And Did These Feet...?

Have almost finished Margaret Drabble's novel from 1967, 'Jerusalem the Golden' and need to put down some impressions before it's over. I read a lot and enjoy most of what I read, but it's not very often I get sucked in like I have to this one. I didn't think much of the first couple of chapters, but I'm quite stubborn when it comes to books and had to keep going. I'm glad I did.

It's the story of Clara, a girl who moves to London from a dismal town in Yorkshire to go to university and to escape the grip of her widowed mother. Accompanying her boyfriend to a poetry recital she runs into Clelia, one daughter of a variously creative family who turns out to be Clara's escape hatch into a more adventurous, more intimate world.

The passage that really grabbed me was this one:

"Clara spent the five minutes changing out of one jersey into another more or less identical one; all her clothes were the same. And during the five minutes she also considered that she would probably fall in love with Gabriel, because a summer in Northam always reduced her to a state where she was ready to fall in love with a taxi driver or the man in the restaurant car on the London train. She viewed the prospect of falling in love with Gabriel with a fatalistic pleasure; she thought she would enjoy it."

And she does. I find Clara a very interesting character - when I started the book I thought her rather irritatingly indecisive and clingy, but as the plot progresses you realise she has some plans of her own, even if most of them still involve putting herself in the way of something so it can happen to her. She's a leech, really, looking for someone else to lead her to salvation, but I find her oddly likeable. And I love the descriptions of Clelia's family - messy and open and argumentative and utterly devoted to each other. I'm interested to see what the ending does for my feelings about them all.