'Jerusalem the Golden'

Author: Margaret Drabble

Publisher: Penguin Books / 1967

Pages: 206

The fact that this review is appearing today has nothing to do with all that's been happening this week in Gaza and Israel. It was sheer coincidence that I put it on top of the pile of books awaiting review.

Nor has it anything to do with the haunting hymn Jerusalem that is sung "con brio" at the end of the annual Last Night of the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall. The Jerusalem in this case is England, the new Jerusalem.

The title of the book comes from a hymn, quoted in the book by J. M. Neale, that the girls in the author's childhood used to sing at school. The combination of the words and the music of this hymn, she writes, "could unfailingly elevate her to a state of rapt and ferocious ambition and desire; she pictured, even at a most tender age, not the pearly gates and crystal walls and golden towers of some heavenly city, but some truly terrestrial paradise, where beautiful people in beautiful houses spoke of beautiful things".

It is clear the book is almost autobiographical depicting the author's emergence from North Yorkshire, in the book Northam. The descriptions in the book must have been the cause why the book won the author the James Tait Black memorial prize for fiction.

The family that the protagonist, Clara, grew up in was the typical Yorkshire family, based on hard work and no frills, where flower decorations were plastic ones and tables had plastic covers rather than proper tablecloths.

The situation became worse when Clara's father died when she was about to finish school. Her mother, a strict parent, struggled hard to enable her to finish school.

Yet Clara managed to overcome these restrictions - she made friends with Clelia and, through her with her very different family from a social class far superior to hers.

And she won a holiday to Paris and tasted love for the first time. After that she just could not return to Northam and its drabness. She could become the golden girl and have real affairs with married men, just like in the novels.