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The sea lady : a late romance / Margaret Drabble.

By: Material type: TextTextPublication details: Camberwell, Vic. : Fig Tree, 2006.Description: 344 pages ; 21 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9780670916498 (hbk.)
  • 0670916498 (hbk.)
  • 0670916501 (pbk.)
  • 9780670916504 (pbk.)
Subject(s): Genre/Form: Subject: Two distinguished guests are travelling separately towards a ceremony where they will meet for the first time for three decades. Both are apprehensive, as they review the successes and failures of their public life, and their secret history. Humphrey and Ailsa met as children, by the grey Northern sea to which they are returning. Humphrey was already a serious child, drawn towards the underwater world of marine biology, but there were as yet few signs of Ailsa's dazzling transformation into a flamboyant feminist celebrity. The novel traces the evolution of their careers and their passionately entangled relationship, and brings them together again to see what they will make of their past, and in what spirit they will be able to face the future.
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Holdings
Item type Current library Collection Call number Copy number Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Fiction Davis (Central) Library Fiction Collection Fiction Collection DRA 1 Available T00463754
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Two distinguished guests are travelling separately towards a ceremony where they will meet for the first time for three decades. Both are apprehensive, as they review the successes and failures of their public life, and their secret history.

Two distinguished guests are travelling separately towards a ceremony where they will meet for the first time for three decades. Both are apprehensive, as they review the successes and failures of their public life, and their secret history. Humphrey and Ailsa met as children, by the grey Northern sea to which they are returning. Humphrey was already a serious child, drawn towards the underwater world of marine biology, but there were as yet few signs of Ailsa's dazzling transformation into a flamboyant feminist celebrity. The novel traces the evolution of their careers and their passionately entangled relationship, and brings them together again to see what they will make of their past, and in what spirit they will be able to face the future.

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Excerpt provided by Syndetics

