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The Red Queen, by Margaret Drabble
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Barbara Halliwell, on a grant at Oxford, receives an unexpected package-a centuries-old memoir by a Korean crown princess. An appropriate gift indeed for her impending trip to Seoul, but Barbara doesn't know who sent it. On the plane, she avidly reads the memoir, a story of great intrigue as well as tragedy. The Crown Princess Hyegyong recounts in extraordinary detail the ways of the Korean court and confesses the family dramas that left her childless and her husband dead by his own hand. When a Korean man Barbara meets at her hotel offers to guide her to some of the haunts of the crown princess, Barbara tours the royal courts and develops a strong affinity for everything related to the princess and her mysterious life. Barbara's time in Korea goes quickly, but captivated by her experience and wanting to know more about the princess, she wonders if her life can ever be the way it was before.
- Sales Rank: #1874222 in Books
- Published on: 2005-10-03
- Released on: 2005-10-03
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x .87" w x 5.25" l, .70 pounds
- 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."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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
PRAISE FOR THE RED QUEEN
"Drabble has written a moving tale of fate, moral responsibility and love."--San Francisco Chronicle
"Drabble's tale is a quiet love song to literature, an illustration as to how reader and subject become intertwined. As Yeats wrote, how can we know the dancer from the dance?"--Chicago Tribune
"An 18th-century Korean princess tells her harrowing life story in the lyrical first half of Drabble's lovely, intelligent 16th novel. A-." - Entertainment Weekly
"Drabble''s tale is a love song to literature, an illustration as to how reader and subject become intertwined." (Chicago Tribune 2004-10-03)
"Editor''s Choice" (Entertainment Weekly 2004-10-08)
"With her usual deftness and clarity, Drabble crosses cultures and centuries...engrossing and provocative" (Kirkus Reviews 2004-08-15)
"A deliciously evocative tale of palace intrigue...one of the most inventive works of fiction in recent memory" (San Francisco Chronicle 2004-11-21)
"Drabble''s plain narrative tenaciousness gives her writing transparency and fire." (Village Voice 2004-11-03)
Most helpful customer reviews
27 of 29 people found the following review helpful.
"Fear and violence, boredom and elegant inertia."
By Mary Whipple
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
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful.
Two separate, interesting stories - combined needlessly into one book
By erica
"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.
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
An ambitious, unusual, and extremely satisfying ghost story
By Bookreporter
Korean Crown Princess Hyegyong speaks from her 200-year-old grave to reveal the true story of her life. Born in 1735, she was pampered as a child to compensate for her destiny in the palace. Her parents suffered depression; the Crown Princess knew at an early age that play was pretend but sorrow was real. Her childhood ended early when her parents entered her into the selection ceremony as a royal bride. The mother of the Crown Prince, Lady Sonhui, favored her and so she was chosen.
The little girl was horrified on her long visits to the palace, where she was petted and fed strange foods, and painted with cosmetics. At home, palace servants attended to her and her parents deferred to her. She wanted to die. Sick with fear on her wedding day, she was married at age ten to Prince Sado, also ten, who called his wife his "little Red Queen" because of her prized red silk skirt. The married children played together, with dolls, kites, a toy horse, and the toy soldiers Sado loved. The marriage was consummated five years later.
The Princess's first son died. Her father-in-law, King Yongjo, was an odd man with many obsessions and insecurities who treated his son, Sado, harshly. He decreed that the couple's second son, Chongjo, was to be groomed to be king because Sado was becoming mentally unstable. As the young mother worried over her beloved son's fate, her husband became madder and madder. Prince Sado blamed his mania on his father's lack of love toward him; his actions were violent and terrifying. Complex court and family maneuvering and catastrophes shaped the Princess's remaining years.
After the princess narrates the balance of her tragic life, the story switches to modern-day England, focusing on Dr. Barbara Halliwell, who appears on the surface to be the opposite of the powerless princess. Babs is puzzled to receive a book of the Korean Crown Princess's memoirs anonymously. She reads the book during her flight to Seoul to attend a conference. As she reads, Babs is astounded at the number of connections and similarities to her own life. Along with other parallels, her own first husband went mad because of his relationship with his father, and her own first son died in infancy. Babs cannot stop thinking about the memoirs.
In Seoul, Babs escapes her conference to search out the places the Crown Princess experienced. Because of her fascination with the Korean princess's life, Babs experiences a significant chapter in her own life --- one that reverberates past her return to London and changes her future drastically.
The surreal yet extremely satisfactory ending includes a surprise appearance by Margaret Drabble herself. A short afterword reinforces the conclusion's mood of circularity and completion. THE RED QUEEN was a bit of a slow start for me (chalk it up to a few too many beach books over the summer), but I was soon ensnared by the haunting plot of this ambitious and unusual ghost story.
--- Reviewed by Terry Miller Shannon (...)
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