Jerusalem the Golden (Canons)

Margaret Drabble's wonderful novel `Jerusalem the Golden', was the winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction when it was first published, so I am very pleased to see that some of her earlier novels are being reprinted as Penguin Classics.The novel centres on Clara Maugham, a young woman in her last year of university, having escaped from her dreary home in the suburban Yorkshire town of Northam. The first part of the story tells us of Clara's lonely childhood and how she has been brought up by an embittered mother who seems, to Clara, to have no purpose in life other than to criticize others and make her life difficult. Clara hates the way her mother looks down on their neighbours, wearily noting that it doesn't matter what one says or does, her mother will always find something reprehensible in it. Clara longs to escape from the depressing influence of her mother and, as the years pass, she begins to realize there is a way out of her tedious life. Clara develops into an attractive and intelligent young woman, who works hard, passes her exams and leaves home to go off to London University to study languages.In London, at an after theatre drinks party, Clara meets the beautiful and elegant Clelia Denham and she is very keen to start a friendship with her. Clelia is part of a delightful, artistic, bohemian family who own a large and beautiful house in Highgate, full of books, old mirrors, faded Turkish carpets and wonderful eclectic pieces of furniture. Mrs Denham is a writer, Mr Denham a poet and Clelia is an artist. There are five grown up Denham children in all, each of them either beautiful, or talented, or both, and Clara cannot help but be enthralled by them all - especially the magnificent (and married) Gabriel who lets Clara know how much he is attracted to her.This novel, possibly named `Jerusalem the Golden', because Clara sees the Denhams and their lifestyle bathed in a golden light, is the story of how Clara is seduced into leading the life she believes she wants to live, and into being the person she thinks she wants to be. Drabble's writing, characterized by perceptive observation, is luminous; I have not read anything of hers for years, but picking up this book was like slipping into a warm bath with a glass of cold wine. Wonderful.4.5 Stars.

Margaret Drabble's Jerusalem the Golden centres around Clara Maugham, an intelligent young woman from the north of England. Clara spends her childhood with a somewhat (though not irredeemably) uptight mother, and excels at school. Clara chooses languages over science, foreshadowing decisions she will make later in life, and makes an eye opening trip to Paris where she deals with the shock of unwanted advances on the part of a young Italian man she meets. She is also gradually introduced, first through the trip and later in London where she goes to study at University, to the world of wealthy bohemians. Most prominent of these in the novel are the Denham siblings, with whom Clara is gradually entangled.The book itself is subtly engrossing. Clara's entrapment is soft but tragic, and one feels the character is entirely authentic and believable throughout. Constantly perplexed by the social graces and habits of those around her, Clara's fascination with those who exemplify everything that her mother and her upbringing were not is both understandable and lamentable. Drabble has the rare power to convey almost everything you need to know about a character's nature from a single sentence, and it makes her work, this novel included, economical with her reader's attention. Highly recommended.

Jerusalem the Golden is a jewel of a book: it is carried by its magnificent writing, humanity and authority. Clara grows up in a mean-spirited northern England home; her mother is conventional, scathing, embittered and it is only via the grammar school, those wonderful places of freedom and meritocracy (for some) that she escapes to university in London where she makes friends - there is a wonderful description of the chancyness of encounters that broker friendship - with another young woman whose family becomes a revelation to her.The book is, like many of her novels, inspired by autobiographical elements of Margaret Drabble's own life but she has constructed an imaginative feat that succeeds in being both particular and universal: the possibility for human lives to become blighted or to progress, to seek out their potential "for advancement", for love, for the freedom of the unconventional that becomes wholly right and apposite.It is a book that might seem to favour female readers, but I think it will be relished by anyone who enjoys great literature, for this is a book that races forward not through the devices of the plotline but through the intrinsic narrative of relationships, ideas, descriptions all composed in the most wonderful, graceful, effortlessly rich style.The Kindle version works well on both the Kindle and the iPad app.

I recently read ' the dark flood rises' and whilst I found it not without lots of faults, rembered how I had enjoyed reading Margaret Drabble in the past I must have read this book but have no real clear memories of ot so came to it as if it were a new book and found it all a bit of a disappointment.Worst of all, it felt very dated and did not in any way transcend the time in which it was written unlike mnay other books by different authors.clara, the bright northern heroine is a spoilt brat of the first order but at least her and her backgound, especially her poor mother who has had a thankless task of bringing the cuckoo up , is will drwn, full of detail and totally believable whereas the up-market London family she cleaves to, never seem at all real and just merge into one amorphous mass Her Parisian dalliace with one of their number is also never truly believable ad the ending is just a damp squibPerhaps not wise to voyage down memory lane with an author you thought you liked....