Word: agee
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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ENGLAND, the "noble and puissant nation" of Milton's poetry, is dying. As the characters in Margaret Drabble's The Ice Age grapple with the meaning of that decline, England's hard times--the "Ice Age" of the title--come to dominate their lives. IRA bombs explode, the economy stagnates and Drabble's heroes try to pick up the pieces. If most of them at the end are not much better off than when they started, the same happily cannot be said for the readers of this wry, compassionate, and suspenseful book...
Since Erica Jong overcame her fear of flying, and Philip Roth professed desire, it is a great relief to find a novelist who isn't hiding, naked ego poorly concealed, behind her central character. The Ice Age is not about any one person, but rather a constellation of characters in an historical content, the downfall of their country. Each character, we feel, has his own identity, his own rationale for living, and a small but important fate to be played out against the background of a faltering England. Drabble has the novelistic strength to make the most of her role...
...characters in The Ice Age become linked through their involvement in the property-development boom and bust in England during the mid-seventies. Len Wincobank, the whiz kid property developer, along with Maureen, his secretary-girl friend, have been unashamedly "raping the city centers of Britain and making millions." His freewheeling charisma pulls in Anthony Keating, the clergyman's son raised to be a cultivated and useless esthete, who revolts against his proper past by leaving his broadcasting job to become a property speculator...
Margaret Drabble is not a Zen guru, a panderer, or a showman. She is a novelist. She does what the writer-as-artist can do better than anyone else: dig down to the truth of our inner lives and make it visible. The Ice Age is convincing evidence that, like England, the novel in modern times is not really dying, but undergoing a strange metamorphosis, from which it yet may rouse itself "like a strong man after sleep...
Part of the answer is that it's hard to quit. After you've played organized sports since the age of seven, being a team athlete is very much a part of your life...