I have just read this again after several years, and realised why I had kept it. Many of her novels have characters I can never relate to, but there is something appealing both about Rose's apparent haplessness, and her deliberate choice of a poorer neighbourhood where she can build up a life from unpromising surroundings. I love the outing in the middle where they all trek off with the kids to visit the hens nesting in the old armchair on the bomb site.
Published in 1972, it evokes a past world of corner shops and neighbourliness, which contrasts with the sterile, empty life of the chattering classes at their meaningless dinner parties. Yet by the end, the scruffy neighbourhood is becoming gentrified and respectable.
I wish the ending were different for Rose though. As in many 20th C novels, violence against women is accepted as a form of love. If we have learned nothing else, if we are even going backwards, we surely have learned that this is not so; violence is control, control is not love. I wanted Rose to keep going it alone with her children, and a little help from her friends; she was doing a grand job.

Upea kirja! Ja kuvastaa kirjoittamisajankohtaansa - 60-lukulaiset arvot ja asenteet parhaimmillaan ( )

This is only the third Margaret Drabble novel I have read, and first published in 1972 it is also the earliest. At the centre of the story of The Needle's Eye is Rose Vassiliou a complex woman who has spent much of her adult life splashed across the pages of the country's newspapers. Renowned as an heiress who gave away her money and married a man against her parent's wishes, we meet Rose in her thirties, divorced, with 3 children and living in a run down house behind Alexandra Palace from where it is impossible to get a taxi. At a dinner party held by mutual friends while his wife is away, Simon Camish an unhappily married lawyer meets Rose and is asked to give her a lift home. It is during this journey that Simon becomes drawn into Rose's complicated world, when he agrees to look over some papers for her concerning the custody case brought by her ex husband. What Simon soon comes to realise is that Rose's relationship with her former husband is far from simple, and many of the decisions Rose makes in the course of the novel are rooted in her peculiar relationship with him. Ultimately many of the relationships are altered by Simon's involvement in Rose's life.

1970's London is one of the stars of this book, I felt I got a real sense of it - and I don't mean the smart trendy London, but the ordinary streets, the corner shops and the harrassed working class mothers. Margaret Drabble's sense of place is brilliant, as are her characters. Rose is often enormously frustrating and I never could decide whether I liked her or not, but I probably liked her more than I didn't. ( )

I used to gobble these paperback Margaret Drabble books up - I'd see them in the grocery store - really! - and they all looked alike, always her picture in b&w on the cover, and I devoured them. How I wish I'd kept all the originals -- now I hunt for them everywhere I go and buy them in any edition that I don't already own. I guess I'm hooked on this dense, wordy, and insightful writer. She's spoken to me and struck me with her brilliance since I was a young woman reading!