Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #111914 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 348 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In her 16th novel, Drabble exhibits her characteristic ironic detachment in an elegantly constructed meditation on memory, mortality, risk and reward. Dr. Babs Halliwell, a 40-ish academic on sabbatical at Oxford, receives an anonymous gift on the eve of her departure for a conference in Seoul: a copy of the 18th-century Korean Crown Princess Hyegyong's memoir. In the crown princess's tumultuous time, women of the court could exercise power only through men. But the sly, coquettish and charmingly unreliable princess not only outlived her mad husband but also survived her brothers, her sons and innumerable palace plots. Her story and her spirit all but possess Dr. Halliwell, whose tragic personal losses and highly ritualized professional life cleverly and subtly mirror those of the crown princess. Upon her arrival in Seoul, Dr. Halliwell begins to come a bit unhinged as pieces of her long-submerged past threaten to catch up with her at last. "These things," she observes, "have long, long fuses." She innocently takes up with a generous Korean doctor, who becomes her tour guide in the jarringly foreign city. Soon, she's also flattered into embarking on a brief but intense affair with a famous and charismatic Dutch anthropologist who's busy grappling with ghosts of his own. Nimbly jumping across time and around the globe, Drabble artfully stitches together the disparate strands of both women's lives with "a scarlet thread... of blood and joy." The voices of the dead reach out to the living, where the ancient and the modern "pass through one another, like clouds of bees, like distant galaxies... like the curving spirals of a double helix."
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From Booklist
Drabble read JaHyun Kim Haboush's translation of The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong: The Autobiographical Writings of a Crown Princess of Eighteenth-Century Korea (1995) and became possessed. Enthralled by the tough-minded memoirist and the crucial phase of Korean history she illuminates, Drabble doesn't simply fictionalize the crown princess' dramatic story, she transforms the royal author into a ghostly, insistent presence who has studied the world closely since her death and who has decided to retell her story in light of all that has transpired in the interim. And so the crown princess--proud, frank, intelligent, discursive, and still wounded by the cruelty of her father-in-law, King Yongjo, and the terrible crimes and suffering of her mad and murderous husband, Prince Sado--recounts her harrowing experiences, matching Anchee Min's historically based Empress Orchid [BKL N 15 03] with her vivid depiction of the claustrophobia and dysfunction of an Asian court, and also offering delectably caustic commentary on the modern world. But there's more. Drabble, a master at constructing two-track, two-epoch tales (The Seven Sisters [2002] brings Virgil into our time), abruptly switches to the present, where the intrepid Dr. Barbara Halliwell, a fetching English academic, reads the crown princess' memoirs on the way to a conference in Seoul, thus inadvertently instigating hilarious, sexy, and suspenseful adventures that reveal curious parallels between her life and that of the Korean princess. Drabble is sleight-of-hand adept at slipping profoundly insightful musings on human nature, history, and social mores into scintillating and all-consuming novels. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

Customer Reviews

Two separate, interesting stories - combined needlessly into one book
"The Red Queen" is a tale of two women struggling for survival in a world dominated by insanity, death, and some degree of oppression. The first part of the book is narrated by the Red Queen herself, a Korean woman married to the Crown Prince as a child and forced to navigate a series of political and familial struggles which ultimately lead to the Prince's insanity and death. The second part turns to Babs, an academic who has also lost her husband to insanity and who seeks to not only escape her past but embrace and exploit her present. Babs reads the Red Queen's memoirs on the flight to a conference in Korea, and the sprit of the Red Queen haunts her throughout the trip.

"The Red Queen" is intelligent and, despite requiring some effort to read, engrossing. Drabble tells a wonderful story and both portions of the novel are imbued with intelligent characters, well-constructed language, and a quiet sense of humor. The first part of the story, narrated by the Red Queen, is particularly unusual and insightful.

The novel's failing is that its central conceit - that Babs and the Red Queen are in some way linked, or more particularly that their stories are linked - falls flat. Although I enjoyed each part of the book, I saw little in the way of parallels beyond the obvious, and the consequences of these were not apparent. The second part of the book thus lacked focus, and resorted to an unnecessarily trite ending.

"Fear and violence, boredom and elegant inertia."
Intending to write a "transcultural tragicomedy," Margaret Drabble announces that this novel will ask questions "about the nature of survival, and about the possibility of the existence of universal transcultural human characteristics." Using the real memoirs of 18th century Korean Crown Princess Hyegyong as the inspiration for her novel, Drabble creates her own version of these memoirs, placing them within the context of world history by relating them to what was happening in western civilization at the same time.

