been left teetering near bankruptcy by the collapse of land prices. His friend and financial adviser, Len Wincobank, is serving a four-year prison term for fraud. Kitty Friedmann loses a foot and her husband in a random terrorist bombing. Keating's lover, Alison Murray, has a teen-age daughter jailed for reckless driving in a Balkan Communist state. "England was a safe, shabby, mangy old lion now," she mused. "Anyone could tweak her tail."

Since current fiction is still overpopulated with navel gazers, it is refreshing to find characters who are willing to stare instead at newspaper headlines and stock quotations. But the relentless public-spiritedness of everyone in The Ice Age sometimes seems almost comical in its portentousness. With no apparent irony, Drabble describes one of Alison's conversations with Keating: "She spoke of the state of the nation." During a get-together between Keating, his ex-wife and their children, "they talked of his father's funeral, of the sale of the old house, of the problems of squatters, of property rights and the property market, of inheritance, and wills, and money, and North Sea Oil, of leaseholds and freeholds, of solicitors and stamp duty." Chatter like that is enough to give solipsism a good name. Yet such lapses are the accidental by-products of an interesting and impressive experiment. A champion and biographer of Arnold Bennett, Drabble has produced an argumentative novel very much in the oratorical mold favored by Bennett and his contemporaries. When she wants a point emphasized or a warning heeded, she consciously resorts to long-outmoded fictional devices: the interpolated essay and the abrupt dismissal of characters who no longer serve her purpose.

That purpose is not just to entertain but to address her countrymen during a time of national crisis. It may no longer be possible for the novel to serve as such a podium; too many other diversions compete for the public's attention. But The Ice Age is Drabble's reminder that writers are also citizens of a dangerous, uncertain world, and that social responsiblity need not be parked outside the door of the study. -- Paul Gray

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