Right off the top, let's get down to brass facts: When it comes to A. S. Byatt, this scribe worships the page upon which she writes.
Her 1990 Booker-winning Possession, recently become a film à l'Ondaatje, stands almost anomalously opposed to her quartet of Frederica Potter novels — The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and, now, A Whistling Woman, the brilliant capstone of the grim and gorgeous tetralogy which also happens to be her eighth full-length narrative intent on delivering nothing short of the contents of the collective — if not splintered — mind of civilisation in the twenty-first century.
Often compared with her half-sister, Margaret Drabble (not to mention both Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch, about whom she has written extensively), Byatt does tend to feature similar types of intellectual embranglers and sublimely civilised casts of characters intermittently transformed into anti-characters in acts of almost wilful gaudiness in her work (à la C. P. Snow); but, of the four dames, she is probably the most accomplished novelist and, without exaggeration, one of the greatest writers alive.
Centring upon the life and interior landscape of emerging writer Frederica from the fifties to 1970, A Whistling Woman is a sonorous and sensual novel of intensely fierce intelligence — sometimes gruesome, always gripping — which rewards attentive readers with a series of double-duty plots which illuminate, more or less, the refractory nature of faith, creativity, love, passion, violence, free speech, censorship, truth, and bone-deep loneliness.
Compendious to a (picayune) fault, A Whistling Woman is both visceral and cerebral, redolent with light and resonant with the darkness that circumscribes the story of Abraham and Isaac, Joshua, Job, and those pitch-black concentration camps of the emotions where either Holocausts or Heavens may wait in the wings.
The reader joins the narrator, both omniscient and slyly personal, on a journey that detours through a University standing in diametric opposition to its "radical" anti-University, Science, Religion, and Technology (as well as sets of twinnings most obviously apparent in John and Paul/Zag Ottokar, so-called Identicals replicated in insets wherein items as disparate as Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem or the Fibonacci Sequence entwine with the yin-yang of such as astrology, witchcraft, a mind-body colloquium, and hypotheses swirling around television in its then still-fluid condition. To her credit, Byatt sensibly ascribes its properties and potential to "McLuhan's 'global village,'" evidenced in the fact already apparent "to everyone who mattered that the politics of the future would be conducted in these small boxes").
Travelling between London and the Yorkshire Moors, Byatt ranges through genetic research, computer science, the foment often surrounding the praxis of Guy Debord's Situationists, and the presentation of a poignant yet somehow repulsive set of pathetic Dickensian freaks, creeps, and dissenters, the most memorable of which is the charismatic and certifiable Josh Lamb (Joshua Ramsden), a Manichaean madman incapable of coming to terms with the horrific familial disasters of his youth. He proves to be the most probable lightning-rod for a cataclysmic conflagration which may lead to the eventual undoing of individuals developing and manifesting curiouser and curiouser characteristics as the novel progresses.
Love affairs grow stronger, weaken, and often wither even as lovers almost somnambulently pair and repair partners, not in any cheap and tawdry way; rather, it may well be the very human and commonplace mixings and unlikely matches that bring Byatt's secondary characters fully to life in the overarching narrative starring her spiky and irrepressibly headstrong (as opposed to heart-driven and, some suggest, semi-autobiographical) protagonist.
Now a divorced single mother of one precocious Leo, Frederica flirts with turning full-time writer before, almost by happenstance, she becomes a "mini-personality" on a ground-breaking boob-tube programme — think Adrienne Clarkson's Take Thirty — that explores a cornucopia of issues which, in a roundabout way, seals her fate even as her first book, Laminations , a curiosity of pastiche and cut-up, is published to less-than-glowing notices. One ungenerous reviewer, for example, describes it as an "I Ching for Intelligent Chicks." Additionally, Frederica is loved and needed by John Ottakar but believes herself to be alone; in the midst of this seamlessly controlled maelström, she experiences an epiphany in which she discovers she is really in love with language, with metaphor, with the order and shape of words in perfect consonance in paragraphs such as the one from F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece, The Great Gatsby , wherein the murderer comes through the yellowing trees to find Gatsby in the pool:
"Note," Frederica had written, "that Gatsby has created his whole world out of his Platonic ideal of himself, his romantic dream, and it is disintegrating . . . What Fitzgerald has done, quickly, briefly, and clearly, is to undo what art and literature have done over and over again, the image of the human mind at home in the beauty of the created garden, with the forms of trees and the colour of the sky and the grass, and the intricate natural beauty of the rose."
So, likewise, with A Whistling Woman , has Byatt done; but, naturally, not to out-do the master, she pulls it all together again, everywhere dazzling with her luminous and sublime way with words, art, and literature which animates an intertwingling and exhilaratingly unforgettable fictional unity.
Canadian poet and literary critic Judith Fitzgerald's critically acclaimed Adagios Quartet's BOOK III: Electra's Benison has just been named one of The Globe and Mail's TOP 100 BOOKS (2007). The Almaguin Highlands resident is currently completing Leonard Cohen, Master of Song (Dundurn Press, Fall 2008).
Your Talkback on this Story