Drabble Trollope

There are two kinds of British writers, Drabble and Trollope.

Drabble takes a novel and makes it into journalism; Trollope takes journalism and makes it into a novel.

The difference between Drabble and Trollope is the difference between writing that's mostly just writing and writing that's really good writing. After reading the one, an intelligent reader is left with hardly anything he hadn't already known; after reading the other, the same reader knows more than he knew before he began reading.

Put differently the same way: in Drabble's writing the characters are rich or poor in the way we expect them to be, the way we've seen them in the mass media (on tv, in the newspapers); in Trollope's writing the characters are rich or poor in their own unique ways.

The new Drabble (Margaret), The Dark Flood Rises (Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 2106), is a bathysphere of a book about old age and the end of the world, or the end of human life and the old world just before it is submerged forever in water. There are many, many real life situations in the Drabble, virtually all of them culled from what we've been led to believe is real life; some are rescued from literary history and some it seems are gleaned from British tabloids scanned by Drabble while standing at the check-out line of the local supermarket.

The old Trollope (Anthony), Barchester Towers (1857) uses the media for story-telling purposes as well (the press, as it was called in those days)--not as source material as Hardy used the press--but as a 'new' third voice emerging somewhere between religion and politics, though not necessarily to be trusted or believed. There are references in Barchester Towers to a daily newspaper called "The Jupiter", a fictionally real rag of the day, and stories planted in it by powers hoping to capitalize on its influence.

Drabble is an exemplary note-taker, taking notes of things that are happening today and writing a novel that's faithful to the notes she's taken. There's nothing in Drabble a reader hasn't already discovered by first reading Trollope--a note taker too, he wrote 1,000 words a day, no matter what--an artist who writes for yesterday, today, and tomorrow.