Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...assemble his reference books, "meant to entertain while they instruct," the Oxford-educated scholar lectured for two years at Manchester and London universities. But he quickly tired of repeating himself and tried his hand at short stories ("quite passable. Well, the New York Times thought so") and a novel ("plain bloody awful...
Nonetheless, the 24-year-old composer produced the best opera seria ever written. Indeed Idomeneo contains some of Mozart's greatest music, much of it achieved with effects that were novel then -and are striking today. In the awesome Act II storm scene, Mozart played with orchestral color like a would-be Romanticist. Never before had Munich heard the morose strains of muted brass. He also gave the chorus a vital role that would have been daring even by the standards of French opera. The arias of opera seria had traditionally been set pieces; Mozart often led the music...
Typically, Margaret Drabble's heroines have been wry, intelligent women pitting their vivid psyches against their drab or otherwise unsatisfying outer lives. Her eighth novel alters this formula. Characters, female and male, no longer have the luxury of pursuing self-fulfillment or fretting about personal unhappiness. They are too preoccupied with current events -with the drama of England's economic decline, featuring a cast of millions of involuntary bit players...
...North Sea Oil, of leaseholds and freeholds, of solicitors and stamp duty." Chatter like that is enough to give solipsism a good name. Yet such lapses are the accidental by-products of an interesting and impressive experiment. A champion and biographer of Arnold Bennett, Drabble has produced an argumentative novel very much in the oratorical mold favored by Bennett and his contemporaries. When she wants a point emphasized or a warning heeded, she consciously resorts to long-outmoded fictional devices: the interpolated essay and the abrupt dismissal of characters who no longer serve her purpose...
That purpose is not just to entertain but to address her countrymen during a time of national crisis. It may no longer be possible for the novel to serve as such a podium; too many other diversions compete for the public's attention. But The Ice Age is Drabble's reminder that writers are also citizens of a dangerous, uncertain world, and that social responsiblity need not be parked outside the door of the study. - Paul Gray