Warning: strpos(): Empty needle in /homepages/5/d845057890/htdocs/clickandbuilds/LionessatLarge/wp-content/plugins/regenerate-thumbnails-advanced/classes/Environment.php on line 47
Margaret Drabble: The Red Queen – Lioness at Large

Margaret Drabble: The Red Queen

I should have read the Crown Princess’s actual memoirs instead.

Pretentious and self-centered.  Forget the book blurbs — this actually isn’t about the Lady Hyegyōng but about Margaret Drabble and the “connection” she allegedly feels with this 18th century Korean princess.

In fact, only the first half of the book even focuses on the Lady Hyegyōng’s story at all — and even that part is (1) almost all telling instead of showing and (2) clearly NOT told from a Korean (even if only a contemporary Korean) perspective but from the Western contemporary author’s own perspective.  Then we get to the second part, where we’re being presented with a Western POV stand-in character for Ms. Drabble, who (for reasons never satisfactorily explained) feels compelled to research and “keep alive” the Lady Hyegyōng’s story after having mysteriously been sent a recent translation of her memoirs — until, that is, during the Seoul conference forming the majority of the second part’s backdrop, she embarks on a fling with the conference’s star speaker / scientist / participant (or rather, throws herself at him with jet propulsion force).  And ultimately, Drabble doesn’t even shy away from explicitly inserting herself into the book, as (you guessed it) the autor eventually tasked with telling both the Crown Princess’s and the Western POV Drabble-stand-in character’s stories.

If I hadn’t been planning on using this book for the Kill Your Darlings game, I’d have DNF’d it — at the very latest when the second part’s supremely annoying Western POV character started throwing herself full-forcce at that star scientist (while at the same time being equally supremely rude to a Korean doctor who’d saved her skin on more than one occasion and who had even taken out time from his own busy schedule to show her Seoul’s historic sites).

So, one star for the faraway glimpes at the Lady Hyegyōng provided in the book’s first part, and half a star for inspiring me to seek out her actual story … and her own point of view.

But if this is supposed to be one of Margaret Drabble’s most celebrated books, I’m afraid I’m now going to need a truly huge incentive to go near her writing again any time soon.

 

Original post:
ThemisAthena.booklikes.com/post/1649565/i-should-have-read-the-crown-princess-s-actual-memoirs-instead

0 thoughts on “Margaret Drabble: The Red Queen

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Literature Reviews

Adventures in Arda

Note: This was my summer 2022 project — but while I posted the associated project pages here at the time (Middle-earth and its sub-project pages concerning the people and peoples, timeline, geography, etc. of Arda and Middle-earth, see enumeration under the Boromir meme, below), I never got around to also copying this introductory post from […]

Read More
Literature Reviews

Michael J. Sullivan: Riyria

The Riyria Revelations are the fantasy series that brought Michael J. Sullivan instant recognition back in the late 2000s.  Originally published as a series of six installments, they are now available as a set of three books, with each of the three books comprising two volumes of the original format.  As he did with almost […]

Read More
Literature Reviews

Michael J. Sullivan: Legends of the First Empire

Michael J. Sullivan’s Riyria books have been on my TBR for a while, but until I’d read two short stories from the cycle — The Jester and Professional Integrity — I hadn’t been sure whether his writing would be for me.  Then I found out that (much like Tolkien’s Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, and The History […]

Read More