Book: The Pure Gold Baby by Margaret Drabble

Margaret Drabble is such a good writer that whatever subject she writes about is interesting. Here, it is the story of Jess, a modern young British woman who gets pregnant by a married professor. She has the baby…the pure gold baby… and names her Anna. The professor had "wanted her to have an abortion, he'd set it all up, with a recuperative week in an expensive, discreet clinic in Hampshire thown in, but she had refused. And their sexual relationship had lingered on, had been picked up after Anna's birth had renewed itself, and then had worn itself out slowly. It had come to an end before Jess learnt of Anna's condition, the the early days when all with Anna was still golden."

The pure gold baby just doesn't grow up normally. She is sweet but slow and eventually Jess sends her to a special school. All through this novel, there are allusions to children who fail to achieve a normal independent adult life. They are not always definitively diagnosed, and they are often easy children with pleasant bland personalities, capable of small worries and easy pleasures.

Jess reads of Pearl Buck's only child, a daughter named Carol and how as Pearl "grew richer and more and more famous, she adopted other daughters in an effort to heal the material wound, and founded homes and institutions…to care for children marginalized by property or hereditary abnormality."

Wonderful sentences on every page:

"English people reading Proust often manifest a degree of self-consciousness, and Jess was no exception. She left a sense of sold and almost visible virtue as she lay in the staler royal-blue bathing suit on her yellow towel on the grass, making her way through the Jeunes Filles en flours….."

Jess lives on with her daughter. She marries and leaves one man but remains friends with him and even remains married to him. She has women friends and men friends and has adequate social connections. Somehow, Drabble makes dailiness and a rather ordinary life into an engaging tale. It is told by an unknown narrator who at the end says: "I haven't invented much. I've speculated, here and there, I've made up bits of dialogue, but you can tell when I've been dong that, because it shows. I've known Jess a long time, and I've know Anna all her life, but there will be things I have got wrong….."

Jess dreams of Africa her whole life and she finally makes a trip there with Anna near the end of the book: "Anna is here, and safe, and with her mother, and she is enjoining the ride. Anna learns to duck when branches hang low over the track, and sips her bottled tepid water and gazes around at this new but ancient world. She likes the sausage trees, and she even likes the circling vultures. As Jess has hoped, she seems to have forgotten about her illness. She does not have a brooding memory…It is all a success, so far, the expedition."

Why read this? For the beauty of the words and how they fit together...