The Pattern in the Carpet -- A Personal History with Jigsaws by Margaret Drabble, HMH '09, $25, 353 pages, ISBN #0547241445. Bibliography, notes, unillustrated.
British writer Margaret Drabble has just entered her eighth decade, with seventeen novels under her belt. So it's not surprising that she should begin to look towards the end of her days, asking "Do I believe in the jigsaw model of the universe, or do I believe in the open ending, the ever evolving and ever undetermined future, the future with pieces that even the physicists cannot number, although the physicists say they cannot be infinite?"
Drabble fuels her quest with words from Elijah, as recited by her father: "If with all your hearts ye truly seek me, ye shall ever surely find me." She makes clear her search is not towards an afterlife, necessarily, but perhaps "a fore-ordained, apocalyptic illumination" in which "the lost and buried tesserae of memory would rush together to form part of a bright and dazzling pattern, a complete picture, which would explain, perhaps at the very moment of death, everything that had gone before, if not everything that was to come."
Clearly, the book (read, the search) is an oddity, even to the author: "This book is not a memoir, although parts of it may look like a memoir. Nor is it a history of jigsaw puzzle, although that is what it was once meant to be. It is a hybrid. I have always been more interested in content than in form, and I have never been a tidy writer. My short stories would sprawl into novels, and one of my novels spread into a trilogy. This book started off as a small history of the jigsaw, but it has spiraled off in other directions, and now I am not sure what it is."
But in Drabble's eloquent uncertainty about how her search should proceed, she echoes the feelings of so many of us, especially those who live without the absolute conviction that there is an afterlife. Without foreshadowing the conclusions the author reaches, it's enough to say that the journey is as engaging and perhaps as important as the destination. To quote Yogi Berra on a roadtrip, "We're lost but we're making such great time."
