Books:

1. A.S. Byatt: Critical Storytelling (Contemporary

Alfer (Author), Amy Edwards de Campos (Author)

British

Novelists)

Alexa

Similarly, whistlingshould be particularly avoided by women; it was typically a skill with

which men and boys entertained themselves, so a woman or girl attempting it would be
labelled unfeminine. The rhyme quoted to reinforce this has a constant first but varied second
line:A whistling woman and a crowing hen Is enough to make the Devil come out of his den
JACQUELINE SIMPSON and STEVE ROUD. whistling. A Dictionary of English
Folklore. Oxford University Press. 2000. HighBeam Research. 21 Jan. 2011
<http://www.highbeam.com>.

A. S. Byatt. A Whistling Woman.(Book Review)

Article from: World Literature Today
Article date: October 1, 2003
Author: Kaiser, Mary
A. S. Byatt. A Whistling Woman. New York. Knopf. 2002. 427 pages. $26. ISBN 0-37541534-3
A WHISTLING WOMAN and a Crowing Hen / Is neither good for God nor Men. This
epigraph for A. S. Byatts novel A Whistling Woman, the fourth in her saga of the intellectual
Potter family, provides not only the title but also the thematic direction and the dominant
metaphor for the narrative to come. Set immediately following the events in Babel Tower
(1997), A Whistling Woman takes place in the early years of the womens movement, as
Frederica Potter becomes a popular author and television personality, and several of her
female friends also follow their intellectual, scientific, and artistic talents. As weve come to
expect with Byatt, there is also a skein of symbolic threads in this intricate narrative tapestry,
in which birds and women are linked as singers, spiritual vehicles, and embodiments of
beauty.
Since introducing the technique in her very successful novel Possession (1990), Byatt has
used embedded narratives in each of her novels, gliding from one plot to the next with
successively more breathtaking dexterity. In addition, she has always been interested in
science, and so the embedding of factual information adds another layer to the multiple
fictional modes she includes. A Whistling Woman includes not only excerpts from the novels,
scientific reports, and letters of the characters, but also the proceedings of two academic
events, a Mind-Body conference and its parodic double, an alternative gathering of followers
of esoteric practices that range from witchcraft to rock and roll. Nearby, a group of mystical
Quakers takes over a manor house and establishes a religious cult under the leadership of a
charismatic madman.

Among all the intelligent, passionate characters in the novel, Frederica is most successful in
adapting herself to the times by moving across the surface of the conflicting narratives that
consume her contemporaries. Her book Laminations, a collage of anecdotes and images, is a
major success and catapults her into the role of talk-show host when the book is adapted for
television. An allusion to the notebooks of Anna Wolf in Doris Lessings The Golden
Notebook, Fredericas Laminations is also a reflection of Byatts own style of layering and
embedding narratives. Though she sees herself as superficial, Frederica skates along her
times, maintaining her sanity and her emotional balance as many around her lose theirs.
One of the denser thickets from which she extricates herself is the doctrine of femininity, the
expectation that fulfillment must include romantic love and that maintaining a romantic
relationship is a womans primary task. Frederica begins the novel with a separation from her
lover and ends it with pregnancy and the uncertain beginning of a new relationship.
Jacqueline Winwar, a young biologist, decides to end her love affair and pursue science,
discovering that stronger than her desire for an intimate relationship is the inexorable force
of her own curiosity, her desire to know the next thing, and then the next, and then the next.
In A Whistling Woman, A. S. Byatt presents the juggling of narratives as something more
than a mode of postmodern fiction writing. It is a strategy for survival in the postmodern
world.
Mary Kaiser
Jefferson State Community College
Kaiser, Mary. A. S. Byatt. A Whistling Woman.(Book Review). World Literature Today.
University
of
Oklahoma.
2003. HighBeam
Research. 21
Jan.
2011
<http://www.highbeam.com>.
Kaiser, Mary. A. S. Byatt. A Whistling Woman.(Book Review). World Literature Today.
University of Oklahoma. 2003. Retrieved January 21, 2011 from HighBeam
Research: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-114488342.html

`A Whistling Woman by A.S. Byatt; Knopf.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

Article from:
Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
Article date:
January 29, 2003
Author:
Robinson, Gaile
Byline: Gaile Robinson
A Whistling Woman is the fourth in a series by British author A.S. Byatt _ although, if you
havent read the first three _ ``The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life and Babel Tower _ you
would never know it. Unlike other series writers who feel compelled to provide back story
with each new installment, Byatt expects her readers to keep up with the class, even if the new
student does not speak the language or know the subject.
Its too much to ask.
Coupled with Byatts interminable story line, characters who all speak identically in the
language of academicians, and fuzzy recall of the late 60s, the author warns the reader, often,

there are no happy endings. Sure enough, thats the payoff for a torturous amount of time
spent. Byatt has accumulated a loyal readership with her multicharacter tomes. This time,
loyalists may feel victimized by the meandering tale of supposed self-discovery that is rife
with muddled observations.
True, A Whistling Woman offers further evidences of Byatts amazing vocabulary. She
sometimes spins sentences that are dazzling. That is the only reward here for readers. In a
more slender volume, with fewer plot lines and characters, it might be enough.
But Byatt takes on too heavy a load in this book. She surrounds her central character,
Frederica Potter, with a series of sideshow freaks. For instance, a mental patient becomes a
religious leader. We are taken on his journey from one crazed madness to the next through his
hallucinating eyes, and then through the sheeplike gaze of several of his followers. The
multiple views do not shed any light on the attraction of cult participation.
In a stroke of painful symbolism, scientists and mathematicians are given way too many pages
to discuss experiments with snails. Then Byatt puts a load of college professors and deans into
the mix for more turgid conversations.
Byatt paints a hindsight portrait of university upheaval in the late 60s that is trivial and
romanticized. She remembers students dressed like medieval minstrels with an aggressive
agenda of revolution, and university administrators as enlightened philosophers given to
benign inaction. Seemingly at the last minute, Byatt infuses an astrological component to add
60s verisimilitude.
All of these verbose characters swirl around Frederica, who says little, dithers a great deal and
moves neither forward nor to the right or left. She is circuitously buffeted by her friends,
family and lovers, and moves in no direction at all.
Remember, there are no happy endings. The cult is dispatched in a cliche firestorm, so,
thankfully, if there is a fifth book in this series, those people will not be returning. The core
characters from books past, who continue to swap partners, are no closer to finding their way
or their soul mates than they were when A Whistling Woman began.
In a Salon interview from the mid-90s, Byatt admits to a personal flaw and one that
plagues this book, I was baffled by the 60s, really. It was very exciting and very pointless.
Precisely.
___
Visit the Star-Telegram on the World Wide Web: www.star-telegram.com.
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
(c) 2003, Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
A. S. Byatt
BORN: 1936, Sheffield, England
NATIONALITY: British
GENRE: Novels, poetry, essays, short stories
MAJOR
Iris
Murdoch:
A
The
Virgin
in
Possession:
A

Critical
the

WORKS:
Study (1976)
Garden (1978)
Romance (1990)

Babel
The
Biographers
Little Black Book of Stories (2004)

Tower (1996)
Tale (2000)

Overview
A best-selling novelist, short-story writer, distinguished critic, and winner of many prestigious
awards and prizes, A. S. Byatt is one of the most ambitious writers of her generation. Her
short stories are of crucial interest in connection with her overall work and with regard to
postmodernist developments of the genre. Because of her imaginative wisdom and
understanding of contemporary culture, Byatts short stories significantly enrich the
postmodern literary scene, while she enjoys a high profile in the media and in public life in
general.
Works in Biographical and Historical Context
A Gifted Student A. S. Byatt was born Antonia Susan Drabble on August 24, 1936, in
Sheffield, England, the eldest daughter of John Frederick Drabble, a courtroom lawyer, and
Kathleen Marie (ne Bloor), a schoolteacher. She is the sister of writer Margaret Drabble. She
was educated at Sheffield High School and the Mount School, York, a Quaker foundation.
Antonia took a bachelor of arts degree (with first-class honors) from Newnham College,
Cambridge, and pursued postgraduate study at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania (1957
1958) and Somerville College, Oxford (19581959).
Academic and Literary Pursuits From 1962 to 1971, she taught in the Extra-Mural
Department of London University and from 1965 to 1969 at the Central School of Art and
Design, London. She also published her first two novels, Shadow of a Sun (1964) and The
Game (1967), as well as her first study on Iris Murdoch, Degrees of Freedom (1965). In 1969,
Byatt married Peter John Duffy, with whom she has two daughters, Isabel and Miranda.
The 1970s were a fruitful decade for Byatt in terms of academic work. In 1970 she published
the studyWordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time, which was followed by her second
monograph on Murdoch, published in 1976. In 1972 she was appointed a full-time lecturer in
English and American literature at University College London. She was appointed a Booker
Prize judge for 1974 and a member of the BBC Social Effects of Television Advisory Group
(19741977) as well as of the Board of Communications and Cultural Studies of the Council
for National Academic Awards (1978 1984). After publishing her third novel, The Virgin in
the Garden (1978), she edited, together with Nicholas Warren, George Eliots The Mill on the
Floss (1979) for Penguin Classics.
Major Success in Fiction In 1981 she was promoted to a senior lectureship, and in 1983,
when she was elected fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she retired from academic life
to write full-time. In 1985 she published her fourth novel, Still Life, which won the
PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award for fiction. She served on the Board of Creative and
Performing Arts (19851987) as well as the Kingman Committee on the Teaching of English
(19871988), and in 1990 she published George Eliot: Selected Essays, Poems and Other
Writings.
Byatts career as a novelist reached a turning point in 1990, when the publication
of Possession: A Romance brought her international fame. She was appointed a Commander
of the British Empire (CBE) in addition to winning the Irish Times/Aer Lingus International
Fiction
Prize, the Eurasian Regional Award of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and, most important
of all, the Booker Prize for Fiction. By December 1995 Possession had been translated into
sixteen languages, and its phenomenal success has often been compared to that of Umberto

Ecos The Name of the Rose (1980), or Salman Rushdies Midnights Children (1981).
Byatts next novel, Babel Tower (1996), took six years to write and publish.
Currently, Byatt holds several honorary doctorates, lives in London, and contributes regularly
to journals and newspapers including The Times Literary Supplement, The Independent, and
the Sunday Times, as well as to radio programs and the British Broadcasting Corporation
(BBC).
Works in Literary Context
Influences In merging realism and naturalism with fantasy, Byatt has been influenced by an
eclectic group of esteemed writers, from George Eliot to Robert Browning. In her midcenturyEngland novels, she takes inspiration from such writers as D. H. Lawrence. And she
references everything from Romantic and Victorian literature to research books on zoology as
also informing her intertextual work. But The novelist I love most, she asserts, is Marcel
Proust. After him, [Honor de] Balzac, [Charles] Dickens, Eliot, Thomas Mann and [Henry]
James, Iris Murdoch, Ford Madox Ford, and Willa Cather. And Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor
Dostoevsky.
High Style A central characteristic of Byatts handling of stories is the manner in which they
are made to refer to their own status as texts and the ways in which different narrative
expectations and multiple types of textletters, diaries, journals, fairy talesare merged. In
this respect, Byatts entire collection abounds in what are called intertextual references,
careful and thorough blends of multiple outside texts into her own. That is, her writing is rich
in echoes of her earlier works or works by other authors as well as in self-conscious allusions
to the narrative. As one reads Byatts fiction, one recognizes characters (the academic, the
professional storyteller, the woman writer, the painter or craftsman, siblings, daughters,
children suspended between life and death, marginalized middleaged women), their interest in
art and literature, and their obsessions with words, with truthfulness, with the body, and with
the past, as well as recurrent symbols and images, such as snakes, pools, paintings, and glass
objects.
In another respect, Byatt refuses to give shape and finality to her characters and the conditions
in which they find themselves. This impression of indeterminacy and openness enhances her
fantastic vein.
High Impact While she agrees she is indebted to multiple influences, Byatt alone catapulted
to the front of the queue of contemporary British writers with her fifth novel, Possession: A
Romance (1990). The work likewise influenced a great number of new and veteran scholars,
prompting a surge in critical studies about her work and a mass of interviews with her both in
academic journals and in popular magazines.
Works in Critical Context
Critics have unanimously praised the way in which Byatt weaves intricate fictions out of
small details and situations. Although many incidents in her early stories point to her own life,
the emphasis is less on their autobiographical dimension than on the phenomenon of how
fantasy interacts with real life. Lived experience furnishes the raw data out of which the writer
spins her tales. While several of her works prompt studied discussion, a few stand out as
especially provocativeamong them Possession: A Romance.
Possession: A Romance The novel reflects Byatts increasing interest in the short story,
because it includes, in the work of the character Christabel LaMotte, wonder tales, two of
which were reprinted as separate stories in Byatts The Djinn in the Nightingales Eye: The
Glass Coffin and Godes Story. While Richard Todd, in his book A. S. Byatt (1997), has
argued that these stories read differently divorced from the context of the novel, Jane L.

