A Summer Bird-Cage by Margaret Drabble

Margaret Drabble, one of Britian's more respected authors, wrote her first novel, A Summer Bird-Cage, in 1962 -- a time when the world and the role of women were starting to change too slowly for some, too quickly for others.

Too often, perhaps even more then than today, single and married women tended to judge each other, much as moms outside the workforce and stay-at-home moms do today. Such judgment divides two sisters in Drabble's novel. One, Sarah, is a recent graduate of Oxford University. She's smart and knows it. She has an out-of-the-way boyfriend whom we never really meet. The other is Louise, "a knock-out beauty" who marries a boring but wealthy writer named Stephen, though she loves another man. Only near the book's end, does Sarah realize how much the sister she thought looked down upon her, really trusts her. The key is no great revelation, for the book is one of character, not plot, development. Rather, the key is the kinds of thing that only sisters who truly trust each other might tell the other one.

If you have a truly close friend or a close sister as well as a sex life (or the lack of one), an innocuous but embarrassing habit or fondness, then you know the kind of thing you might share with one of them but absolutely no one else, not even your therapist. And that's exactly what happens in Drabble's intelligent but rather slow-paced book.

It's a creative work with themes which I suspect run in most people's lives whether they acknowledge them or not.

When I was young -- 18, even 35 -- I was Sarah. When I was in my mid 40s, I was Louise. And now that I'm a regular recipient of AARP solicitations, I'm honestly not sure who I am or what I believe in some cases. I have begun to question values I have long believed (or thought I did) and even pontificated. Maybe I need to live to be 100 to have all the answers. Maybe I'll never have them. Or maybe, just maybe there are different answers, different rules and even rules that should be broken.

Is a mother wrong to steal milk for a starving baby? Is a soldier wrong to kill his enemy in war even though his country has lied to him and does NOT have God on its side? Am I right even to begin to second-guess either of those people, especially when I've never lived through what they have endured? That's not situation ethics; that's reality.