The Presentation The winning book was about fish, and to present it, she appeared to have dressed herself as a mermaid, in silver sequinned scales. Her bodice was close-fitting, and the metallic skirt clung to her solid hips before it flared out below the knees, concealing what might once have been her tail. Her bared brown shoulders and womanly bosom rose powerfully, as she drew in her breath and gazed across the heads of the seated diners at the distant autocue. She gleamed and rippled with smooth muscle, like a fish. She was boldly dressed, for a woman in her sixties, but she came of a bold generation, and she seemed confident that the shadowy shoals of her cohort were gathered around her in massed support as she flaunted herself upon the podium. She felt the dominion. It pumped through her, filling her with the adrenalin of exposure. She was ready for her leap. The silver dress must have been a happy accident, for until a few hours earlier in the day nobody knew which book had carried off the trophy. The five judges had met for their final deliberations over a sandwich lunch in a dark anachronistic wood-panelled room off an ill-lit nineteenth-century corridor. The result of their conclave was about to be announced. Most of the guests, including the authors, were as yet ignorant of the judges' choice. Ailsa Kelman's wardrobe could hardly have been extensive enough to accommodate all six of the works upon the shortlist, a list which included topics such as genetically modified crops, foetal sentience and eubacteria: subjects which did not easily suggest an elegant theme for a couturier. Would it be suspected that she, as chair of the judges for the shortlist, had favoured a winner to match her sequinned gown, and had pressed for its triumph? Surely not. For although she was derided in sections of the press as an ardent self-publicist, she was also known to be incorruptible. The sea-green, silvery, incorruptible Ailsa. And her fellow-judges were not of a cal¬i¬bre to submit to bullying or to manipulation. The venue of the dinner might also shortly be observed to be something of a happy accident. The diners were seated at elegantly laid little round tables beneath a large grey-blue fibreglass model of a manta ray, which hung suspended above them like a primeval spaceship or an ultra-modern mass-people-carrier. They could look nervously up at its grey-white underbelly, at its wide wings, at its long whip-like tail, as though they were dining on the ocean floor. Like the costume of Ailsa Kelman, this matching of winner and venue could not have been planned. The museum was a suitable venue for a prize for a general science book with a vaguely defined ecological or environmental message, but the diners could as easily have been seated in some other hall of the huge yellow-and-blue-brick Victorian necropolis, surrounded by ferns or beetles or minerals or the poignant bones of dinosaurs. The dominant theme of fish had prevailed by chance. The programme was going out live, and noses had been discreetly powdered, hair adjusted, and shreds of green salad picked from teeth. Now the assembly fell silent for Ailsa's declaration. Although the winner did not yet know the result, the cameramen and women did, and some of the more media-wise of the guests were able to read the imminent outcome from their disposition. Great sea snakes of thick cable twisted across the floor and under the tables, and thinner ropes of wire clambered up like strangling weeds on to the platform and connected themselves to microphones and control buttons. The technology was at once primitive and modern, cumbersome and smart. The platform on which Ailsa stood was temporary and precarious, and the fake grass matting that covered it concealed a hazardous crack. Posture, Ailsa, posture, said Ailsa Kelman to herself, as she straightened her shoulders, drew in another deep breath, and, upon cue, began to speak. Her strong, hoarse and husky voice, magnified to a trembling and intimate timbre of vibration by the microphone, loudly addressed the gathering. The audience relaxed, in comfortable (if in some quarters condescending) familiarity: they knew where they were going when they were led onwards by this siren-speaker. They felt safe with her expertise. She took them alphabetically through the shortlist, travelling rapidly through the cosmos and the bio¬sphere, sampling dangerous fruits, appraising the developing human embryo, interrogating the harmless yellow-beige dormouse, swimming with dwindling schools of cod and of herring, burrowing into the permafrost, and plunging down to the black smokers of the ocean floor. She summoned up bacteria and eubacteria and ancient filaments from the Archaean age, and presented her audience with the accelerating intersexuality of fish. Behind her, around her, above her, in the wantonly and wastefully vast spaces of the Marine Hall, swam old-fashioned tubby three-dimensional life-size models of sharks and dolphins, like giant bath toys, and the more futurist magnified presences of plankton and barnacles and sea squirts and sea slugs. Ailsa Kelman shimmered and glittered as she approached her watery climax. And suddenly, all the foreplay of the foreshore was over: Ailsa Kelman declared that the intersexuality of fish had won! The hermaphrodite had triumphed! Hermaphrodite: Sea Change and Sex Change was the winning title. The winning author was Professor Paul Burden, from the EuroBay Oceanographic Institute in Brittany and the University of California at San Diego. Applause, applause, as a tall bearded marine biologist picked his way over the seabed of Marconi cables towards the platform to receive his cheque and present his weathered outdoor face to the bright unnatural lights. A television person conducted the applause, encouraging a crescendo, insisting on a diminuendo, attempting, not wholly successfully, to impose a silence. Some members of the captive audience were by now quite drunk, and, deprived of the false concentration of suspense, were growing restless. The hermaphrodite had won! 'This is a brilliantly written survey of gender and sex in marine species . . . prefaced by a poetic evocation of a distant and placid asexual past . . . covering bold hypotheses about the evolutionary origins of sexual reproduction, followed by startling revelations about current female hormone levels, current male infertility, and rising sexual instability caused by POPs and other forms of chemical hazards . . . Few were listening to the formal citation. However, because of the cameras and the controlling conductor, nobody could yet move. They had to sit and pretend to follow Ailsa Kelman's eulogy. The jaws of sharks, fixed in the gape of their everlasting grins, displayed their triple rows of teeth above the diners.Now the prize-winner was saying his few words. Oddly, he pronounced the main word of his title with an extra syllable, an unusual fifth syllable. 'Herm-Aphrodite,' he said, conjuring forth an intersexed Venus-Apollo from the waves, a goddess or a god of change. He spoke of intersexed males and females, of transitionals. 'When I was young, he was saying, hermaphrodites were more common in the invertebrate world. My first published paper was on the life cycle of the marine shrimp . . .' Ailsa Kelman stood on the platform, back straight, breathing evenly and listening hard. She smiled rigidly outwards and onwards as the marine biologist spoke. Professor Burden was speaking very well. He was a proper scientist, a hard scientist, but he was also a literary man, and keen to prove it. Now he had moved on to Ovid and his Metamorphoses and why they had become so fashionable at the beginning of the third millennium. He mentioned the nymph Salmacis and Hermaphrodite, joined together in one body in the fountain of life. The question of the mutability of gender which had so intrigued the ancients, he was saying, had now become a serious item on the very different agenda of evolutionary biology . . . Ailsa found it hard to concentrate on the content of his speech, elevated and displayed to the public view as she was, as she so often was. But she tried. She was dutiful, in her fashion. She was a professional. Public occasions enthralled Ailsa Kelman. She loved their special effects, their choreography, their managed glamour, their moments of panic, their humiliations, their heterogeneity, their ephemeral and cynical extravagance. She rose to these occasions and blossomed in the surf of them. She was in her element here. The marine biologist mentioned the escalating incidence of uterine cannibalism in certain species. Fish siblings, it seems, increasingly tend to devour one another in the womb. The womb is a surprisingly dangerous environment, he was telling the obligatorily attentive diners.   Copyright (c) Margaret Drabble, 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.   Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be submitted online at www.harcourt.com/contact or mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777. Excerpted from The Sea Lady by Margaret Drabble All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Two British academics meet after decades and reconstruct their frayed lives; see the review, p. 91. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