Campbell in The Somehow May Be Thishow: Fact, Fiction, and Intertextuality in Antonia
Byatts Precipe-Encurled (1991) has stressed the experimental, intertextual nature of the
stories themselves.
LITERARY AND HISTORICAL CONTEMPORARIES
Byatts famous contemporaries include:
Tony Blair (1953): Prime Minister of the United Kingdom between 1997 and 2007, leader
of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007, and member of Parliament for Sedgefield between
1983 and 2007.
Hilary Rodham Clinton (1947): First Lady to the forty-second president of the United
States and a U.S. senator from New York.
J. K. Rowling (1965): World-renowned British writer of the Harry Potter series.
Arundhati Roy (1961): Indian novelist and activist who has won such awards as the 1997
Booker Prize and the 2002 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize.
The publication of Possession also led to a reappraisal of Byatts earlier work, a compilation
of which was published in Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings (1991). This selection of
earlier writings includes reviews and essays on Robert Browning, Eliot, Vincent van Gogh,
Willa Cather, Elizabeth Bowen, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, Barbara Pym, and Monique
Wittig. In the introduction to Passions of the Mind, Byatt explains a feature
characteristic of her whole writing careerthe link between creative and academic work, the
encounter with other minds, and the connection with the cultural past.
Responses to Literature
While Reading Possession: A Romance consider what the word romance means and
look at all the ways Byatt presents romance in her novel. Look up romance in the
dictionary and consider the various definitions of the word with reference to this book.
2.
View the film version of Possession: A Romance. In the film, the nationality of one of
the characters is changed from British to American. How does this change your
understanding of the story?
3.
Byatt has written two critical studies of Iris Murdoch, a British writer who weaves
philosophical themes into her novels. Research the life and works of Murdoch in your
library and on the Web. What reasons can you give that Byatt would be attracted to
Murdoch and her work as a field of study? Write a paper summarizing your conclusions.
COMMON HUMAN EXPERIENCE
Byatts novel Possession intersperses two different story lines with a long poem in a complex
narrative. Other books that successfully blend literary genres and plotlines include:
The Blind Assassin (2000), a novel by Margaret Atwood. This prize-winning novel blends two
storylines, one set in contemporary Canada and one set in World War II era Canada, with a
pulp science fiction novel.
Pale Fire (1962), a novel by Vladimir Nabokov. The highly unusual structure of this novel
has been the subject of much critical attention. Nabokov present a long poem Pale Fire as
the work of a fictional author. The book also features commentary by a fictional editor.
Lord Byrons Novel: The Evening Land (2005), a novel by John Crowley. Like Possession,
this novel centers on an adventure in literary research. The efforts of the research to discover a
lost novel by English poet Lord Byron are interspersed with sections of the novel in question.
1.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books
Alfer, Alexa, and Michael J. Noble. Essays on the Fiction of A. S. Byatt. Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 2001.

Kelly, Kathleen Coyne. A. S. Byatt. Boston: Twayne, 1996.

Todd, Richard. A. S. Byatt. Plymouth, U.K.: Northcote House in association with the British
Council, 1997.
Periodicals
Adams, Ann Marie. Dead Authors, Born Readers, and Defunct Critics: Investigating
Ambiguous Critical Identities in A. S. Byatts Possession.Journal of the Midwest Modern
Language Association(2003): vol. 36.1: 10724.
Gitzen, Julian. A. S. Byatts Self-Mirroring Art. Critique (1999): vol. 36.2: 8395.
Su, John J. Fantasies of (Re)collection: Collecting and Imagination in A. S.
Byatts Possession: A Romance. Contemporary Literature (2004): vol. 45.4: 684.
Web sites
Byatt, A. S. A. S. Byatt Official Home Page. Retrieved January 31, 2008,
from http://www.asbyatt.com.Last updated on May 17, 2007.
Miller, Laura. A. S. Byatt. Retrieved January 31, 2008, from
A Whistling Woman by A.S. Byatt
From the author of Possession, a novel of intellectual life in the 1960s and the
dangerous allure of utopian and revolutionary dreams.
BY LAURA MILLER

The old, and possibly apocryphal, admonition to write what you know never really
accounted for the novelist who knows everything. While A.S. Byatt may not actually know
everything, it sometimes seems that way. At the very least shes interested in it all -- literary
criticism, history, politics, education, biology, painting, genetics, religion, law, physics. And
when she wants to drag the whole kit and caboodle out of her intellectual closet, her favorite
place to do so is in her quartet of novels about Frederica Potter. A Whistling Woman is the
conclusion to that quartet (which also includes The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life and
Babel Tower), and it has all the strengths and weaknesses of its predecessors.
This can only be a qualified recommendation: A Whistling Woman, like the three other
Frederica Potter novels, never mesmerizes the way Byatts best and most popular works,
Possession and the novella Morpho Eugenia, do. She has a great gift for storytelling, but
she isnt consistently interested in using it, particularly when shes feeling most ambitious.
Many readers find the Frederica Potter books frustrating (in fact, this reader often does), but
to the susceptible, theyre engrossing even when they irritate. Byatt took George Eliot as her
model when she began the quartet back in the 1970s, and in it she most fully realizes her ideal
of the novel as a form into which you can get the whole world.
The quartet describes mid-20th-century Britain and Fredericas life as the quintessential
bluestocking -- one of the first women to study at Cambridge and, later, a divorce with a
young son making a new life in London. Like Babel Tower, A Whistling Woman covers

the 60s and dips into the utopian and revolutionary dreams of the time. In Yorkshire, where
Frederica grew up, a small therapeutic community grows into an insular cult under the
influence of an otherworldly madman whose childhood was disfigured by a horrible crime.
And on the outskirts of the local university, an anti-university grows up, a sort of hippie
camp where anyone can teach a class on such topics as astrology and Mao and theres always
a pot of bean soup simmering away. Meanwhile, Frederica stumbles into a gig hosting what
sounds like an impossibly brainy and fanciful talk show for the fledgling BBC.
Fredericas job gives Byatt an excuse to riffle through the intellectual preoccupations of the
time -- feminism, psychology, sociobiology, etc. Frederica is also deciding whether she wants
to remarry, and what role sex and romance will play in her life as a single mother and a
woman prone to fiercely declaring, I want to think. Byatt has never entirely succeeded in
making Frederica appealing, perhaps because shes never really tried to. So as usual its in the
subplots of A Whistling Woman that the novel really clicks. Reading the quartet is a bit like
patronizing a restaurant where the entres are passable and the side dishes steal the show.
Every bit of the novel that concerns Joshua Ramsden, the mental patient who eventually takes
over the Quaker group called the Joyful Companions, is riveting. Byatt is fascinated by
charisma -- its animal nature, the simultaneously magnetic and repellent nature of the people
who possess it, and the often terrible effect it has on those drawn to it. Though she tries to do
justice to the exhilarating iconoclasm of 60s youth culture, mostly she depicts it as naive and
scary, and the leaders of the anti-university as self-indulgent children who abuse their power.
With Ramsden, though, she creates a man who may be merely and dangerously mad, but
might instead -- or also -- be a genuine visionary and perhaps even acquainted with God. Its
an immensely sympathetic and yet menacing portrait, particularly in the passages Byatt tells
from Ramsdens point of view.
Babel Tower concludes with two trials (obscenity and custody), and The Whistling
Woman finds its climax in the universitys Body and Mind Conference, a high-powered
academic confab designed to bring together cutting-edge papers in both the sciences and the
humanities. Byatts interest in the life sciences has apparently only grown since she wrote
The Virgin in the Garden, with its somewhat schematic attempt to see a new Elizabethan
era in 1950s Britain.
A Whistling Woman contains two passages in which Frederica feels a surpassing ecstasy -one while reading a passage from The Great Gatsby (for the rest of her life she came back
and back to this moment, the change in the air, the pricking of the hairs, of really
reading every word) and the other while looking at the earth as she walks down a Yorkshire
hill to the man, a scientist, she has chosen almost by chance (she thought that somewhere -in the science which had made Vermeers painted spherical waterdrops, in the humming

looms of neurons which connected to make metaphors, all this was one). She has expanded
her notion of what she wants to think about from literature to the universe itself. And, here at
last, Byatt has finally succeeded in squeezing the whole world into Frederica Potter.
Laura Miller. A Whistling Woman by A.S. Byatt. Salon.com. 2002. HighBeam
Research. 21 Jan. 2011 <http://www.highbeam.com>.
A.S. Byatt: a Whistling Woman.(Book Review)
Article from:
International Fiction Review
Article date:
January 1, 2004
Author:
Campbell, Jane
More results for:
A Whistling woman novel
A. S. Byatt A Whistling Woman London: Chatto and Windus, 2002. Pp. 422. $38.95
A Whistling Woman concludes the quartet of novels which A. S. Byatt began in 1978 with
The Virgin in the Garden. The first novel introduced the Potter family and their circle, living
in North Yorkshire in the early 1950s. Its sequel, Still Life (1985), traced the familys
progress--especially the experiences of the two sisters, Stephanie and Frederica--to 1957,
when Stephanie, who is married to Daniel Orton and the mother of two young children, dies
in an accident and Frederica, at the age of twenty-one, graduates from Cambridge. Byatt did
not return to her project until the mid-nineties. Together, Babel Tower (1996)
and A Whistling Woman take the story through the sixties. Throughout the series, endings
are resisted, and the last volume, true to the open form of most of Byatts fiction, concludes
with questions still unanswered and loose ends still untied. The strong narrative thread is
carried throughout by Frederica, but there are chronological gaps, most notably the seven
years between Stephanies death and the beginning of Babel Tower, when Frederica
reappears, miserably married to Nigel Reiver and the mother of four-year-old Leo, and
Daniel, having survived the shock and grief of his wifes death, works on a telephone help
line in London. The first two volumes are introduced by prologues that further disrupt the
time sequence. The prologue to The Virgin is set in 1968, and part of its action is reconfigured
in A Whistling Woman. This fourth volume ends in 1970, but the prologue to Still Life,
dated 1980, has already marked the chronological end of the quartet. Byatts story overflows
its own boundaries.
Not only is linearity subverted, but our attention is dispersed in many directions. It has been
clear from the beginning that Byatt was engaged in a much larger undertaking than the
traditional family saga. In the second pair of novels in the series, the vastness of her project is
especially apparent: She is depicting the artistic, intellectual, and social life of Britain in the
years after World War Two. Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman are enriched by the work
which Byatt produced in the decade after Still Life. The two large-scale volumes, Possession
and Angels and Insects (the latter constituting two novellas), are major achievements in the
re-imagining of history--especially womens history; The Biographers Tale (2000) extends
her inquiries into science and biography. In these texts, as well as in the four volumes of short
stories that began with Sugar (1987), the play between fiction and theory becomes more

