The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws

by Margaret Drabble

An original and brilliant work. Margaret Drabble weaves her own story into a history of games, in particular jigsaws, which have offered her and many others relief from melancholy and depression.

The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws is an original and brilliant work. Margaret Drabble weaves her own story into a history of games, in particular jigsaws, which have offered her and many others relief from melancholy and depression. Alongside curious facts and discoveries about jigsaw puzzles — did you know that the 1929 stock market crash was followed by a boom in puzzle sales? — Drabble introduces us to her beloved Auntie Phyl, and describes childhood visits to the house in Long Bennington on the Great North Road, their first trip to London together, the books they read, the jigsaws they completed. She offers penetrating sketches of her parents, her siblings, and her children; she shares her thoughts on the importance of childhood play, on art and writing, on aging and memory. And she does so with her customary intelligence, energy, and wit. This is a memoir like no other.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography, History, Biography Memoir, British Literature, Autobiography

350 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Dame Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939 and was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She is the author of eighteen novels including A Summer Bird-Cage, The Millstone, The Peppered Moth, The Red Queen, The Sea Lady and most recently, the highly acclaimed The Pure Gold Baby. She has also written biographies, screenplays and was the editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature. She was appointed CBE in 1980, and made DBE in the 2008 Honours list. She was also awarded the 2011 Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature. She is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd.

Drabble famously has a long-running feud with her novelist sister, A.S. Byatt. The pair seldom see each other, and each does not read the books of the other.

Reviews

[SarahC · Rating 5 out of 5]

As with most things that occur in our everyday lives, puzzle-working can generate many thoughts of things that were and are important to us. the Pattern in the Carpet is a book that reflects this. The notable English writer Margaret Drabble writes this reflective story of moments and thoughts from her own life, combined with the historic journey of the jigsaw puzzle. This is an unusual combination among the publishing trends of today, but a very good reason to set the trends aside for a moment.

In a childhood of growing up with a mother who suffered from intense depression, Margaret Drabble’s aunt played an important role. Phyllis Bloor, Auntie Phyl, a maiden aunt, existed as a calmer, more comforting adult figure in the Drabble’s life. Food, outings, games, and jigsaw puzzles were a part of the comfy lives of Margaret and siblings as holiday visitors to Aunt Phyl’s. Phyllis Bloor was a steady family figure of many years, living into her nineties. Drabble weaves the telling of life with Phyl with the tracing of the history of jigsaw puzzles that she and her aunt commonly loved. And it should be no surprise that the more this amazing writer researches, studies, and writes about jigsaw puzzles, the more she discovers concepts, connections, and philosophies that aren’t at all puzzling. Among the facts she discovers, interesting stories come tumbling out of this book.

Early household jigsaw puzzles were created as teaching tools so children could learn geography. Over time, they took off as more of a past time, seeming to speak to us aesthetically and in other ways. Drabble takes this history beyond the obvious. She includes a look at items of antiquity, such as ancient mosaics as they could be thought of as “jigsaw” puzzles also. She examines the reforming and refitting of relics within a city or culture. This is the older concept of saxa rediviva, or “stones reborn.” When these pieces of a city are refitted into the “big frame” of a place, Drabble wonders if we are experiencing the “safety of the frame,” that all pieces will fit, that things will turn out right. And that concept trickles right back down to the small cardboard pieces of our jigsaw puzzles on the dining room table.

Drabble upholds the importance of puzzles, parlor games, amusements, diversions and all the things we do in innocent pursuit. Higher art can’t always claim the innocence of thought, and thus the innocent jigsaw puzzle holds a separate, important spot. Even the ephemeral quality of working a puzzle does not detract, but perhaps adds to, the importance of it. The short life of a puzzle in the works makes us pause. As Drabble says, we begin to really look at the small pieces themselves and the colors. In searching for parts that fit together, you take a close look at the patterns in the scene. You then recognize “greys and mauves... the white crests and mountains...the tints of pink and red” and the matching shades shared by completely different objects in the same scene.