Chosen to be the bride of the Crown Prince when both are ten years old, the Princess abandons her family and marries the prince that year. We hear her adult voice relating the sad changes her husband undergoes after their marriage, as he becomes increasingly fearful and eventually insane, committing atrocities, including murder. "I failed my husband," she says, unable to stop his rampages. Describing her training to be queen, the birth of her children and their fates, and her experience in the claustrophobic court, she breathes life into her descriptions of her unusual existence. Though her observations are honest and fair, her language, not surprisingly, is elegant and formal. She keeps her distance, not really sharing her innermost thoughts and feelings.

In Part II, Babs Halliwell, a contemporary scholar in Oxford, leaves for Korea to deliver a paper at a conference on globalization. Drabble creates obvious parallels between the life of the Princess and that of Halliwell from the outset of Part II. As Halliwell boards the plane, she brings with her a copy of the Princess's memoirs, "sent to her anonymously, packaged in cardboard, through Amazon.com," which she reads in flight.

No reader will miss the parallels between the life of Halliwell and that of the Princess, who "has entered her, like an alien creature in a science-fiction movie." Halliwell's background, her tragedies, her own difficult marriage to a mentally ill husband, and her uncertainties about the future are clearly created to show parallels to the Princess's life. Drabble draws additional parallels between recent news events from around the world and events in the life of the Princess, in an effort to continue the connections across cultures and time.

Those who have studied other cultures may find Drabble's themes obvious and her deliberate parallels lacking in subtlety. She explains these parallels, rather than allowing the reader to discover them. The construction feels artificial, and Drabble's tone is sometimes coy. The diary of the Princess, however, is especially interesting for the light it casts on a way of life almost unknown to contemporary westerners, and for this the novel is both important and fascinating. (3.5 stars) Mary Whipple

A worthless little literary double-feature
What makes a good book? C'mon, what do you like? Identifiable characters? A compelling plot? A relevant, insightful theme? Some sort of justification (no matter how abstract) for turning the pages? A reason to start reading the damn thing in the first place? Well, here's the deal: The Red Queen has absolutely none of that. None. It'd be easy to say that book sucks- and it really does, on more levels than you can possibly imagine- but there's more to it than that: As far as I can tell, there is absolutely no reason why this book should exist.

I mean, what am I supposed to like about this thing? Why did I keep turning the pages? It certainly wasn't the plot: The story is an incomprehensible mess, a tossed-together jumble of painfully stressed clichés, meaningless plot turns, pitiful stabs at emotional resonance, and groan-inducing melodrama. The novel's structure (the first half consists of a bizarre first-person summary of some Korean monarch's memoirs, while the second half describes a few days in the life of a woman who reads said memoirs, except they're not exactly the memoirs that were in the first half, but they tell the same story, but they- oh, screw it) is a painfully misguided stab at postmodernism- it's like Drabble skimmed a Wikipedia entry on postmodern literature and thought "how hard can it be?" It's full of gaping holes, undeveloped ideas, and a prose style that suffers from multiple personalities (and all of them are awful). The characters are uniformly horrendous- the Red Queen herself is a whiney, inconsiderate twerp who's surrounded by underdeveloped cardboard cutouts. Meanwhile, Barbara (the woman who reads the memoirs) is a dull, humorless tramp. I'd say that I hate the characters, but the book doesn't even inspire enough passion to make me do that. Everything that they do is simply dull and vaguely irritating, causes a few seconds of mental discomfort before slipping off into the background and losing the name of action.

And in the end, what's it all add up to? What does all this sound and fury (or, to put it more accurately, noise and unmotivated gesturing) signify? Less than zero, of course. The novel attempts to make some grand point about the connections that can reach across generations and nationalities, how common experiences can shape the lives of disparate people, about the power of literature and history to move and change us, but it doesn't' even come close. There's simply no sense of connection between Barbara and her Queen- all she did was read her stinkin' book. If Drabble had wanted to make this work, she should've taken care to make each woman's story haunt the other's, to draw subtle parallels, to speak to the essential humanity of each character, to show that at the very bottom of it all, they were motivated by loves and hates and passions just like each other's. Instead, she just shoehorns two stories into one book, and tacks on a cheesy epilogue that attempts to make up for three hundred pages of lazy writing with one smarmy conclusion. Nice try.

This really is the worst kind of novel; it's dull, uninspiring, badly conceived and horrendously executed, and on top of all that it's stunningly pretentious. You'd get more out of a T.V. guide.