spontaneous, the movement among genres, including fairy tale, and the use of intertextuality
(with paintings often appearing as texts) more assured. A Whistling Woman, with its
multiplicity of discourses, its intellectual sweep, and the sheer scope and rapidity of its action,
bears the fruit of the experimentation that has preceded it.
In this volume Frederica and her family recede somewhat; the Potter plot is only one of four
interconnected narratives. At the new University of North Yorkshire, an academic conference
on Body and Mind is organized; the university is threatened by a group of student protesters
led by aprofessional rebel from the counterculture. Meanwhile, a third narrative is built
around a religious commune where another struggle for power takes place. All three of these
groups, like Frederica and Daniel in their own stories, are concerned with redefining the
human in light of new knowledge. In the clash of languages that forms the book, the old
binaries (sane/insane, altruistic/selfish, natural/unnatural, innate/learned) are all shown to be
inadequate signposts. Byatt invents new characters, the most striking of whom is Joshua
Ramsden, a religious visionary whose fervor leads the commune to its destruction. She also
gives old characters new prominence. Academic figures from earlier books--Gerard
Wijnnobel, Vincent Hodgkiss, Luk Lysgaard-Peacock--have stronger voices now, while
Fredericas old friend Alexander Wedderburn, whose play about Elizabeth I gave The Virgin
in the Garden its title and whose second play about Van Gogh figured largely in Still Life, is
relatively silent. Most interestingly, perhaps, Jacqueline Winwar, the young biological
researcher, now appears in a story of womens history that parallels Fredericas. The
vocabulary to articulate womens struggle for equality was still in the forming stages in the
late sixties, and the experiences and needs of Jacqueline and Frederica are lived, not debated,
in the text. In every area, however, the readers retrospective judgment is invited. Implicitly
warning against reductiveness and rigid systems (not least, about women), Byatts text avoids
dogmatic pronouncements by the narrator.
With considerable ingenuity, Byatt structures an ending that combines the tragic and the
comic, the linear and the cyclical. In the midst of defeat and death, she offers the openness of
surprise and renewal. Most importantly, perhaps, she has continued to create characters who
live as compelling figures in the papery self-reflexive houses of postmodern fiction.
Campbell, Jane. A.S. Byatt: a Whistling Woman.(Book Review). International Fiction
Review. International Fiction Association. 2004. Retrieved January 21, 2011 from HighBeam
Research: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-122580797.html
A Whistling Woman by A.S. Byatt; Knopf.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)
Article from:
Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
Article date:
February 5, 2003
Author:
Wilson, Frank
More results for:
A Whistling woman novel
Byline: Frank Wilson
Plump little Josh Ramsdens first-ever night staying with a friend from school didnt turn
out well. Oh, the visit itself was fine: He had done nothing odd or foolish ... had been made

welcome ... had behaved like a real boy and had not been found out in any failing. His
friends mother even told him to come again soon.
The problem was, Joshs mother let him go, but didnt ask his father, who probably wouldnt
have. Which may be why, when little Josh comes home, he finds Mom and Sis lying together
upstairs, quite unpleasantly dead. He finds Dad later on, in the coal cellar, looking as though
he had tried to burrow his way into the centre of the sloping hill of coal. Regretting that Josh
hadnt been around earlier, his father tells him to fetch the police.
The police dutifully take Dad off for an eventual rendezvous with the hangman _ he refuses to
plead insanity _ and Josh gets shipped to a distant relative. He manages to get through high
school, and even becomes a theology student. But blood-soaked visions of light and darkness,
good and evil _ pure, unadulterated Manichaeism, in fact _ land him in the mental ward. And
mental hospitals are pretty much where he stays until he winds up leading a New Age cult at
Dun Vale Hall, right in the middle of A Whistling Woman, A.S. Byatts latest novel,
which concludes the sequence of four begun with The Virgin in the Garden.
There is a glancing reference in The Virgin in the Garden to a boy spending the night
with a school chum and never returning for another visit. Virgin opens in 1968 with
Frederica Potter, the series protagonist, meeting her brother-in-law Daniel Orton and
playwright Alexander Wedderburn at Londons National Portrait Gallery to see actress Flora
Robson portray Queen Elizabeth I. The rest isa flashback to 1953, when Wedderburns play
Astraea _ about Elizabeth I and in which Frederica played the young Elizabeth _ was
mounted as a pageant to honor Elizabeth IIs coronation. AWhistling Woman returns us
to 1968, and the gathering at the portrait gallery is briefly reprised. Virgin ends abruptly, at
as good a place as any to stop. Woman opens with characters complaining about a tooabrupt ending to a story theyve just been read.
The sense of balance and proportion _ one thing mirroring or echoing another _ is one of the
many pleasures to be had from reading Byatts tetralogy. Although each of the novels in the
series is self-contained, it is the synergy of the four that impresses.
Ostensibly, the books are about headstrong, redheaded Frederica Potter, who seems to be one
of those people who can never quite translate their academic accomplishments _ and
Frederica was an outstanding student _ into anything on the scale of ... their academic
accomplishments. In AWhistling Woman, though, she finally finds her niche _
as a talking head on the tube, an intellectual entertainer, hosting a show called Through the
Looking Glass.
Told in Virgin that she could never be a star on stage, in Woman Frederica has
mostly asupporting role. The lead here is Joshua Ramsden, who may be crazy but also has
genuine charisma, and even genuine insight. Which doesnt mean he isnt a spark waiting to
ignite a conflagration.
The whole series is really a tale of two decades, the 1950s and the 1960s, with the differences
between them reaching a discordant climax in Woman. Frederica has gone into TV
because she finds teaching in a time of campus unrest unbearable. A planned body/mind
conference at North Yorkshire University _ an innovative interdisciplinary institution located
on the estate where Wedderburns pageant play had been mounted years before _ is about to
be mugged big-time by aswarm of yahoos congregating at the nearby Anti-University:
The sprawling caravanserai of the Anti-University was something that was clearly working,
if by working you meant swelling and spreading and attracting students and always having
some new Happening from fireworks to group sex, from three-hour lectures on Kropotkin to
psychological experiments in sense deprivation or sense-overwhelming, buckets of sewage
and buckets of hyacinths, strobe lights and pinhole shadows, touchy-feely crawls through
damp fleshy tunnels with occasional pinpricks.

Byatt is frequently characterized as a cerebral novelist, interested in ideas more than is good
for awriter of fiction. But Byatts novels arent about ideas. Theyre about passion _ the
passion for learning and understanding, and the discipline needed to acquire both.
True, her characters tend not to be bozos. Nothing unusual there. Lots of people do research,
prepare lectures and discuss _ as some of the characters in A Whistling Woman do _
arcane matters, such as the origin and nature of language and the mating habits of snails.
Moreover, Byatt doesnt champion intelligence in any dry, abstract way. That is why the
scene in AWhistling Woman in which Fredericas father teaches her son Leo (who is
slightly dyslexic) how to read is so wonderfully touching. It is also why Byatts detailed
descriptions so often take on the resonance of poetry: ... wrinkled silk and sheen of feather,
gleam of stone and lacquer of shell. ...
The villains here are ignorant fanatics with a lust to destroy born of laziness and lack of
imagination. The moral is something Frederica comes to understand: What is important, she
thought, is to defend reason against unreason. And that takes passion.
___
Wilson, Frank. `A Whistling Woman by A.S. Byatt; Knopf.(Knight Ridder
Newspapers). Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service. Tribune Company. 2003. Retrieved
January 21, 2011 from HighBeam Research:http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G197306375.html
Reviews: A whistling woman: Too long if not too clever by half
Article from:
Scotland on Sunday
Article date:
September 22, 2002
Author:
DAVID ARCHIBALD
More results for:
A Whistling woman novel
A whistling woman by AS Byatt Chatto & Windus, GBP 16.99
A Whistling Woman marks the culmination of a quartet of AS Byatt novels charting English
life from the Fifties to 1970. Its the summer of 1968 and Frederica, the central protagonist of
the previous three novels - The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life and Babel Tower - has given
up her teaching position and landed a job as a TV talk show host on the high-brow
programme Through the Looking Glass.
Meanwhile, her lover John has taken up a post at the North Yorkshire University
where a student revolt has led to the creation of an anti-university. Sixties mayhem abounds
everywhere, not least on the nearby moor where a quiet therapeutic community is being taken
over by darker forces intent on establishing some devilish cult.
Punctuated by a series of letters between academics and those entrapped in the therapy group,
the narrative spirals towards an impending conference which is due to be addressed by two
academics with dubious histories. One is a suspected National Socialist sympathiser
with a dodgy line on eugenics, the other is left-leaning and radical, but with possible CIA
connections. Its enough to raise the hackles of the most liberal of students, never mind the
rent-a- mob loony lefties.

Here the students are enthralled in a campaign against the ideological state apparatus, opting
to spend valuable time on 36- hour-long television-watching orgies against passive
consumerism, culminating in televisions being smashed to pieces with hammers.
Sixties students are the target of some easy humour. Byatt writes with unbridled animosity
towards them, yet scarcely criticises the anachronistic, conservative institutions that housed
the revolt.
Moreover, she refuses to mention the world outside of the university that created such
turmoil. What happened to the general strike in France or the war in Vietnam? She merely
succeeds in reducing the events of 1968 to an upper-class, ivory-tower revolt by little rich
kids with too much spare time.
A former academic herself, Byatt uses the university settings to again reveal the range of her
knowledge, and takes great delight in informing the reader of the origins of words.
She also takes time to pass comment on, among other areas, Chomsky and linguistics, Freud
and psychoanalysis, the merits of cognitive psychology, Wittgenstein and mathematics, before
making observations on the reproductions of Guevara and Warhol and speculating on the
politics of representation.
There are also countless literary references weaved into the text, from Milton to F Scott
Fitzgerald.
The broad sweep of Byatts literary and intellectual enquiry is undoubtedly impressive.
Theres asection where Frederica refers to her own previous books which had been described
by reviewers as irritatingly clever. Its clearly a reference to some of Byatts previous books
that have received similar criticism.
But the problem is not that A Whistling Woman is clever - the more clever writers the better.
The problem is that her subject matter and her cleverness are not always integrated into the
narrative. Thus, although the novel comes in at over 400 pages, its narrative could be
contained in considerably less.
DAVID ARCHIBALD. Reviews: A whistling woman: Too long if not too clever by
half. Scotland on Sunday. Scotsman Publications. 2002. Retrieved January 21, 2011 from
HighBeam Research:http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-12936955.html

Farewell to the virgin in the garden

Article from:
New Statesman
Article date:
August 26, 2002
Author:
Taylor, D J
More results for:
A Whistling woman novel
A S Byatt has redefined the novel of ideas. D J TAYLOR on the culmination of a great
fictional sequence that maps English intellectual life from the 1950s to the present day
A Whistling Woman