I love the blending of history and memoir -- hers and our own, really, when it comes to things like jigsaw puzzles. There is a very important concept of recognition here. I think Drabble is such an effective writer. She has the ability to write with the effect that lives and their stories are part of everyday, rather than in contrast with it. The stories with everyday-ness still provide “wow” moments for me though. This history/memoir is a perfect example of connecting history, thought, art, and objects of family life with the unending narrative of life.

[Hermien · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recognised a lot but also learned a lot. And I'm glad jigsaw puzzles have Ms Drabble's seal of approval as I love doing them whilst listening to audiobooks.

[Eliza · Rating 4 out of 5]

1/13/2010: I loved this book, despite its rambling lack of structure and and stream of consciousness style. Drabble is such a confident and relaxed writer that I was carried along, despite some slow patches. More importantly, her stated purpose--to use the writing of the book as therapy for herself while she was taking care of her husband, who was being treated for cancer--is more than realized, and in the most thoughtful, compassionate, and intimate ways. In addition to all I now know about jigsaws, mosaics, patterns, children's books, ephemera, English rural history and nostalgia for it, and Drabble's family, I also feel that I understand better Drabble, her thought processes, and her life. So the oblique nature of her story, oddly, brought me closer to her than if she'd written a straight up memoir.

[Leslie Angel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like Drabble. Had to read this --jigsaw puzzles--retired teacher, dog-loving, totally non- housecleaning aunt--but it was too rambling. Some good info. Needed serious editing. Some great lines. Strangely, not enough about jigsaw puzzles or her life. Liked her line about things coming together, like a disaster movie played backwards.RR-NYT

[Maura Heaphy Dutton · Rating 5 out of 5]

"... a memoir like no other," indeed ... Margaret Drabble's personal history and history of jigsaw puzzles is maddening, rambling, knowledgeable and thoughtful. Like a good jigsaw puzzle, I found it impossible to give up on it, even as it was driving me crazy.

Structured (because, yes, lack of structure is a kind of structure ...) like a jigsaw, Drabble first builds a kind of frame, as she describes her original (and quickly abandoned) idea for the book, and the context of her husband's illness, and tensions between herself and her siblings over writerly usage of family memories. She then groups together the details just as you would do, setting about a particularly tricky jigsaw: sorting, resorting, grouping and regrouping, by "color" and "shape," by singular images and hidden patterns. The bigger picture of her life, her family and her career as a writer, and the history of puzzles, emerges as she painstakingly brings those pieces together. But --and here's the catch -- the reader isn't allowed to be idle, you have to work with her. Drabble would no more hand you a neat, finished picture, tied up with a bow, than she would present someone with a completed jigsaw puzzle, and expect them to be grateful to her for saving them the trouble of doing it for themselves ...

One great pleasure of this book are the multitude of offhand observations about jigsaw-doing, so beautifully written and so relatable, so that I felt like I was comparing notes on preferences and technique with a fellow addict:

... when a piece that has eluded intensive search over hours and days and weeks suddenly makes itself known, and fits itself into its home. At once, the piece loses its profoundly unknown quality and becomes so much part of the pattern that within seconds you cannot remember where the gap was ... (page 11)

I think one of the reasons I am drawn to these puzzles is precisely because they have no verbal content; they exercise a different area of the brain, bring different neurons and dendrites into play. (p. 122)

There are marvellous factoids, such as that it's "mere chance" that jigsaw puzzles aren't called "fretsaw puzzles," as the jigsaw and fretsaw are almost the same thing. The story of the man who collects jigsaw puzzle pieces that he finds in the street. The heartbreaking story of the sad childhood of Robert Southey, poet laureate and great rival of William Wordsworth ... The fantastic quotes that cast light on how the great and the good perceived the jigsaw puzzle, either as an activity or as a metaphor. She mentions a number of puzzles that sound just wonderful, and I would love to get my hands on them ... (the Jackson Pollack! The Venus of Urbino ... Kinderspieler, by Brueghel ...)

