In a complexly plotted novel that ranges from strife-ridden Cambodia to contemporary London, Margaret Drabble's (1939- ) The Gates of Ivory (1991) explores the possibility of establishing a moral norm in an age of atrocity. How do people who think of themselves as living more or less decent lives absorb and integrate such unimaginable horrors as that which occurred in Cambodia? This question, similar to the one that arose for the previous generation in confronting the Holocaust, now emerges in the 1980s, as the truth about the "killing fields" of Cambodia becomes known. In an echo of the beginning of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities ("It was the best of times; it was the worst of times"), The Gates of Ivory opens with a reference to the "Good Time and Bad Time," asking you, the reader, to imagine yourself by a river on the border of Thailand and Cambodia. Behind you is "the Good Time of the West. Before you, the Bad Time of Cambodia." On one level, the novel explores the irony underscoring the antithesis of good and bad, focusing on the degree of the good's culpability for the existence of the bad.

In London, Liz Headeland receives a package containing a manuscript, a diary, a booklet of "Atrocity Stories," and "the two middle joints of a human finger bone." The source of this material is Stephen Cox, a writer and old friend of Liz, who has gone to Cambodia with the intent of writing a play about Pol Pot, "to find out what went wrong" with Pol Pot's attempt to "take Cambodia out of history." The rest of the novel is narrated from a number of viewpoints, principally those of Stephen and Liz, who, in attempting to determine what has happened to Stephen, travels to Thailand. Liz discovers that Stephen has died in a remote clinic in Cambodia. A doctor at the clinic, who had become friendly with Stephen, mailed the package containing his effects because her name was listed as next of kin on his passport. After becoming ill herself in Bangkok, apparently a victim of toxic shock syndrome, she returns to London. In Stephen's account, we learn that his death is precipitated by an ill-advised attempt to enter Cambodia, where he and his companion, a young English photographer, Konstantin Vassiliou, are captured by Khmer Rouge guerrillas and force-marched to a remote village, which ultimately results in Stephen's death. Back in London, Liz arranges Stephen's memorial ceremony, where the guests' behavior epitomizes lines from the poet W. H. Auden: "[Suffering always] takes place / While someone is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along."

The emblematic figure in the novel is Madame Savet Akrun, an educated Pnomh Penh resident, who loses her husband, brother, mother, and sisters in the genocide. She is thrust out into the jungle with her three children, the oldest of whom is 18-year-old Mitra, a medical student, who has luckily survived--the novel explains, "Out of 6,000 doctors, 57 remained alive in 1979"--by pretending to be a street vendor of cigarettes. Mme. Akrun's family forms part of a group forced to trek through the jungle to a designated area where they will do agricultural work. They are stopped by Khmer Rouge soldiers, "boys of sixteen and seventeen . . . ignorant children . . . mad with power," who, after killing most of the men in the group, force the rest, Mitra included, aboard a truck. Now living in one of the Thailand camps bordering Cambodia, Mme. Akrun is photographed by Konstantin, and the photograph--with the caption, "Where is my son?"-- becomes the official poster for the refugees' international relief fund. At the conclusion of the novel, we learn that Mitra has survived and become a Khmer Rouge guerrilla: "He does not care whether his mother lives or dies.He marches on. He is multitudes."

References to the novels of Joseph Conrad (1857-1926) appear often, particularly in the suggestion that Stephen is entering "the heart of darkness," and in the finger bone among his effects, which alludes to the skulls adorning Kurtz's hut in Conrad's story. Mitra assumes the Kurtz role, the young medical student so transformed by the "horror" that he becomes the enemy, while Liz, who had thought of marrying Stephen at one point, might function as the "Intended" of Conrad's tale, enmeshed in "Good Time" without recognizing its imperceptible slide into "Bad Time." Stephen, on the other hand, dying, awakens in the middle of a storm to see the woman who has been tending him swaying in a strange dance: "Stephen feels an intense happiness. It is a vision. It is the heart of darkness, it is the heart of light," a suggestion, perhaps, that from the absolute perspective of imminent death, the distinction between the two times vanishes.

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