“The Gifts of War” by Margaret Drabble #GBSS20/27

“The Gifts of War” by Margaret Drabble Number 20 of 27 Great British Short Stories 

Premise: Two women – one a beaten down but surviving mother, the other a well-meaning (road to hell?) pacifist collide in a toystore, their lives controlled by, well, manboys.

Review: Holy shit.  I keep thinking the latest story is the best. This is an astonishing piece of work, of compassion and imagination. It pivots at the halfway point and the connection between the two women only becomes apparent on the last page. The ending is an extremely plausible punch in the guts. I would put this on a list of stories EVERYONE should read, but especially activists. Holy shit.

Outa ten: An easy ten

Keywords: Violence (so many types), life, feminism, pacifism, education, activism – you name it

Quotes: 

“It amused her to see him behaving like a man already, affecting superiority, harmlessly, helplessly, in an ignorance that was as yet so much greater than her own.” p.261

“Her face had only one expression, and she used it to conceal the two major emotions of her life, resentment and love. They were so violently opposed, these passions, that she could not move from one to the other: she lacked flexibility so she inhabited a grin inexpressive no-mans’s -land between them, feeling in some way that she thus achieved a kind of justice,” p.264

“The visiting prince, whom need and desire had once truly transfigured in her eyes, now lay there at home in bed, stubbly, disgusting, ill, malingering, unkind: she remembered the girl who had seen such other things in him with a contemptuous yet pitying wonder.”

“When she saw the young girls today, of the age that she had been then, still pointing and giggling with the same knowing ignorance, she was filled with a bitterness so acute that her teeth set against it, and the set lines of her face stiffened to resist and endure and conceal it. Sometimes she was possessed by a rash desire to warn them, to lean forward and tap on their shoulders, to see their astonished vacant faces, topped with their mad over-perfumed mounds of sticky hair, turn upon her in alarm and disbelief. What do you think you’re playing at, she would say to them, what do you think you’re at? Where do you think it leads you, what do you think you’re asking for? And they would blink at her, uncomprehending like condemned cattle, the sacrificial virgins, not yet made restless by the smell of blood. I could tell you a thing or two, she wanted to say, I could tell you enough to wipe those silly grins off your faces: but she said nothing, and she could not have said that it was envy or a true charitable pity that most possessed and disturbed her when she saw such innocents.”

“Frances was not yet old enough to speculate upon the effects that this tale, oft-repeated, and with lurid details, had had upon the development of her sensibility; naturally she ascribed her ardent pacifism and her strong political convictions to her own innate radical virtue, and when she did look for ulterior motives for her faith she was far more likely to relate them to her recent passion for a new found friend, on Michael Swaines, than to any childhood neurosis.”.

“It was a pity, she thought, that there weren’t any more Easter marches: she would have liked marching, it would have been more sociable; but Michael believed in isolated pockets of resistance. Really, what he meant was, he didn’t like things that he wasn’t organizing himself.”

Words: xx

Look up: 

Murder in the Cathedral (Thomas A Becket – murder of innocents blah blah)

“The Toys of Peace” by Saki

Afterlives of the story/connections to other stuff: 

Why You Should Read “The Gifts of War” by Margaret Drabble

Is it online? Seems not, which is a crime.

PS This AI slop is hilariously and totally wrong. AI slop is slop. Don’t use it.