There is the touching portrait of Drabble's Auntie Phyl, a woman who clearly taught her so much, and provided her with some much-needed unconditional love in her childhood. A woman who, like a good puzzle, and like her neighbours in the village of Long Bennington, on the Great North Road, "They were what they were. They were complete in themselves."

There are so many threads that Drabble follows, that makes this book worthwhile. Threads about family, about childhood. About getting older. About the activities that make life worthwhile. Reading this while the world is struggling with the effects of the Pandemic was an amazing experience, because so many of the things that Drabble says, written over ten years ago, sound as if they come from the heart of the struggle for meaning that so many people have found themselves in, as the usual sources of entertainment and community and distraction have been denied us, during Lockdown ... This isn't because Drabble had a crystal ball, but because she knows how to make connections, how to fit the pieces together ...

Books, too, have beginnings and endings, and they attempt to impose a pattern, to make a shape. We aim, by writing them, to make order from chaos. We fail. The admission of failure is the best that we can do. It is a form of progress ...

[Barbara · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 really, because she is such a good writer. But in the end, this was disappointing. You settle down on the first page knowing that you are in for a treat.... but then she meanders about in a very unstructured and not entirely satisfactory way. Some people would call this her "ruminative" style, I would just call it rambling. It's a pity, because there are some beautiful moments and a lot of wisdom.

[Liz Pardey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely loved this book! Very cozy, conversational;. branching out left, right and centre. It starts as a study of jigsaw puzzles, a topic she’d been thinking of for a while, undertaken when her husband was very ill. Well, if she is going to talk about puzzles, she has to talk about Auntie Phyl, who lived at Bryn, a bed and breakfast (Tea with Hovis) on the Great North Road. Since the highway system was developed, Bryn is pretty quiet but Margaret and her sister go there every summer and play games with Auntie Phyl – and do jigsaw puzzles. There are happy memories, a lot of scholarship on puzzles and sundry related subjects -- dissected puzzles, mosaics, Old Masters, Belusha, family, museum shops . . . . After all, the subtitle is A personal history with jigsaws.

Totally delightful book, I’d read it again and again. And by the way, her husband was doing much better by the end of the book, and Ms Drabble continues to write novels

[Allyson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading this informative, ruminative, sometimes dry, very British book. I love the cover and when I found my interest waning, I would look at the pattern and it would revive me. I have played with jigsaw puzzles all of my life, but mostly in my youth, and to hear of their history along with children's games was interesting.
Very digressive, but a book I would read again next year simply to explore areas I may have glossed over.
Almost like a mosaic, something to be studied in detail, page by page. A book I would like to own in fact.

[Armelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

This rambling book touches on many (many, many, many) things besides jigsaw puzzles - tapestry, mosaic, buying souvenirs, Jackson Pollock, children's literature - the list goes on.

The book is often fascinating - and just as often extremely frustrating. The fascinating parts managed to pull me through to the end, but just barely. I considered giving up on it more than once.

[Cathy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I bought this because I love Drabble and this is an odd genre--a memoir focussed around Jig Saw Puzzles and their history. I left it on the plane and it isn't gripping enought to merit buying another copy. But I will finish it when it gets to the library.

[Cheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was nothing like what I expected it to be. Then, again, towards the end, the author frankly admitted that it was nothing like she had expected it to be either. She set out to write a brief history of jigsaw puzzles and to include a bit of their place in her life. Those bits are in here, but there's much more.

The author addressed the history of children's toys and books for children, of miniatures and collectibles, mosaics and the stories of the English countryside. And a great deal about her beloved Aunt Phyl, with whom she traditionally did jigsaw puzzles. And about the BnB run by her grandparents and Aunt Phyl on the Great North Road.

The author served a long tenure as the editor of The Oxford Companion to English Literature and that comes through in her constant references and quotes related to authors, more than half of whom are unknown to me as an American reader. She frequently invokes authors and works which she presumes to be common knowledge but would likely be strange to many of today's British readers. In that way, it is much like traveling to another time, or watching a dated television show with the sound off. It's not completely alien, but it's quite removed from my own life experience.