A S Byatt
Chatto & Windus, 422pp, 16.99
Discounts at www.newstatesman.co.uk
A S Byatt recently declared, in one of her many interviews, that she was no longer interested
in character so much as ideas. This seemed an unusually reductive statement for a writer who,
more than most postwar English novelists, has succeeded in reducing the hulking gap that
separates the identities of her characters from what they think. Byatt has been worrying in
print about these issues for upwards of 30 years, and nowhere more so than in the fictional
sequence that A WhistlingWoman completes. Her skill as a writer lies mostly in her ability
to show, with a minimum of artifice, how her characters work, from the inside. This is a rare
enough tendency in English fiction, but it was apparent even in her earliest days.
A Whistling Woman makes many references back. Like The Game (1967), an almost
neurotically schematised second novel built on the eternal Byatt foundation of contending
sisters, it is a book about the consequences of religious extremism. Like the short story On
the Day that E M Forster Died, it fixes on the qualities that Byatts writer-protagonist
attributes to Forster: He believed in tolerance, in the order of art, in recognising the
complicated energies of the world in which art didnt matter.
The Byatt tetralogy - which runs to something like three-- quarters of a million words - began
in 1978 with The Virgin in the Garden, which was set in 1953, the dawning of the new
Elizabethan age. The chief protagonists were a pair of independentminded sisters, Frederica
and Stephanie Potter (respectively bright schoolgirl and Cambridge undergrad), and the focus
was a mock-Elizabethan entertainment being staged in the grounds of a stately home in North
Yorkshire. Already, one of the central oppositions of Byatts work - the life of the mind
versus the life of the hearth - was moving purposefully into view. It was there in the
architecture of the novel - half a high-class family saga, halfa kind of symbolist masque about
virgin queens and transposed myth - and it informed one of the chief dilemmas: Stephanies
decision to throw over her career as a Newnham bluestocking and marry aburly curate.
Still Life, published seven years later and covering the period 1954-59, though still
concentrating on the Potter sisters, was different again. The intellectual debates were trained
on signification, communality and a pattern of English life that could look distinctly
provincial when set against the solidity of southern France, to which Frederica makes her
first, enraptured visit. Simultaneously, notably in the scene where Stephanie gives birth to her
first child, it offers some of Byatts best naturalistic writing, in which the formal outlines and
the formal temperament are suddenly dashed aside by sheer narrative excitement. At its end,
Byatt took what then seemed the risk of killing off the more likeable of her two main
characters - Stephanie was electrocuted by an unearthed fridge. That now seems a deliberate
act of closure, a warning that a novel sequence that had previously worked in one way would
now start to operate in another.
Certainly Babel Tower (1996) - 11 years in the making and preceded by the Booker-winning
Possession (1990), Angels and Insects (1992) and a great deal else - moved on even further
from the relatively calm postwar landscapes inhabited by Frederica and Stephanie Potter.
Frederica, having left Nigel, her roguish upper-class husband, decamps to London. There, she
takes up a position on the fringes of 1960s counter-culture. Everything turns horribly
metatextual: the title, for example, refers to Babbletower, a supposedly pornographic novel,
and the subject of an epoch-defining court case. The old rootedness of Blesford and
Cambridge is shattered beyond repair - again, one suspects, deliberately. Half a dozen times
in the sequence, two or three members of the original cast convene to elegise the world of
their lost youth. Funny, the Fifties, Frederica reflects from the vantage point of 1968.

Everybody thinks of it as a no time, an unreal time. Just now. But we were there, it was
rather beautiful. . .
The just now is significant. Fredericas remark was written by her creator in 1978, is set ten
years before that and refers to a time 15 years before that. Twenty-four authorial years later,
we find Frederica and Alexander Wedderburn having their conversation again, in a world
whose lineaments can now be more sharply grasped. The old pre-1960s landscapes of tethered
consciousness and homogeneous culture are yet more fractured. Frederica, now inducted into
the bright and deeply suspect light of television by her old seducer Wilkie, and about to
publish a modish work of cut-and-paste entitled Laminations, is just one among a multitude
of characters jostling for space with psychotherapists, student revolutionaries and academic
bureaucrats. Long Royston Hall, site of The Virgin in the Gardens entree to the new
Elizabethan age, is now the University of North Yorkshire. Science has begun to
colonise a world whose explanations (or so Frederica believed) had been thought to lie in
literature. Overlaid with huge accretions of myth and religion, the whole is brought together
and somehow immobilised by the paralysing gaze of television.
Moving between these contending, and in some cases sharply opposed, constituencies roomfuls of academics, Quaker peaceniks, the resourceful but strangely oppressed young
women in whom Byatt has always specialised - is not easy. And yet everything
in A Whistling Woman turns out to have been placed there for maximum impact. The
university is planning a prestigious conference. Noting the invitation extended to a German
scientist with a doubtful wartime reputation, the student agitators are on the march and an anti-university (about which Byatt, unusually for her, turns almost satirical) has grown up
alongside the real one. Meanwhile, an extraordinary charismatic has come to dominate an
increasingly sinister religious community out on the moors. Wilkies cameras are in
attendance. Predictably, but with hugely unpredictable incidentals and consequences,
everything explodes.
A Whistling Woman is, in the end, a novel about the limits of liberalism. Its central dilemma
is this: how do you tolerate something that will, if tolerated, eventually extinguish both you
and tolerance itself? There is a key moment in which Wijnnobel, the urbane, considerate vicechancellor, tries to dissuade his mad, trouble-seeking wife from involving herself with the
antics of the anti-university. Wijnnobel fails. His wife destroys herself. What is crucial, we
finally understand, what must be preserved at all costs, what the evil-minded and the
tyrannous will always try to obstruct and seek to destroy, is knowledge.
A Whistling Woman can perhaps be filed under middle-to-late-- period Byatt. Stylisation
abounds- curious names (Elvet Gander, Avram Snitkin), together with scenes that, rather in
the way of middle-to-late-period Iris Murdoch, seem to offer the bones of much more
substantial encounters and dialogues that somehow got away. Occasionally, the whole
pretence that one is reading a noveldisappears altogether, to be replaced by the rather less
allowable spectacle of A S Byatt thinking. It is an axiom that any book labelled a novel of
ideas should be thrown immediately into the nearest dustbin. One of Byatts greatest
achievements, here and elsewhere in her work, has been to redefine that label and our
expectations of it. Weighed down with intellectual baggage, their creator wildly semaphoring
from her nearby observation post, cross-disciplinary shellfire exploding above their heads, her
characters stagger on across the postwar battlefield to a place where, ultimately and
successfully, they can be themselves.
[Sidebar]
Byatts skill lies mostly in her ability to show, with a minimum of artifice, how her characters
work, from the inside
[Author Affiliation]
Zoe Williams

Taylor, D J. Farewell to the virgin in the garden. New Statesman. 2002. Retrieved January
21, 2011 from HighBeam Research: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P3-158655511.html
Books: Fiction - Remember kids, all you need is your navel A Whistling Woman By AS
Byatt CHATTO pounds 16.99
Article from:
The Independent on Sunday (London, England)
Article date:
September 15, 2002
Author:
Kate Bingham
More results for:
A Whistling woman novel
AS Byatt has often been accused of intellectual over-egging, of a clever cleverness that
overshadows plot and character. Its a question of balance which every serious novelist
attempting to write, in Byatts words, about the life of the mind as well as of society and the
relations between people must resolve. Possession achieved this brilliantly. Her
new novel, A Whistling Woman, comes close too. Readers who enjoyed The Virgin in the
Garden and Still Life, the first two volumes of the Potter family quartet, but were put off by
the complexity of Babel Tower, the third, can relax. In this concluding instalment, Byatt
blends her own excitement at intellectual curiosity of any kind with a lucid narrative and
gripping plot.
As in the earlier novels, Frederica Potters is the central consciousness. It is 1968 and the
autumn of her affair with John Ottakar who, partly to escape his needy identical twin Paul,
accepts a post running the computer department at the University of North Yorkshire.
Frederica lands work presenting acultural chat-show, Through the Looking Glass, the very
first television about television. As the programmes grow in popularity Frederica must
choose whether to be a single-parent TV celebrity in lonely, exciting London or to return with
John to an intellectual environment she knows and loves.
But the university itself is under threat. The students sulk about their curriculum and
in a caravan at the edge of the grounds a gang of consciousness- raisers founds the AntiUniversity. As leaflets blow slogans (Teaching is exploitation, All you need is your
navel) across the campus, liberal Vice-Chancellor Sir Gerald Wijnnobel waits for the AntiUniversity to disrupt his forthcoming Body and Mind conference.
On the moors not far from UNY, meanwhile, in the novels darkest chapters, a therapeutic
community-turned- sect slowly severs contact with the world. As the community retreats
behind its newly erected boundary wall, we depend for news on the letters Brenda Pincher, an
undercover ethnomethodologist, smuggles out to her colleague at the Anti-University. Here
Byatt is up to her usual tricks - poking fun at the social scientists own methodological
dilemmas - but as both the sects behaviour and Brendas fear of being exposed as a fake
become more extreme, the correspondence builds into a masterpiece of black comedy.
Letters appear elsewhere in the book, but there is little scope for Byatts famous flair for
literary mimicry. As a novel of ideas, A Whistling Woman is more excited by Science than
Art. Too excited, perhaps. Every novel has its own information threshold, beyond which
readers simply look forward to established characters and themes playing themselves out. I
was tempted to skim-read Marcus Potters explanation of The Diagonal Proof on page 216.

By the time the conference begins, on page 353, my interest in the papers themselves (bar
one) was barely polite. Byatt is teaching here, and gets away with it only because of her
straight-talking enthusiasm.
Frederica, whose presence in the novel is physically slight, but whose face and words
glimmer through TV screens into the homes and lives of every other character, and Byatt
herself share many of the same opinions. Of the 1960s Byatt has said: I had this vision in the
1950s... of being allowed to be a responsible grown-up. Instead of which you were supposed
to play. And I never wanted to play. Its a view of that decade we dont often
see. A Whistling Woman has its share of 1960s stereotypes but Byatt is not interested in
mere idealists. Her strongest, most engaging characters are people with ideas.
Although it has one of the least reader-friendly beginnings of any I have read, the novel is
self-conscious about endings throughout. As Frederica says in chapter one, The end is
always the most unreal bit. Even so, Byatt indulges us, trying her best to resolve old
animosities and couple up everyone of childbearing age. Its a pity. She is too scrupulous an
observer of human nature for much of this to ring true and I suspect that fans will be hoping
for a fifth instalment.
Kate Bingham. Books: Fiction - Remember kids, all you need is your navel A Whistling
Woman By AS Byatt CHATTO pounds 16.99. The Independent on Sunday (London,
England). Independent Print Ltd. 2002. Retrieved January 21, 2011 from HighBeam
Research: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-1704044.html
Byatts tale of plain v fancy.(Review)
Article from:
The Evening Standard (London, England)
Article date:
September 9, 2002
Author:
Shilling, Jane
Byline: JANE SHILLING
A WHISTLING WOMAN by AS Byatt (Chatto, [pound]16.99)
A WHISTLING Woman is the fourth novel in the fictional sequence on which AS Byatt has
been working since the late Seventies, when the first, The Virgin in the Garden, was
published.
Her publishers describe A Whistling Woman as a triumphant conclusion to AS Byatts great
quartet, which sounds pretty final, though there is a tantalising passage in the text which
hints at the possibility that the story of Frederica Potter is not quite over.
Frederica is the sort of strongly flavoured heroine for whom one feels an attraction, or a
repulsion, that is decidedly sexual. Her person and her personality are pungently described.
She is thin, with knobbly joints, freckled, red-haired, foxy, wilful and extremely clever. A
marvellous passage in The Virgin in the Garden describes her getting her extraordinarily good
A-level results: No one can beat me. I can do anything, better than anyone, she exults.
This is in 1952. By 1968, the year in which A Whistling Woman is set, a violent marriage and
a humiliating divorce have chastened Frederica, though only very slightly. Ive not got a
first-class mind, she admits to her lover. This is probably not quite true. What she means is

that there was a moment at which she could have chosen an academic career, but that she
came down instead on the side of glamour and excitement, in the form of journalism.
Clever young women who make this choice often pass through a stage of regretting what they
imagine to be the purer and more noble pleasures of the intellectual life. It is likely that the
other thing Frederica really means is that she hasnt a firstclass character: that she is obscurely
aware of being dissatisfied with the life she is living because parts of it are rather frivolous
and therefore not, in a conventional way, virtuous.
The dualism of cleverness versus goodness haunts the Virgin in the Garden quartet.
Stephanie, Fredericas elder, gentler and equally clever sister, sacrifices cleverness to
goodness, partly as a means of escaping her insistently rational father and, in effect, dies of it.
Frederica, who subscribes joyfully when very young to the principle of be clever, sweet
maid, and let who will, be good, ripens rather late into uncertainty. Her internal debate
reflects - and in a way also leads, since in Whistling Woman she works as the presenter of an
excitingly radical television arts programme - the vivid intellectual ferment of the 1960s,
which evidently seemed so rich and exciting at the time, but can appear faintly tawdry in
retrospect.
Byatt herself makes Frederica reflect, in a sly flash-forward to her 60-year-old perspective on
things, that the intellectual debates of the Sixties were essentially insubstantial: The 60s were
like a fishing-net woven horribly loose and slack with only the odd very bright plastic object
caught in its meshes, whilst everything else had rushed and flowed through, back into the
undifferentiated ocean.
This seems - which is why it makes one think that we may not have heard the last of Frederica
- an odd summary of the intensely energetic and questing arguments that eddy around
Frederica and her wider circle: arts v science, rules v anarchy, education v instinct, rationality
v religion, Yorkshire v London, plain v fancy.
Plain versus fancy is what underpins the whole of this, and it is not a straightforward
apposition. Plain, in Byatts quartet, can mean clarity, truth, precision; it can also mean
ignorance and a lack of subtle apprehension. Fancy can mean energetic, vigorous,
imaginative; also mendacious, superficial and frankly bonkers.
The first two novels of the quartet are quite plain, which is to say naturalistic, with a quality
of monumental simplicity, rather like a stone chapel with clear glass windows.
The later two are also monumental, but their architecture is baroque, symbolic, incantatory,
explicitly informed by the rhythms of fairy tale and myth.
On the whole, they seem to express a paradoxical yearning for plainness.
Names are important to Byatt, and it is noticeable in A Whistling Woman that the more
fanciful the name - Elvet Gander, Jonty Surtees, Paul-Zag Ottokar, Gideon Farrar - the more
muddled, compromised and ultimately catastrophic the thinking.
Though one may brood on the fact that, in the end, plain old Miss Frederica Potter finds
herself entangled with a chap with the fanciest name of all, the rational, anti-religious but
nevertheless Romantic scientist, Luk Lysgaard-Peacock.
The comparison between George Eliots writing and that of Byatt has been frequently and
justly made.