The bold latest from by the ever-inventive Drabble (The Red Queen, etc.) tells the tale of two aging academics-Ailsa Kelman, flamboyant feminist activist and TV talking head, and marine biologist Humphrey Clark-who are traveling separately to the North Sea coastal town of Ornemouth: she's presenting a book award that he, unknowingly, will receive. The two met at Ornemouth as children one summer toward the end of WWII; they lost track of one another and haven't seen each other since their brief, disastrous marriage in 1960s London. A cocky narrator reveals the charged memories, of childhood and beyond, that the trip triggers for both-and occasionally breaks free to fill in narrative gaps and pose destiny-altering scenarios. Neither is content: Humphrey is lonely and dissatisfied by his scholarship's mere competence; Ailsa, twice divorced, is uncertain if she's a success or a caricature of success (her cervix has been on TV). Secondaries include red-headed local boy Sandy Clegg, and Ailsa's rich, unscrupulous brother Tommy, in thick with the royals. Nothing as simple as a love story, this prismatic novel shines as a faceted portrait of England's changing mores, as an ode on childhood's joys and injustices, and a primer for marine biology, complete with hermaphrodite crayfish and fossils of sea lilies. Seductive as the tides, it pulls the reader in. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

There are few pleasures more mentally invigorating than astringently witty and wise satirical fiction. Drabble is a master of the form, creating audacious women characters of withering insight and triumphant sensuality. Her latest, Ailsa Kelman, is the most reviled of celebrities: an outspoken, sexy, shrewd, and exhibitionist feminist scholar. In her sixties and still indomitable, she is, however, haunted by her past, and is now heading back to the place where she met the great love of her life, a modest city on the cold yet fertile North Sea. As a child she spent an indelible summer there, as did Humphrey Clark, who was so smitten with the sea that he became a notable marine biologist. Now, he, too, is returning to the source of his life's passion. The sea, the crucible of life, infuses every aspect of this blissfully commanding performance, and Drabble goes all out in an orgy of marine imagery, from mermaid-inspired attire, to oceanic decor, tsunamis of emotion, and salty sex, powering a steady current of exhilarating metaphors involving tides, fish, seashells, reefs, and sharks. And this is no idle wordplay. As in The Peppered Moth (2001), Drabble uses a character's scientific quest to delve into humankind's abuse of the natural world, here portraying a man full of reverence for the sea in a time of rampant marine devastation. But for all its dark knowledge, oceanic psychology, and spiny social critique, Drabble's novel is as scintillating as a sunny day onboard a fast-moving sailboat on the life-sustaining sea. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2006 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

An intense melancholy pervades the latest novel from the prolific and always thoughtful Drabble (The Red Queen, 2004, etc.), as she untangles the twisted strands of a 50-year relationship between a marine biologist and a well-known feminist. Celebrity-scholar Ailsa Kelman makes plans to accept an honorary degree from a university in northern England because she knows it's a chance to see her old love Humphrey Clark, who is also receiving a degree. Although unaware that Ailsa will be there, Humphrey has a foreboding that an unpleasant surprise awaits him. As they travel to Ornemouth from London, Ailsa by plane and rental car, Humphrey by train, they relive their pasts. They first met as children during a summer vacation on the coast near Ornemouth. Humphrey, mainly concerned that his best friend Sandy had fallen under the sway of Ailsa's attractively devilish brother, barely registered Ailsa, who was herself full of longing and resentment as she tagged along with the boys. When they met again in their 20s, Ailsa was an actress, Humphrey at the start of his career in science. They fell passionately in love, but their brief marriage was doomed once their lives took different paths. Each entered unsuccessful second marriages, and each parented a child with whom there developed a degree of estrangement. Ailsa dropped acting to become a scholar and social commentator. Humphrey had a successful career as a marine biologist of some renown. Neither publicly acknowledged their relationship or marriage. Now in their 60s, they both look back on their accomplishments and failures with a certain regret. Ailsa works a little too hard at her high-energy persona while Humphrey has become stodgy and almost timid. Drabble mixes sociology, psychology and philosophy--not to mention marine biology--into what is at heart a bittersweet autumnal romance. Emotionally reflective and intellectually invigorating. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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