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Title: Babel Tower by A. S. Byatt ISBN: 0-679-73680-8 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 July, 1997 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.54 (24 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: What Fiction was Meant to Be
Comment: A. S. Byatt's Babel Tower integrates one woman's complicated journey into the story of the troubled 1960's with masterful results. Frederica has married an upper-class gentleman who expects her to stay at home and take care of their child without exercising her intellectual gifts or being allowed to see her friends. When he turns violent, she flees with her son back to London and her artistic peer group. In her part-time job reading unsolicited manuscripts, she comes across a vibrant, disturbing book called Babbletower and recommends it for publishing. The rest of the novel deals with Frederica's divorce trial and the prosecution of the novel for obscenity. All of it is set, however, in the swirling, chaotic upset of the 1960's and the redefinition of an entire culture's values.
Byatt is a masterful fiction writer. The many voices of the novel - Frederica's, the fanatic recluse author's, the liberal clergyman's, even Anthony Burgess' - are rendered in believable and splendid detail. We believe them all, whether they repulse us or not. The surrounding culture mirrors Frederica's changing identity - reading the Hobbit to her son, short skirts, hash brownies, happenings. Excerpts of Babbletower indeed read like a work of subversive genius - and it's all created by Byatt. I believe the English have an edge on the subtle development of character and plot. Read this great one to know how it's done.
Rating: 3
Summary: Not Talkin' bout My Generation
Comment: Boy, if there was ever a book to expose my lack of classical education, it's this. Clearly Byatt is incorporating the Persephone myth and the Tower of Babel into her tale of one woman in England's '60s, but lack of familiarity with the original myths may impede the reader's direct enjoyment. Not to say the book isn't enjoyable from beginning to end, but it was rather humbling for me! The story mostly follows Fredrica, a shining star at Cambridge who left everything behind to marry a man she is unsuited for. The main tension is supplied by her leaving after he throws an axe(!) at her, taking her son to live in London. A long struggle follows, but that's just a very small piece of the pie. It's difficult to pinpoint what the book is about, as it is so massive in scope and size, however the themes of lost loves and disappointment run rampant. An English review wrote: "...a book which deals with great and important subjects..." I'm not so sure that people of my age (28) and position will agree with this, for, despite the fine writing, its not really for us.
Rating: 4
Summary: A woman and literature, both on trial
Comment: Even though "The Babel Tower" is the third volume in a tetralogy, one need not have read the first two books to enjoy it. (I hadn't read any other novels by Byatt, and I dove right into this one.) This entry has been described as a novel of the Sixties, but such a characterization is misleading. Byatt never really leaves the ivory tower: the turbulence of the streets, the counterculture, the mod scene, the social upheavals all remain on the periphery throughout. The novel depicts more calm than storm, exploring instead the far narrower (but still interesting) milieu of the literati.
Byatt presents two parallel plots. After the death of her sister, Frederica (the subject of all four novels) is trapped in a marriage that quickly seems unsuitable, eventually becomes oppressive, and finally turns violent. Since it's 1964, a divorce is not simply for the asking; after escaping with her son, she finds her suitability as a mother on trial (both literally and figuratively). The scenes describing the spousal abuse are among the most harrowing I've read, even though, compared with similar episodes in other works, the horror is more psychologically distressing than physically violent. Byatt explicitly links Frederica's subsequent emotional and legal ordeal with Lady Chatterley's trial (both of the book and of the character); Frederica represents a late-twentieth-century woman judged by lingering puritanical nineteenth-century standards.
The second story concerns a thematically similar trial: the ban of "Babbeltower," a book recommended to a publisher by Frederica that is subsequently deemed pornographic by the British government. Tame by today's standards (and even when compared to "Last Exit to Brooklyn," which served as Byatt's model), this fable portrays a sexually uninhibited utopia that evolves into a masochistic and totalitarian dystopia. The recently concluded obscenity trial of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" lingers in the background, although the prosecution asserts that "it was Lady Chatterley herself who was on trial, for the fact of her sexuality. In the case of 'Babbeltower' it is the prisoner in the dock who is on trial, his imagination, the world he created, the tendency of the messages he offers."
While "Babel Tower" is often riveting and stimulating, if Byatt herself were on trial, she might be found guilty of excess. Byatt's most obvious mentor is Iris Murdoch, whose influence she confirms in both the text and the acknowledgments. Murdoch, however, doesn't always spell out her many cultural, philosophical, and literary references; she leaves it for the reader to discover or disregard. Byatt, in contrast, seems to believe that her audience is not well-read; she assumes the role of literary critic for her own work. Her characters quote a dizzying parade of passages to each other, to themselves, or to the reader. Sometimes this approach works, but the technique reaches its nadir when she reprints Frederica's scrapbook, a collage of excerpts and scrambled texts(which Frederica herself correctly disparages as unsatisfying and incoherent). There's also a bizarre and not entirely satisfying subplot which evokes Cronenberg's "Dead Ringers" but can't match its creepiness; it involves identical twins, one of whom courts Frederica, while the other is a jealous psychopath.
Despite these excesses, Byatt still succeeds with her portrait of the young woman artist whose confusion is aggravated by clashes between desires and expectations, nonconformity and morality, literature and society.
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Title: The Virgin in the Garden by A. S. Byatt ISBN: 0679738290 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 January, 1992 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: STILL LIFE by A. S. Byatt ISBN: 0684835037 Publisher: Scribner Book Company Pub. Date: 01 January, 1997 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: A Whistling Woman by A.S. BYATT ISBN: 0375415343 Publisher: Knopf Pub. Date: 10 December, 2002 List Price(USD): $26.00 |
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Title: Possession: A Romance by A. S. Byatt ISBN: 0679735909 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 October, 1991 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Angels & Insects : Two Novellas by A.S. BYATT ISBN: 0679751343 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 29 March, 1994 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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