Byatts four novels are complex, lively, muscular, moral and rather masculine books whose
celebration of cleverness and strong feeling is intensely invigorating. I hope this isnt really
the last of them. Those of us who love Frederica would like to know what became of her in
the end.
Shilling, Jane. Byatts tale of plain v fancy.(Review). The Evening Standard (London,
England). McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. 2002. Retrieved January 21, 2011 from
HighBeam Research: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-91225731.html
A New Byatt Novel With a Novel Within
By MEL GUSSOW
Published: July 9, 1996

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PRINT
SINGLE-PAGE

Deep into A. S. Byatts new book, Babel Tower, the third in a projected quartet of novels
about the interplay of life, language and literature in postwar England, the protagonist offers
pithy summaries of the landscapes of contemporary writers: Murdochian moral intricacy,
Sparkian wit and bizarrerie. Asked in a recent interview if she could similarly characterize
her own work, Ms. Byatt said, The two words I would most like to have applied are
empiricism and elegance. To those, her readers might add intellect and imagination.
The choice would depend on which Byatt book is under scrutiny. While the novels in the
quartet follow Frederica Potter on her path from Yorkshire to Cambridge to literary London,
Ms. Byatts best sellers, Possession and Angels and Insects, could borrow moral
intricacy and wit and bizarrerie from Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark. Through these and
other works, she has become a prismatic creative talent.
For many years, however, she was overshadowed by her younger sister, Margaret Drabble,
the prolific author of The Needles Eye and other books. With Possession, Ms. Byatt took
a giant step into the artistic spotlight.
Babel Tower carries the characters of The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life into the
1960s, but it paints a larger, more vibrant canvas. As does Possession, the new book
includes a narrative within a narrative, in this case a dystopian novel written by one of the
books characters.

The book focuses on Frederica, who is, in Ms. Byatts description, a slightly transgressive,
independent woman -- a whistling woman, as in a favorite refrain of the novelists
grandmother: A whistling woman and a crowing hen is neither good for God nor men.
Although Frederica draws characteristics from Ms. Byatt, among others, she is by no means a
self-portrait. The authors role in the book, as in all her books, is as narrator. In common wih
her model, George Eliot, she studiously keeps herself at a distance: If I deployed my own
follies, I would be embarrassed. What she doesnt want to write, she says, are novels that are
self-exculpatorial or self-regarding.
She said that the character in the quartet who is closest to her is Fredericas older sister,
Stephanie. In Still Life, Stephanie tries to rescue a wandering bird from under a refrigerator
and is crushed to death. Years ago, Ms. Byatt was almost electrocuted in similar
circumstances. She was saved by her quick-thinking husband.
In her grand novelistic scheme, Still Life was meant to deal with accidental death, but by
the time she came to write it, she was confronted by her own family tragedy. The week of his
11th birthday, her son was killed in an automobile accident. After that, it was almost
impossible to write about Stephanie, she said. Understandably, it is still difficult for her to
talk about this traumatic event.
Somehow she managed to finish Still Life, and then several years later turned to
Possession for romantic relief. Although she thought the book might be popular, she was
unprepared for its runaway success. After Angels and Insects and the ironic Matisse
Stories, she returned to Frederica and her family.
One of the principal figures in the new book is Fredericas irascible father. Asked if he was
based on her own father, she said it was not her father but her mother. All the screaming and
shouting was my mother, she said, and the only way I could publish the book was to change
the gender and hope my mother wouldnt notice. Of course, she did.
My sister Maggie and my mother used to have huge shouting matches, she said, adding that
her father was silent, but when he was there, on the whole the roaring stopped. From her
point of view, men are bringers of sanity, clarity, order, peace.
But what about Jude Mason, the mad, outrageous author of the novel within Babel Tower?
He is, of course, an exception, a combination, she said, of Gollum in The Hobbit, Quentin
Crisp and Ms. Byatts inkwell.
Did she say inkwell? Sitting on her desk at home in London is a 19th-century inkwell in the
shape of a squatting figure covered with scales, with a pointed nose and a long, spiny tail.
The inkwell is her writing talisman.

At the beginning of her career, when she was married to Ian Byatt, an economist, Antonia
Byatt adopted the name A. S. Byatt, in homage to T. S. Eliot, who, she said, felt that writers
should be anonymous. As a result, her grandchildren and others often call her A. S. Since
1969, she has been married to Peter Duffy, an investment analyst.
Her former husband is well known in his own right in England. When he was interviewed
about his days at the London School of Economics, he was asked if Mick Jagger had been a
fellow student, or Peter Duffy, who married A. S. Byatt. Mr. Byatt replied, Well, I married
her myself, once.
The choice of A. S. as signature was also intentionally androgynous. Ms. Byatt said, I dont
write out of an enclave of women who see men as incurably other. Her heroines include
George Eliot, Willa Cather, Ms. Murdoch and Toni Morrison. An active critic, she can be
sardonic about peacocky male novelists. When Martin Amis demanded, and got, a huge
advance for The Information in 1994, she called his approach a kind of male turkey
cocking.
Real people often make appearances in her books. In one, E. M. Forster is seen falling asleep
at a tea party, an incident that Ms. Byatt observed in life. Anthony Burgess is in Babel
Tower, offering expert testimony at a censorship trial. The Virgin in the Garden begins at
the National Portrait Gallery, where Antonia Fraser is seen accompanied by a dumpy woman
in a raincoat.
Who is that dumpy woman? Its me, said Ms. Byatt, reserving her self-regard for her art.
Im not glamorous, she said, but I did quite well at being sexy when I was the right age,
partly owing to the accident of there being 11 men to one woman at Cambridge. They used to
ask me to marry them once a week.
For relaxation, Ms. Byatt often watches nature programs on television, but not ones about
wildlife. Snails and slugs are more miraculous, she said. Until you see them under a
microscope you dont know what they can do. She said that were she not a novelist, she
would have been a naturalist. Her fascination extends to insects, a fact that led her to write
Angels and Insects and to be involved in the recent movie version.
In addition to the fourth Frederica book, Ms. Byatt has two other novels on the boil, one
about two women who are psychoanalysts in the time of Freud, the other dealing with people
in England in the 1890s. She plans to call it The Hedgehog, the White Goose and the Mad
March Hare, because its about the awful effect a childrens story writer has on her
children. In that novel there will also be a fizzing of socialism and eugenics with George
Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells around the edges.

During a long, demanding book tour through the United States, Ms. Byatt was anxious to get
back to work. That morning she went for a swim in her hotel pool, as she often does. She said
that while she was swimming, three tiny sentences of her next novel came into her head. I
thought, its all right, she said. Youre still there.
A New Byatt Novel With a Novel Within - New York Times. The New York Times. 1996.
Retrieved January 21, 2011 from HighBeam Research: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1S19199607090072737.html

Books: Birds of paradise A S Byatt closes her epic quartet with a novel that scorns
the wild passions of the Sixties. Yet Stevie Davies trusts this brilliant mind most
when it gives way to deep emotion
Article from:
The Independent (London, England)
Article date:
September 7, 2002
Author:
Stevie Davies
A WHISTLING WOMAN
A S BYATT
CHATTO & WINDUS, pounds 16.99
421pp
A WHISTLING Woman completes a quartet begun in 1978 with The Virgin in the Garden,
charting the progress of Frederica Potter from precocious Fifties schoolgirl to the 33-year-old
intellectual of 1968. We have now turned 2,038 pages of this work. Cerebrating wildly,
wittily and wordily, Byatt has transformed the tale of the narcissistic and scholarly heroine,
and a group of contemporaries, into the equivalent of an epic. It presents itself as the tale of
our times, in a dialect of loquacious mandarin, loaded not only with recondite aestheticpolitico-scientific allusion but with self- referential curlicues.
How well has Frederica, that fierce, brilliant redhead, worn? Has she dated? Will she bear
the weight of these tomes, fleshed out with pastiche, laminated with every kind of baroque
postmodern legerdemain? Is anyone desperate for page 2,039?
Byatt is one of the most brilliant minds and speakers of our generation. She is a galvanising
literary critic and a cultural commentator of the highest order. My qualm in reading the whole
quartet lay in my query: are talkers all we have to talk about in the modern novel?
Byatt eschews realism as archaic; she sidelines the human heart. But paradoxically, her
writing is most powerful when it deviates from her agenda. In Babel Tower, she wrings the
heart when Frederica occupies the space of so many ordinary women, silenced and subdued in
a violent marriage. Her grief and confusion, and her lacerating love for her child, Leo, reaches
to the deepest sources of human nature and womens predicament. Leo clings to his mother,
grips, grips, and tries to burrow back into her body.

But this authenticity doesnt last. The heroine is rescued by three male Cambridge chums, and
returns to queen it in the chaps world of letters.
Is it just fatigue that leads me to wish the 2,000-odd pages carefully edited for excess,
elaboration and mannerisms? The virtuoso cleverness and self-mocking solemnity beget a
recurrent sense that the story has not quite begun. One wants a solid packet of fish and chips.
With salt. And vinegar. Eaten with the fingers. This airy souffle of highbrow talk palls.
Who is Byatt writing for? Presumably, the cognoscenti. But, since most of us are common
readers, the quartet condescends to us. When pregnant Frederica appears as a Botticellian
Venus-Flora in billowing floral cloth, sprigged with olives, to the accompaniment of abstruse
scientific reference (page 2,038), you have to be jolly clever to grasp the full range of
allusion. But even if you are jolly clever, you wont be clever enough. And that, too, is the
novels agenda.
A Whistling Woman centres on late-Sixties movements and technology which radicalised
consciousness. Frederica, quitting teaching in disgust as it is undermined by the anarchist
sloganeers of the counterculture (Use pricks and cunts not brains), is now presenter of an
arts programme in which she interviews celebrities. The novel discusses the trompe loeil
mirrorings of the televisual age, along with the violent emergence of Dionysian
countercultures.
A hippyish Anti-University is raised against a university in the north. A heterogeneous body
of radical Quakers, Anglicans, madmen and infiltrators settle an unsettling congregation
called the Spirits Tigers in the vicinity. Under the crazed and visionary influence of Josh
Lamb, it expresses communitarian reversion to the id. Meanwhile Frederica, having entered
the looking-glass world of TV, inhabits a set in a transparent box within a box to conduct
her highbrow discussions.
A comprehensive birdiness prevails in imagery, with Frederica predominating as the chief
whistler: a Picasso cock-hen-woman. I warmed to the viewer who thought, None of you
are really talking about anything. Dialectical Laingian and Jungian doubles and selfdivisions proliferate. The Manichean charismatic hermeneut, Josh Lamb, traumatised when
his father murdered his mother, has another self; and John, Fredericas lover, has his
identical (and opposite) twin, Zag, from Zagreus (Dionysius), intimating carnality and
carnage.
As in Renaissance humanism, opposites are one. Man, the bifurcated beast, straddles his
tragic and ridiculous dilemma. In a saturnalian conclusion the animals are liberated - by the
way, there is a sheep, Tobias, who thinks he is a dog - as the Sixties carnival disintegrates.
The novel ends in the roasting alive of Tobias and two sacrificial human characters. I didnt
believe a word of it.
Absence of affect in the quartet is linked with the authors recoil from bonds of warmth
between women. Men and women speak to one another, as do women and children; but
women are rarely close. Odd that a novel claiming to anatomise the Sixties omits serious
consideration of the womens movement, while it burlesques and trivialises the peace
movement and the periods spiritual quests.
Gender politics in the quartet are reactionary. Frederica is an honorary male and a mans
woman, costumed to the nines in a fashionable wardrobe. In A Whistling Woman, studious
scientist Jacqueline is a paler variant of Frederica, but not always top of the class. Well,
good for her. Fredericas rivals meet sticky ends: her sister Stephanie has been killed in Still