I did learn one tidbit that was fascinating -- Little Goody Two Shoes was a character from Victorian British children's literature. An orphan in rags and one shoe who begs for her sustenance and is fortunate to find a wealthy benefactor. She is provided new clothes and a pair of shoes and she pays it forward by visiting the village children and teaching them their letters and manners and basic morality until she is given a schoolroom to teach in.

[Marie Fouhey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Margaret Drabble started this book as a history of jigsaw puzzles, added reminiscences of her aunt Phyl with whom she did puzzles as a child and then wanders all over the place in discussing topics only remotely related to jigsaws. She says in one place that she has strayed "out of my frame and along a branching, spiral track of free associations" and that seems to me to be highly accurate. She covers art and Elizabeth Gaskell's novels and Goethe's travels in Italy among other subjects and ends with musings on the falsity of some kinds of n0stalgia. Shes a smart, extraordinarily well read, well-traveled woman who finds interesting things to say about a variety of subjects.

[Liz]

I enjoyed the start of the book but got bogged down in all her digressions and irrelevances. I just wanted to hear about her life, her aunt, and jigsaws and not everything else. Too much on pictures that weren’t illustrated, so I had to keep looking them up, too much on other toys that aren’t jigsaws.

[Lyn Elliott · Rating 4 out of 5]

A gentle, ruminative book, that follows connections as they occur to Drabble, who began writing this book as a history of jigsaws when her husband, Biographer Michael Holroyd, was critically ill undergoing treatment for aggressive cancer. But the book expanded from its starting point to become a rich mosaic of family memoir, information on puzzles, games and reflection on their place in our lives. Her mother's sister, Phyllis Bloor, is there throughout the book as a loved and comforting presence. Auntie Phyl and Margaret worked on jigsaws together over the years.

Jigsaws are quiet pastimes - they are ways of passing time. Humans and their companion animals, she suggests, are unusual in the animal world in experiencing boredom. (Anyone who has seen caged animals in a zoo is likely to disagree with this, I think). So we have invented, and continue to invent all sorts of ways of filling in time; some active, some meditative, suitable for playing alone or with others. or who should be carefully selected for their willingness to follow the same rules - do you fill in the frame first, or do you pick out all the bright bits of pattern and put them together without worrying about the edges. Will you collaborate or compete? Much less exciting than other games to pass time, such as the royal Game of the Goose (French), but deep;y engaging for those who like to piece together fragments of an image to complete the whole.

Her thoughts stray via jigsaws to collecting object;, games children play (from there to Brueghel); the entertainments of royal children; maps and education; mosaics; the idea of the rural idyll; melancholy, sorrow and depression; and the jigsaw as model of the universe and an 'antidote to anger', noted particularly in relation to her anger at the way that Auntie Phyl's died in a nursing home in 'the meaningless dignity and indignity of endurance'.

In the last paragraphs of her book, Drabble reflects:
'The concept of life as a journey, a pilgrimage, a quest, a ladder or a spiral track may be attractive to some, but to me the notion of a goal is not. [It implies competition]. ...Whereas the Greek telos can mean an end, an aim, an ultimate purpose, a final cause, and need not embrace the concept of competition. in the larger pattern, all the solitary journeys combine, and we arrive together.

'The jigsaw, with its frame, is a simulacrum of meaning, order and design...[I]f you try hard enough you can complete it. That galactic scatter of inert and inept fragments of wood or cardboard will come together and make a picture.'
And so we see the tempting nature of the jigsaw: it can be understood, whereas life itself often can't; there is no discernible pattern.

The last sentences read: 'Books, too, have beginnings and endings, and they attempt to impose a pattern, to make a shape. We aim, by writing them, to make order from chaos. We fail. The admission of failure is the best that we can do. It is a form of progress.'

I am considering this idea, find it difficult to accept.

