The Seven Sisters By Margaret Drabble

Candida Wilton, pale star of The Seven Sisters, is a lady. She's also a washed-up wife alone in London after self-imposed exile from genteel Suffolk. She both pities and blames herself for her husband's defection to a younger, more succulent female, the mother of her daughter's best friend (who has mysteriously drowned). Though humiliated, Candida approaches her reduced circumstances with "adventurous despair".

She views life with distaste, has little talent for pleasure and doesn't like sex. Her three daughters shun her, siding with their father Andrew, a pompous academic. She doesn't understand lottery tickets or know what "empowered" means. Somehow she has mastered a laptop on which she plays solitaire and keeps a diary, filled with images of inconsequence: sparrows, farthings, small change. She does swim at the local health club, formerly a college where she took a course in Virgil's Aeneid, whose sixth book bewitched her.

Candida has "lost caste" by buying a small flat at the wrong end of Ladbroke Grove, dark, dirty and menacing. Vagrants lurk beneath the motorway, and though they frighten her, she does not despise them. She feels at home among outcasts. She walks along the sordid canal pass, where the unrepentant prisoner she visits raped and drowned a woman, and wonders why she continues to see him. Is she a masochist or an urban Aeneas, called to the underworld. Or does the murderer conjure the dark side of Andrew?

When an old schoolfriend, the flamboyant novelist Julia Jordan, suggests an Italian holiday, Candida begins to fantasise about following Aeneas's itinerary from Carthage to Naples, via Lake Avernus (the underworld), the Phlegrean Fields and the site of the Cumaean Sybil. Her wish is magically granted by a pension windfall, and she organises her dream tour to include Julia, her Latin teacher, the revered Mrs Jerrold, two friends from the class and meddlesome Sally Hepburn. Their guide, Valeria, completes the high-spirited company that Candida christens The Seven Sisters.

Their journey, narrated in the third person, reads like a mediocre travelogue. I missed Candida's voice. She does manage a brief radiant happiness in the sun of the Classical Mediterranean, even sensing the promise of a future. The third section, ostensibly written by her daughter Ellen, attempts to compensate for the preceding lack of inspiration by mere trickery. Humour is conspicuously absent.

But with a second reading, I saw how Drabble's weaving of classical references makes the novel resonate and cohere. The book is in part a threnody for faded women and wronged wives. Like Latin, they are unfashionable and nearly extinct. Yet why should not "shoring up the ruins" remain a source of pleasure and verification?

Back in Ladbroke Grove, there is no resolution and precious little liberation, but Candida is playing her own endgame, bravely accepting that she is "condemned to life". She will not play Dido, but concedes that as she learned to grow up, she must now learn to grow old.