Life and weird Eva Wijnnobel, who insulted Frederica in Babel Tower, emerges as a barmy,
vatic heroine of counterculture, punished by cremation.
Ludic encounters with ideas blow up the novel in a giant afflatus. However, where it strikes
into the human, as with Joshs inner life, Byatts writing is at once forensic, profound and
humane. The source of Joshs charisma in trauma is searched out with intense compassion; he
feels memories like bright lights through holes in a blanket. His story is linked with that of
Abraham and Isaac, an indictment of Gods goodness. Josh becomes a seer who cannot bear
to be touched, carrying the atrocious burden of his insight.
Chiefly however, the late Sixties are represented through tiresome cliches. The author cannot
take the period seriously, and the brittle distance she maintains from warm emotion
demonstrates not only distances but alienates.
Stevie Davies. Books: Birds of paradise A S Byatt closes her epic quartet with a novel that
scorns the wild passions of the Sixties. Yet Stevie Davies trusts this brilliant mind most when
it gives way to deep emotion. The Independent (London, England). Independent Print Ltd.
2002.
Retrieved
January
21,
2011
from
HighBeam
Research:http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-1710681.html
Frederica in wonderland; With enough footnotes and explanatory diagrams, books by A.S.
Byatt may one day be readable. Until then, display them prominently, praise them
broadly.(FEATURES)(BOOKS)
Article from:
The Christian Science Monitor
Article date:
December 19, 2002
Byline: Ron Charles
Fans of A.S. Byatts fiction can be divided into two groups: Those who cannot understand her
novels and those who lie. Even her most popular work, the Booker Prize- winning
Possession, was demanding, and her previous novel, The Biographers Tale, was
downright baffling.
Her latest, A Whistling Woman, completes a tetralogy, meaning a fair number of us already
feel intimidated. The series began 25 years ago with The Virgin in the Garden, which
introduced Frederica Potter, then a precocious teenager. Now, three novels later, Frederica has
abandoned her university post - driven away by self-righteous and dimwitted undergraduates,
no doubt the kind of lazy readers who would find A.S. Byatts novels too arduous.
The British publisher claims that A Whistling Woman stands on its own, but I just wished it
would stand still. This peripatetic story about the late 1960s is as fascinating, eclectic, and
confusing as that psychedelic era.
The various strands of the plot wind around a body-mind conference being planned at a new
university in Yorkshire. An infinitely patient vice chancellor hopes to inspire a biologicalcognitive Theory of Everything, while his vindictive New Age wife traipses around campus
reading hippies horoscopes. To ensure maximum academic and media attention, hes invited
speakers from every possible discipline - even, against his better judgment, religion.
Meanwhile, back in London, Frederica has reluctantly accepted a job as the host of a new
television talk show called Through the Looking Glass, a wacky and cerebral kaffeeklatsch
about the way television is going to change everyones consciousness. The first step in her

preparation for the job is to buy a television and watch some of it. Shes not impressed, but
something intrigues her about the possibilities of this new medium. Soon shes appearing on
the screen as the Witch in the sugar cottage talking about Doris Lessings idea of Free
Women, George Eliot, and a Tupperware bowl. (Check your local listings.)
Unfortunately, just as she begins to find success and a bit of fame, her boyfriend moves back
to Yorkshire to continue his work in advanced mathematics at the university. Hes working
with researchers who are studying the physiology of memory by observing snails. But hes
also drawn inexorably to his mentally ill twin brother, whos a member of a therapy group
thats metamorphosing into a religious cult.
Everyones looking forward to the body-mind conference, including a group of radical
students who have founded an antiuniversity outside the grounds of the old-style university on
land owned by the religious cult where the biologists well-observed snails live.
If youre still with me, youre probably thinking this is a pretty poor inventory of the story,
but actually, its something of a miracle that I could corral A Whistling Woman even into
this unruly summary. The plot is so fragile that it breaks into tangents at the slightest touch of
coherence.
And yet its all strangely engaging, partly because Byatt constantly tempts us to pursue
connections between these disparate elements, but also because shes embedded the cosmic
ideas of this ultimate novel of ideas in the lives of such interesting characters.
One of the most gripping and disturbing is a psychiatric patient known sometimes as John
Lamb. He gradually emerges as the charismatic leader of the Spirits Tigers, an apocalyptic
cult near the university. Byatt moves back to his childhood and the ghastly murders that
derailed his life, sending him into the fiery tropes of the Bible for guidance.
Other narrators watch Lamb too, responding in various ways to his seductive theology. Letters
from his Jungian analyst, for instance, to a colleague show the slow corrosion of the doctorpatient relationship. And a sociologist secretly studying the cult provides increasingly
terrifying reports about its madness.
In the best tradition of chaos theory, everything in this story refolds to greater complexity.
That can be maddening, but its also fascinating. Where else can a religious maniac explain
Kierkegaards analysis of Abrahams faith, and keep you on the edge of your chair?
The most unnerving implications surround issues of faith in a world rapidly becoming
convinced that all thought can be reduced to matter. Trapped in recurring hallucinations of
blood, poor Lamb is lost in a thicket of theological symbolism that forces us to confront a
blurry line between the mentally ill and the spiritually minded. The psychiatrists studying
Lamb ask themselves how science will ever distinguish between a dangerous fanatic and a
religious visionary.
On the university campus, even the scientists most devoted to snail and memory research
sense something inadequate about their attempts to reduce all cognition to the activity of
electricity in gray matter.
Jacqueline, a brilliant young student toiling in the sexist shadow of her adviser, cries out: I
dont know how I got myself so cocooned in my self. I want to be able to do the things people
do - I want to live, not just to think. Ultimately, she neednt worry: There are forces within
these characters - noble and shameless - that defy their rationality, that thwart their perfectly
logical, Darwinian explanations and throw them into life with a vengeance.

Clearly, this is serious play for a writer who can make words do magic, and shes never been
more intellectually lush than here. One senses in Byatts witty satire of the antiuniversity a
venting of authorial rage against lazy minds that fail to appreciate the accumulation of
wisdom. And yet, the conflagration that ends the vice chancellors quest for a Theory of
Everything casts a humble light on the all-inclusive ambition of this remarkable quartet of
novels.
Frederica in wonderland; With enough footnotes and explanatory diagrams, books by A.S.
Byatt may one day be readable. Until then, display them prominently, praise them
broadly.(FEATURES)(BOOKS). The Christian Science Monitor. The Christian Science
Publishing Society. 2002. Retrieved January 21, 2011 from HighBeam
Research:http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-95597124.html
A.S. Byatts tales will give you the creeps.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)
Article from:
Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
Article date:
May 5, 2004
Author:
Matthews, Charles
Byline: Charles Matthews
``Little Black Book of Stories by A.S. Byatt; Knopf ($21)
___
Look at _ no, better yet, listen to _ the way this story begins:
There were once two little girls who saw, or believed they saw, a thing in a forest.
How can you not read that story? As that sentence delicately steps from naive to sinister, it
evokes the shivery delights of campfire tales.
Which is precisely what A.S. Byatt intends it to do. The first of the five stories in her slim but
extraordinary new collection, Little Black Book of Stories, The Thing in the Forest cycles
through several modes _ once-upon-a-time fable, reminiscence, horror story, psychological
realism _ before it ends with the sentence that began it, implying that the characters are caught
in some horrifically inescapable loop. Byatt is working here on the margins of the genre
associated with Stephen King, though she equals King in fecundity of imagination, far excels
him in mastery of language and thought, and manages to give us the delicious creeps without
succumbing to the gratuitous vulgarity of shock-lit.
What the two little girls see, or believe they see, in the forest is evil embodied, a foul creature
with a liquid smell of putrefaction, the smell of maggoty things at the bottom of untended
dustbins, the smell of blocked drains, and unwashed trousers, mixed with the smell of bad
eggs, and of rotten carpets and ancient polluted bedding.
Or is it that what they see is what they have done? For all of these stories, even the ones in
which the supernatural plays an apparent role, are about the way imagination shapes reality or
cushions us against it _ but only up to a point, for reality has a way of asserting itself after all.
In Body Art, Damian, an ob-gyn, becomes involved with Daisy, an artist, but is appalled
when he discovers that she has appropriated items from the hospitals valuable collection of
antique medical instruments to create a sculpture of the goddess Kali:

Her four arms were medical prostheses, wooden or gleaming mechanical artefacts, ending in
sharp steel and blunt wooden fingers, and one hook, from which hung what looked like a real
shrunken head, held by the hair. Her earrings were preserved foetuses, decked with beads,
enclosed in mahogany-framed glass jars like hourglasses. She brandished a surgical saw in
another hand, and the final two arms were crocheting something in an immense tangle of
crimson plastic cords. Her crochet hooks were the tools of the nineteenth-century
obstetricians, midwives and abortionists; the dreadful formless knitting glittered like fresh
blood.
Damian insists that the sculpture be removed from the gallery and the implements returned to
the hospital, but its not just the grotesque and unauthorized use of the instruments that
disturbs him. For he has always been attracted to Daisy, and by the end of the story both of
them will face something neither has anticipated: that life can be more terrifyingly uncertain
than those things that are often regarded as lifes antithesis _ art and death.
Byatts love of specialized and esoteric lore can make her fiction somewhat lumpy, as the
narrative dodges around all manner of intellectual preoccupations. The novella Morpho
Eugenia in her book Angels and Insects, for example, is aswarm with lepidopterology, and
her most recent novel, A Whistling Woman, was a jumble of everything from Chomskyan
linguistics to the sex life of snails.
In this collection, A Stone Woman tells how the protagonist, Ines, discovers that her body is
gradually petrifying _ literally. And not just into ordinary rock, but into a variety of minerals
and gemstones. Byatts foray into mineralogy adds to the storys richness and strangeness.
Heres a bit from her account of Ines transformation:
HShe observed its beginnings in the mirror one morning, brushing her hair _ a necklace of
veiled swellings above her collar-bone which broke slowly through the skin like eyes from
closed lids, and became opal _ fire opal, black opal, geyserite and hydrophane, full of watery
light. ... She saw dikes of dolerites, in graduated sills, now invading her inner arms. But it
took weeks of patient watching before ... she surprised a bubble of rosy barite crystals,
breaking through a vein of fluorspar, and opening into the form known as a desert rose,
bunched with the ore flowers of blue john.
This gorgeous specificity is certainly over the top, and some will object that such virtuoso
cataloging weighs the story down. But its also what keeps A Stone Woman from dwindling
into allegory _ the story of a woman who turns into stone could easily have been a preachy
parable, either feminist or anti-feminist, but Byatt is working in the realm of myth, as she
sends Ines to her destiny in a land of stone _ Iceland. Anchoring her story in physical reality
gives it a substance and depth that such a fantasy would otherwise lack.
Fantasy is also present in The Pink Ribbon, about a man whose wife, sunk into senile
dementia, is oddly fascinated by the ``Teletubbies. At night, the man is visited by a
mysterious woman who claims to be a fetch, the spirit of a living being, the embodiment of
his younger, saner wife. Byatts audacious trick is to play off the familiar but truly bizarre
fantasy of a childrens TV show against the sad, melancholy but somehow genuine fantasy of
the haunted husband.
But my favorite story in the collection is not a fantasy. Raw Material is about a failed
novelist, Jack Smollett, who teaches creative writing courses to adults in provincial English
cities. His students write cliche-ridden stories full of rape, torture and murder _ sometimes
working out their own revenge fantasies: e.g., A tale of the entrapment and vengeful
slaughter of an unjust driving examiner.