[Blaire · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oddly enough, while Ms. Drabble set out initially to write a history of jigsaws, when she mentions them it's mostly as time-wasters. The book is really about the jigsaw concept as metaphor for lots of things in life. Her musings are wide-ranging; partly memoir, partly philosophical, with a little art history. While I was impressed with her erudition, I came away from the book feeling unsatisfied. Ms. Drabble tells us that she suffers from chronic depression, and it shows in the tone of the writing.

[False · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I started to read this twice, and never finished it. I have no idea why. This time I did read it, and I enjoyed it. It had all of the qualities I like in a book: history, people in history, personal memoir, geography, exploration--in other words a lot to hold your interest. That and she writes with a very honest pen.

[Debra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a typical Margaret Drabble--but it prompted me to order 3 jigsaw puzzles--Botticelli's Venus, Giorgione's Tempest, and Raphae's The School of Athens. Drabble says you never notice the details of a painting so carefully as when you put it together as a jigsaw.

[Lesley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reminiscent of G B Stern's 'ragbag chronicles', which I am very fond of. Also interesting in its own right.

[Cheryl · Rating 1 out of 5]

Rambling and unstructured, not enough about jigsaw puzzles to hold my attention. I found the writing dull.

[Ape · Rating 3 out of 5]

This has left me feeling a bit depressed. About the pointlessness or life. About die young, or you'll live too long and have an awful end in an old folks home. Everything we put meaning to is just romanticised nonsense we put on our memories... OK, the whole book isn't that bad, it's really just the last chapters. But that's the part I have most recently read.

This is neither a biography, a family history or a history of jigsaw but a jumble of it all as she writes at the start. And as she writes towards the end, she has veered off in other directions, so it becomes even harder to say what it is about. It's also about childhood and education and the history of games, on pondering on the significance of old objects, of different meanings of jigsaws. In a taxi in London she is telling the driver about the first jigsaws, and he tells her, no, there must be jigsaws far older than that. Next day he takes her on a tour of relevant places in London. Things like that and reading about her family and Auntie Phyl, who really did sound like a character, or the old games they played were interesting. I found this card game that toured through the UK, Belisha, particularly curious.

I had never read any Drabble before this, and knew precious little about her so of course I had to look her up on the Internet. From Yorkshire, now in her 80s, once married to Clive Swift. One of her siblings was AS Byatt, who passed away last year. Another writer I have yet to read although I have a couple of her books waiting in my reading piles.

[Manda Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

VERY rambling… think someone has already said in their review, it’s like sitting with an ageing great aunt who is reminiscing. It feels so intimate.

I’m a big fan of Margaret Drabble- esp her last novel The Dark Flood Rises - so felt privileged to be sharing such an intelligent thinker’s musings, diversions and tangential observations.

There were many overlaps between what she found poignant and what I have often thought or noticed but not thought to share or assumed I was the only one who felt that… as a jigsawer (? implies I am a person with said tool actively engaged in the action of sawing?!) jigsawee? I loved her exploration and information about the history and development of the puzzles but also how like a jigsaw this book turned out to be.

It has prompted many thoughts and insights particularly around memory which I have written down to return to ponder, but the pearls of her musing are often hidden amongst quite alot of ‘fluff’ (don’t think that analogy works but you get the drift!)… but worth the sorting and shuffling (to return to the jigsaw analogy).

[Deirdre · Rating 2 out of 5]

Felt similar to Walking to Camelot: A Pilgrimage along the Macmillan Way through the Heart of Rural England in that it didn't feel like there was a clear through line or enough emotional engagement. Toward the end I started to think that perhaps I was just not paying close enough attention to the allusions, but I didn't want to wade back through the historical details to find out what I was missing, either.

I picked this up because I've never been big into biography/autobiography, and I did like the Charles Williams biography I read during my Sabbatical, and I like puzzles. Oh, well. Perhaps her novels will be more to my liking. I will give them a try.

