Fitting it all together
Margaret Drabble's memoir of a life in jigsaws illuminates past and present. By Kathryn Hughes
Kathryn Hughes writing in The Guardian, Saturday 18 April 2009

Alongside the dying trend for misery memoir has lain a far more accomplished and interesting fashion for well-known authors to write their life stories. Michael Holroyd, Michèle Roberts, Miranda Seymour and Lyndall Gordon are just a few of those who have recently produced some of their best work while turning their gaze upon themselves. Now along comes Margaret Drabble, a novelist whose finest fiction has so often felt autobiographical, yet who, until now, has kept her own identity hidden behind textual veils.

The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws
by Margaret Drabble
352pp,
Atlantic

The Pattern in the Carpet takes as its organising motif Drabble's lifelong love of jigsaws. She was initiated into the pleasures of banging bits of coloured wood together by her mother's spinster sister. Auntie Phyl combined village schoolmistressing with helping her own parents run a roadside inn on the Great North Road. Young Margaret's holidays at Bryn, the Georgian farmhouse which served as a B&B for lorry drivers and tourists thundering through Lincolnshire on their way to the Scottish border, were mostly spent assembling reproductions of rose-clad cottages and the birds of Britain. From this primal memory Drabble spools both backwards and onwards in an extended meditation on the life and death of Auntie Phyl, our collective longing for tokens of the pre-industrial countryside and, of course, the important question of whether the proper way to do a jigsaw is to start with the corners first.
Drabble explains in her foreword that she has "never been a tidy writer", and that's certainly true here. Recollections of wartime visits to Bryn, complete with guttering Kelly lamps and utility paper, segue into scenes of Auntie Phyl's old lady rudeness in the 1990s. Explorations of the jigsaw's history - the early ones were known as "dissected maps", and used to teach aristocratic children their basic geography - spill over into a study of mosaics, which date back to the beginnings of historical memory. Glances towards Drabble's present circumstances, which include ageing, illness and the pleasures of grandmahood, are spliced with recollections of equally mixed times as a single mother embarking on a literary career in the 60s. Past folds into the present, and the personal into the public. Only at the very end is the pattern in the carpet fully revealed.

Auntie Phyl would probably not have approved of her niece's reluctance to hold tightly to the edges of her story. Still, the result of this discursive approach is an abundance of good things nestling within a looser frame. Drabble is particularly interesting on the state of being a child. Her own recollections of the playground games at her Yorkshire primary school are set against a moving account of recently completing a puzzle of Brueghel's Kinderspiele. This busy masterpiece from 1560 shows a host of Flemish children engaged in a variety of pastimes, from Blind Man's Buff to ice-skating by way of playing shop. The painting has attracted close attention from academics who argue endlessly over its meaning. Are the children allegorical adults, squandering time as they hurtle heedlessly towards death? Or are they something simpler and more joyful, inheritors of innocent and ancient ways of being?

Read the full review at The Guardian online.