Then one of the students, Cicely Fox, a woman in her 80s, hands in something extraordinary:
an essay titled How We Used to Black-lead Stoves. Dazzled by this elegantly written
memoir of a childhood chore, Jack reads it to the class, who react to it with hostility and
merciless adjectives: `Slow. `Clumsy. `Cold. `Pedantic. `Pompous. `Show-off. `Overornate. `Nostalgic.
But Cicely is unperturbed, even when her next essay, Wash Day, gets the charge of being
overwritten from the class, which begins to shun her as teachers pet. (The contrast of
Cicelys simple, eloquent, marvelously detailed essays with the portrayal of Jacks sour
cynicism and his students relentless banality is superb _ Byatts astonishing gift for voices
has never been better displayed than in this story.)
Secretly, without informing Cicely of his plan, Jack enters her essays in a writing contest _
and they win. But when he goes to tell her of her prize, he makes a shocking discovery. Yet,
tellingly, the story doesnt end with Jacks discovery. In none of these stories is Byatt out for
cheap thrills _ even at their most sensational, they are vehicles for reflection.
Byatts novels have always struck me as unfocused and restless, as if she were a little bored
with having to live with the same characters for so long. But the short story concentrates her
strengths; the very conciseness of the form doesnt allow her to dawdle or divagate. And these
are stories that are extraordinarily varied in style and emotional texture, from the mythic in
The Stone Woman to the mundane in Raw Material, and from the unspoken guilt that
lingers in The Thing in the Forest, to the sexual tension of Body Art, to the regret that
haunts The Pink Ribbon.
Little Black Book of Stories is abundant proof of Byatts greatness as a writer.
Matthews, Charles. A.S. Byatts tales will give you the creeps.(Knight Ridder
Newspapers). Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service. Tribune Company. 2004. Retrieved
January 21, 2011 from HighBeam Research:http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1116262254.html

`A Whistling Woman by A.S. Byatt; Knopf ($26).

Article from:
The Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, PA)
Article date:
February 3, 2003
Byline: Frank Wilson
Plump little Josh Ramsdens first-ever night staying with a friend from school didnt turn
out well. Oh, the visit itself was fine: He had done nothing odd or foolish ... had been made
welcome ... had behaved like a real boy and had not been found out in any failing. His
friends mother even told him to come again soon.
The problem was, Joshs mother let him go, but didnt ask his father, who probably wouldnt
have. Which may be why, when little Josh comes home, he finds Mom and Sis lying together
upstairs, quite unpleasantly dead. He finds Dad later on, in the coal cellar, looking as though
he had tried to burrow his way into the centre of the sloping hill of coal. Regretting that Josh
hadnt been around earlier, his father tells him to fetch the police.
The police dutifully take Dad off for an eventual rendezvous with the hangman _ he refuses to
plead insanity _ and Josh gets shipped to a distant relative. He manages to get through high

school, and even becomes a theology student. But blood-soaked visions of light and darkness,
good and evil _ pure, unadulterated Manichaeism, in fact _ land him in the mental ward. And
mental hospitals are pretty much where he stays until he winds up leading a New Age cult at
Dun Vale Hall, right in the middle of A Whistling Woman, A.S. Byatts latest novel, which
concludes the sequence of four begun with The Virgin in the Garden.
There is a glancing reference in The Virgin in the Garden to a boy spending the night with
a school chum and never returning for another visit. Virgin opens in 1968 with Frederica
Potter, the series protagonist, meeting her brother-in-law Daniel Orton and playwright
Alexander Wedderburn at Londons National Portrait Gallery to see actress Flora Robson
portray Queen Elizabeth I. The rest is a flashback to 1953, when Wedderburns play
Astraea _ about Elizabeth I and in which Frederica played the young Elizabeth _ was
mounted as a pageant to honor Elizabeth IIs coronation. A Whistling Woman returns us to
1968, and the gathering at the portrait gallery is briefly reprised. Virgin ends abruptly, at
as good a place as any to stop. Woman opens with characters complaining about a tooabrupt ending to a story theyve just been read.
The sense of balance and proportion _ one thing mirroring or echoing another _ is one of the
many pleasures to be had from reading Byatts tetralogy. Although each of the novels in the
series is self-contained, it is the synergy of the four that impresses.
Ostensibly, the books are about headstrong, redheaded Frederica Potter, who seems to be one
of those people who can never quite translate their academic accomplishments _ and
Frederica was an outstanding student _ into anything on the scale of ... their academic
accomplishments. In A Whistling Woman, though, she finally finds her niche _ as a talking
head on the tube, an intellectual entertainer, hosting a show called Through the Looking
Glass.
Told in Virgin that she could never be a star on stage, in Woman Frederica has mostly a
supporting role. The lead here is Joshua Ramsden, who may be crazy but also has genuine
charisma, and even genuine insight. Which doesnt mean he isnt a spark waiting to ignite a
conflagration.
The whole series is really a tale of two decades, the 1950s and the 1960s, with the differences
between them reaching a discordant climax in Woman. Frederica has gone into TV because
she finds teaching in a time of campus unrest unbearable. A planned body/mind conference at
North Yorkshire University _ an innovative interdisciplinary institution located on the estate
where Wedderburns pageant play had been mounted years before _ is about to be mugged
big-time by a swarm of yahoos congregating at the nearby Anti-University:
The sprawling caravanserai of the Anti-University was something that was clearly working,
if by working you meant swelling and spreading and attracting students and always having
some new Happening from fireworks to group sex, from three-hour lectures on Kropotkin to
psychological experiments in sense deprivation or sense-overwhelming, buckets of sewage
and buckets of hyacinths, strobe lights and pinhole shadows, touchy-feely crawls through
damp fleshy tunnels with occasional pinpricks.
Byatt is frequently characterized as a cerebral novelist, interested in ideas more than is good
for a writer of fiction. But Byatts novels arent about ideas. Theyre about passion _ the
passion for learning and understanding, and the discipline needed to acquire both.
True, her characters tend not to be bozos. Nothing unusual there. Lots of people do research,
prepare lectures and discuss _ as some of the characters in A Whistling Woman do _
arcane matters, such as the origin and nature of language and the mating habits of snails.

Moreover, Byatt doesnt champion intelligence in any dry, abstract way. That is why the
scene in A Whistling Woman in which Fredericas father teaches her son Leo (who is
slightly dyslexic) how to read is so wonderfully touching. It is also why Byatts detailed
descriptions so often take on the resonance of poetry: ... wrinkled silk and sheen of feather,
gleam of stone and lacquer of shell. ...
The villains here are ignorant fanatics with a lust to destroy born of laziness and lack of
imagination. The moral is something Frederica comes to understand: What is important, she
thought, is to defend reason against unreason. And that takes passion.
`A Whistling Woman by A.S. Byatt; Knopf ($26). The Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia,
PA). McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. 2003. Retrieved January 21, 2011 from
HighBeam Research: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-119482893.html
Crowded house.(A Whistling Woman)(Book Review)
Article from:
Book
Article date:
January 1, 2003
Author:
Mesic, Penelope
A Whistling Woman **** A.S. BYATT Alfred A. Knopf, 435 pages
AS A WHISTLING WOMAN OPENS, IT BECOMES clear that the three previous volumes
of A.S. Byatts magnificent quartet of modern British life (The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life
and Babel Tower) have led inexorably to the feminism, divisive protest and cultural ferment
of the late 1960s.
Frederica Potter, the protagonist of the earlier novels, is now a single mother in her early
thirties teaching literature at a London art school. Beset by radical students protesting the
authoritarianism of lectures and reading lists, she finds she must [give] up teaching
because she wanted to teach. Brilliant and adaptable, she lucks into a job hosting a
pioneering talk show at the BBC. This proves a clever narrative choice. The show captures the
appealing qualities of the period--intellectual playfulness, a then-new mix of high and low
culture and a frank examination of issues previously taboo. More important, it puts Frederica
at the center of opinions and events.
This is crucial for Byatt, who displays a great-hearted determination to present a cross section
of society ardent with ideas. Biologists and geneticists, psychotherapists and clerics,
playwrights and poets and pop stars and fledgling computer scientists--even a charismatic
madman--stream through this final volume. This gives Byatt the opportunity to put into her
characters hands every sort of literary product: pop song, committee report, scientific study,
protest poem, sermon, letter, journal, commonplace book. Her command of such forms is
effortless, joyous and exact, and the result is characters who seem to embody a separate
universe of ideas.
Byatt briefly defers the hubbub of twentieth-century thought by choosing to begin her novel
with the charm and simplicity of myth. The first character to speak is a small, comically selfimportant thrush, the narrator of the concluding episode of an epic bedtime story Fredericas
friend Agatha is reading to their children. The fairy tale tells of three young travelers
journeying through the bleak land of the Whistlers, bird women with beaks like knives who
are angry because no one can hear [their] speech. Those strong but lonely compound

creatures, the Whistlers, suggest women such as Agatha and Frederica, who are raising their
children as single parents and seeking relationships with men capable of regarding womens
work to be as valuable as their own. The final chapter of this fairy tale is a key to the novels
two main narrative strands, one relating to the emerging feminism of the 1960s and the other
to the mastery of knowledge in all its forms, from the genetic code to the language of dreams.
Many of the characters struggling with the issues occupying women like Frederica peopled
the earlier volumes of Byatts quartet, particularly those encountered in Yorkshire, England,
Fredericas childhood home, which she revisits here. It is in Yorkshire that the struggle
between tradition and liberation plays out on a larger scale, as the local university and its
kindly administrator are confronted by a disruptive, ragtag anti-university that is calling for
the abolishment of requirements such as foreign language.
Meanwhile, beyond the university and the protest movement lies a remote farm, where, as the
novel unfolds, an episode of grisly domestic abuse has taken place. During the course of the
book, the farm becomes the farthest outpost of rash inquiry and disorder, beginning as a
psychiatric halfway house and ending as the headquarters of a religious cult.
The figure around whom the cult forms, Josh Lamb, is mentally disturbed, yet uncannily
insightful and magnetic. The survivor of his fathers homicidal religious mania, Lamb is alive
to evil and its potential to overwhelm good. He is plunged into horrific, near-constant visions.
Once, ecstatic, he sees hundreds of thousands of creatures made of light, men, women,
winged things and swimming things, all dripping with brilliance ... swarm[ing] up and down
toward the moon.... Another time, he topples headlong into a claustrophobic hell where a
false moon gave off a miserable light, like inadequate fluorescent tubing in cheap canteens.
There his family, in postures of violent death, yammer and clack, and a voice commands him:
You must take in what you do not want, to finish the Work. The precision with which Byatt
tracks the progress of the group Lamb first joins as a patient, then comes to lead, is absolutely
chilling.
With so much going on, in so many different heads, a reader might envision the accumulated
throng of Byatts characters pressing forward, each eager to dominate the narrative. Yet none
alone offers a complete vision of the world, and the books inside joke is that fiction embraces
and contains all manner of other mental realms. This teeming realm, so crammed with idea
and incident, so intertwined with opinion and description that the richness of it is like a drug,
must finally have a last page. And even though Byatt has from the first prepared us, by
showing us the children, outraged when the story of the Whistlers is suddenly over, the reader
ends up sharing their reaction: an appalled silence, a sense of loss and grief at having now
to live outside the book.
Mesic, Penelope. Crowded house.(A Whistling Woman)(Book Review). Book. Barnes &
Noble,
Inc.
2003.
Retrieved
January
21,
2011
from
HighBeam
Research: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-96554766.html
BOOK OF THE WEEK FICTION The Childrens Book By A.S. Byatt CHATTO &
WINDUS, pounds 18.99, 617 pp Jane Shilling is enthralled by a rich, many-layered saga of
the Edwardian Summer in which art is a destructive as well as a redemptive force
Article from:
The Sunday Telegraph London
Article date:
April 26, 2009