[Colin · Rating 3 out of 5]

As Margaret Drabble explains in the forword to The Pattern in the Carpet, she originally set out to write a short history of the jigsaw puzzle, with an eye for the museum gift shop as a likely outlet. What she ended up with though is a strangely satisfying, somewhat meandering, exploration of aspects of her family history (also explored, in fictional form in her earlier novel, The Peppered Moth), largely through the prism of her aunt Phyl, interpolated with a wide-ranging history of board games and jigsaws and a reflection on the means we invent to pass or kill time. It’s the sort of book that is best enjoyed by going with the flow and letting the author take you wherever her interests lead. Lovers of good writing with curious minds will find a great deal to enjoy in this mixture of memoir, social history, art history and philosophy.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

It struck me that Drabble constructed this book in the manner of putting together a jigsaw. Topics picked up at random, examined, then she quickly went on to another area of the whole - and so it covered her family history, especially as related to her Aunt Phyl, games, jigsaws, childhood pastimes, the history of the aforementioned, writers, getting old, and so on. There were portions of this I liked very much (especially the family sections which were warm but clearsighted). Yet sometimes so many historical names and pieces of what seemed a larger more academic-type study, made the reading hard going. Interesting nonetheless.

[Marta E C R · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me quite a while to warm up to this book, which the author describes as a hybrid between a memoir and a history of the jigsaw (something I've always enjoyed working). In the beginning, I recognized my own lack of knowledge about British authors and didn't bother to fill in the gaps. But by the end, I was looking up images of many of the paintings, artforms, places, and other things she referenced, which greatly enhanced my enjoyment of this book and my own self-education. This ultimately led me to give it a 5 star rating. Bravo, Margaret Drabble. If another of your books crosses my path, I will definitely read it.

[Ginni · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is rather like having a long, rambling conversation with a favourite aunt - albeit one who is extraordinarily widely read, and scholarly, but not in a stuffy way. Indeed, Drabble’s beloved Aunt Phyl is remembered here, whose passion for jigsaws is one of the main planks of the book. A fascinating, rather melancholy book, which one can dip into and read the short chapters without losing the thread; biographical, elegiac, a book about growing older and remembering, as well as a history of the jigsaw - and many other games and pastimes along the way.

[Susan Day]

I've read this book before. (haven't read anything new for months.)
I used to like Margaret Drabble a lot and read all her novels through the 19Seventies and Eighties. This one though is not fiction but a history of toys and pastimes, loosely hung on a memoir of her aunt and her jigsaw rabbit, which Margaret Drabble now also has. There is lots of information in this book, some of it interesting; she is an erudite woman, but the style is quite conversational, with personal asides.
It's a rainy day book; it wouldn't keep me inside on a sunny day, but passes the time pleasantly in bad weather.

[Peter Burton · Rating 3 out of 5]

A rambling, wandering memoir linked to her fascination with jigsaws and her aunt Phyllis’ love of doing them.Enjoyable but erudite and too long.I lost interest about half way through and skimmed the rest although it was very interesting as she talked about her childhood and growing up.It probably has only a limited market and would appeal to those who are elderly and have nostalgia fo the 1940s and 50s,those who are intrigued by jigsaws and their history and those who admire Margaret Drabble.

[Caro · Rating 4 out of 5]

A discursive mix of memoir and research. Drabble starts off with the family love of jigsaws but soon turns to memories of her Auntie Phyl, the history of early books for children, the arts of pietra dura and mosaics, and so much more. She was seventy when she wrote the book, and as someone of the same age now, I appreciated her occasional comments on ageing. In the end, I just love being in her mind and enjoyed this enormously.

[Ogi Ogas · Rating 4 out of 5]

My ratings of books on Goodreads are solely a crude ranking of their utility to me, and not an evaluation of literary merit, entertainment value, social importance, humor, insightfulness, scientific accuracy, creative vigor, suspensefulness of plot, depth of characters, vitality of theme, excitement of climax, satisfaction of ending, or any other combination of dimensions of value which we are expected to boil down through some fabulous alchemy into a single digit.