Margaret Drabble's The Sea Lady

I read Margaret Drabble's novels in the 70's but had read nothing more recent until I came across April Bernard's piece in the Feb. 6 New York Review of Books, which encouraged me to seek out The Sea Lady (Harcourt, Inc., 2006), a marvelous book about remembering and growing old

The Public Orator pauses here, relieved that at last both of the principals have recognized the necessary shape of the plot.  It is a story of convergence, but it is not yet clear whether the story will end in recognition, reconciliation, refusal or rejection.  The Orator does not know the end of the story but has come to see, defiantly ageing though those two be, enfeebled by age though they be, rash and cowardly though they be, over-reaching, over-extending, over-ambitious, over-weening and intermittently defeated though they be, they may yet, even at this late stage in the game, find in themselves enough strength to push on toward their own resolution.  (p.219).

This insertion of a narrator of this sort is more common in the 18th C. than it is today; this is also true of the complex sentence structure, one of the many things I like about Drabble.  I also like that she trusts the intelligence of her readers and is not afraid to use words such as solecism, annealing, verdigris, and feels comfortable quoting Freud, Plato, Wordsworth and Blake.  The "two" mentioned are Ailsa Kelman and Humphrey Clark, who knew each other in childhood, were briefly married in adulthood and are now meeting in old age, both having complex stories somewhat defined by the decades in which they have lived. 

The book reminds me of Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea (1978), a book very different in style but with some themes in common with The Sea Lady, especially the role the sea can play in one's memory.