Author:
Jane Shilling
In her Virgin in the Garden tetralogy A.S. Byatt wrote about the changing state of the
English family and English society between the Fifties and the beginning of the Seventies.
Her latest novel, The Childrens Book, pursues a similar theme over an equivalent expanse of
time - it begins in June 1895 and concludes in May 1919 - but in a single, vast volume.
The narrative of The Childrens Book involves the connected fates of several clans: the
Wellwoods, the Fludds and the Cains, within whose powerful gravitational fields is contained
a constellation of satellite relationships. Between them, these families constitute an elegant
sample of the enlightened, thoughtful, energetic, reforming, educated middle classes whose
artistic and social vitality flourished across Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,
before the flowering of creativity was checked by war.
Urbane and sophisticated - the men have jobs in London, the sons attend public school and
Cambridge, the daughters take part in the London
season - Byatts characters have deep provincial roots in remote and ancient parts of Kent
around Romney Marsh: the Fludds at Dungeness, the Wellwoods on the Weald. Their sense
of place is as powerful a formative influence as their moral or aesthetic sensibility.
The relationship between art and morality is a theme that preoccupies Byatt: the later volumes
of the Virgin
in the Garden books describe experimental communities whose idealistic aspirations tend to
be undermined by baser human qualities - lust, ambition, the will to power.
Each of the tribes in The Childrens Book is sustained and animated by art. Prosper Cain, a
former Major in the Royal Engineers, is Special Keeper of Precious Metals at the South
Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and Albert). Cains old friend, Benedict Fludd, is a
volatile potter who suffers from religious and anti-religious fits in which he has to be
restrained from smashing his own work. Olive Wellwood is a writer of childrens stories who
draws energy and inspiration from her own large brood.
A central question of Byatts narrative is the extent to which the act of creativity is
destructive: the creator a predator on the lives of others. Cain, the conservator, is a caretaker
also in human terms: a rescuer and repairer of damaged lives. Fludd and Olive Wellwood are
more complicated: makers of lovely artefacts, but at heavy human cost.
The Childrens Book is a richly allusive text. Readers familiar with the biographies of E.
Nesbit and Eric Gill will find them haunting the complicated menages of Olive Wellwood and
Benedict Fludd (whose household contains a beautiful but deeply disturbed wife and two
daughters, and a dire locked cupboard full of exquisitely modelled priapic pottery horrors).
On Olive Wellwood, Byatt bestows Nesbits strong attachment to Kent, Fabian Society
connections and singular domestic arrangements: the large family of siblings who eventually
discover themselves to be a mixed set of half-siblings, the urgent financial imperative to write
and the consequent pillaging of things too fragile to be pressed into narrative service, the
loved and fatally neglected children.
Byatts text is punctuated with excerpts from Olives fairy stories, in which the characteristic
flavour of winsome terror (characteristic not just of Nesbits work, but of Edwardian
childrens writing in general) is boldly evoked. The Ugly-Wuglies - horrifying puppet figures

from Nesbits Enchanted Castle - are daringly reimagined. Themes of incest,

of masks, of performance, concealment, anarchy and fugue predominate. The production of
The Winters Tale in Byatts earlier novel, A Whistling Woman, is reprised in The Childrens
Book, with Olive taking the role of the statuesque queen, Hermione.
What a mess, thinks Frederica,
heroine of A Whistling Woman, as she watches that novels emotionally complicated
performance of Shakespeares problem play. But mess - the mess that art makes in the process
of trying to impose order on a messy world - is Byatts raw material and her synthesis of it
here is dazzling.
As she completed the Virgin in the Garden tetralogy, Byatt was reported as saying that she
was no longer interested in character so much as ideas. If that were once the case (she
certainly had a phase of giving her characters outlandish names of quasi-Murdochian
improbability) it
is no longer.
The narrative vigour and passionate engagement with the human condition that has always
informed Byatts writing ensures that one can approach The Childrens Book in perfect
ignorance of Nesbit, Gill or any of the social, political and artistic convulsions of the
Edwardian era and still miss nothing of its astonishing power and resonance.
Besides, the novel is punctuated with brisk historical digressions for the really ignorant. Byatt
is an artist of exceptional moral enchantment, but she can never quite resist the impulse to
instruct, as
well as beguile.
Jane Shilling. BOOK OF THE WEEK FICTION The Childrens Book By A.S. Byatt
CHATTO & WINDUS, pounds 18.99, 617 pp Jane Shilling is enthralled by a rich, manylayered saga of the Edwardian Summer in which art is a destructive as well as a redemptive
force. The Sunday Telegraph London. Telegraph Group Limited. 2009. Retrieved January
21, 2011 from HighBeam Research: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-20181193.html
Whistling Woman resonates deeply
Article from:
Deseret News (Salt Lake City)
Article date:
February 9, 2003
Author:
Susan WhitneyDeseret News staff writer
A WHISTLING WOMAN, by A.S. Byatt, Alfred A. Knopf, 427 pages, $26.
Luk put out a hand. Jacqueline backed away, a little, made the gap between her body and his
reach just that bit too great. It was the reverse of a mating dance, he reflected, it was a ritual
move of avoidance, perfected by her, recognised by him. He thought of Lorenzs studies of
the behaviour of other creatures. Most unreceptive females bit, or scratched or snarled. This
one just took a step or two out of reach. The signs were quite clear. She did not want him.
What puzzled him, as a scientist, given the unambiguous clarity of her discreet messages, was
how much he wanted her. . . .

A Whistling Woman, A.S. Byatts latest novel, is a study in complexity. It is as lush and
intricate as Byatts most famous book, Possession, for which she won the Booker Prize in
1990.
And although it is written as the fourth novel in a quartet, A Whistling Woman stands alone
quite nicely.
Her quartet seeks to explore the social changes in England during the 1950s and 1960s. In this
finale, Byatt picks up some characters and plot lines from the first books. At times its hard to
keep track of all the characters, actually, and hard to care about any of them too deeply. But
the sprawling cast doesnt distract too much, because what A Whistling Woman is really
about is a pivotal time in history.
The plot is a series of vignettes. For a few pages we are out in the field with some snailtracking scientists, then we are on the set of a television show, then in an insane asylum.
Eventually the characters come together in a demonstration on a college campus. The book
builds to this, a scene of tension and danger, a scene Byatt echoes in a parallel scene on a
nearby commune, where the cult leader may or may not be directing his followers toward
suicide.
The echoes in this story are masterful. The dualities and complications are so satisfying.
There are dozens of metaphors and symbols. Each scene reflects and enhances and
foreshadows something else. The recurring images include a whistling woman, a Mondrian
painting and peacock feathers.
The feathers, for example, are used in several ways -- as symbols of creation, as symbols of
luck or the evil eye, but also as symbols of the expendability of the male. (Looking back on
the late 60s, we see the beginnings of the womens movement, the lifting of the stigma of
single-motherhood.) Expendability aside, Byatts is a happily- ever-after ending.
At times, the story does become tedious. Theres a lot of dialogue about finding yourself and
a lot of dialogue about making the college curriculum more relevant. Yet, when it is tedious,
A Whistling Woman is tedious in precisely the same talky way that the 60s were tedious -which makes it cool.
Susan WhitneyDeseret News staff writer. Whistling Woman resonates deeply. Deseret
News (Salt Lake City). Deseret News Publishing Company UT. 2003. Retrieved January 21,
2011 from HighBeam Research:http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-7072915.html
Book reviews: A Whistling Woman: Satirical swing through the Sixties with a modern
George Eliot
Article from:
The Scotsman
Article date:
September 7, 2002
Author:
ALLAN MASSIE
A Whistling Woman
by AS Byatt
Chatto & Windus, GBP 16.99

WHEN The Virgin in the Garden was published in 1978, AS Byatt described it as the first
volume in a quartet of novels. Still Life followed a few years later. There was then a long gap
before the appearance of Babel Tower, and only now is the quartet completed. Other novels
and novellas have appeared in the interim, notably Possession, certainly her most popular
book.
The 24-year gap between the publication of the first and last books in the quartet is actually
longer than the period covered in the novels, from 1953 and 1970. One would have to find
time to read the three earlier books again - and they are certainly worth re- reading - to be able
to determine whether the quartet has any structural or thematic unity. My impression is, not
much, but I may be wrong.
Memories of the earlier novels certainly help one to read the new book, but are not essential.
It stands well, and absorbingly, if also sometimes puzzlingly and even infuriatingly, on its
own.
The time is the late Sixties, a time of flux, of intellectual excitement, of the lively,
intoxicating , absurd and occasionally dangerous counter-culture. The novel has so many
strands that it is almost impossible to summarise it. Some novelists cut and refine their
material, others stuff their books with whatever currently interests them. Byatt belongs in the
second group. She, and her characters, engage us with discussions about genetics, physiology,
how memory works, cognition, metaphor, the possibilities of television, and many other
subjects - theres a lot about snails and peacocks and the different means by which various
species reproduce.
This is often exhilarating. At other times, I wished that a rigorous editor had got to work on
the manuscript. The publishers tell us that this is the ultimate novel of ideas made flesh, but
far too often the ideas are too divorced from the characters. There are pages which call for the
reader to resort to what Scott in Redgauntlet called the laudable practice of skipping. The
novel is still - if only just - held together by the Potter family, especially Frederica, who is the
heroine of the quartet; now the divorced mother of a son, Leo, and the presenter of a
television programme more free- rangingly intellectual than any ever made even in the socalled golden age of TV. Frederica is an intellectual, as are the scientists of the novel: their
interest is in finding things out, in testing hypotheses against evidence.
But intellectuality is challenged on two fronts. The University of North Yorkshire, where the
vice-chancellor is organising a high- powered conference on Body and Mind, finds itself
invaded by a group from the counter-culture calling themselves an anti-university. Byatt
extracts comedy from their mindlessness, and their intellectual torpor or frivolity - Mao
thought is free thought is one of their slogans, which truly brings back the grotesque and
self-indulgent stupidity of a decade when that bloodstained and destructive dictator was seen
as a liberator. Her treatment of the anti-university is comedy, but bitter comedy: the selfsatisfied idiots represent everything she detests. They know nothing and wish to learn nothing.
They are frightening in their nihilism.
The second challenge is at first treated more sympathetically. This is a cult that gathers round
a strange, spiritually wounded charismatic figure of Joshua Ramsden, whose father murdered
his wife and daughter in 1939 to save them from the Holocaust he foresaw, and was hanged.
Joshua - all his life since then disturbed by visions of blood - is a spoiled priest, in and out of
mental hospitals, who believes himself engaged in the struggle between light and darkness in
a world that is the work of the powers of Evil. He has become an exponent of Manicheism, an
ancient and (to many) attractive heresy - that of, among others, the Cathars. Joshua is a good

man, almost saintly, who, in his rejection of the world of flesh and intellect, proves a
destructive and corrupting force.
This account may make the novel seem aridly intellectual. Except in a few passages, it isnt,
and is better described as an intellectual adventure, full of energy and vitality. It has its own
moments of absurdity, as when, for example, we are told that Frederica felt about her father
as most of her generation felt about Dr Leavis, that anything she could conceivably produce
must fall short of his high requirements. Im afraid that is the Cambridge English School
speaking: really, most of Fredericas and Dr Byatts generation felt nothing about Dr Leavis.
But such moments are rare, if in their way delightful. Most of the time this novel offers more
solid delights, keen and demanding pleasures. Even so, if Dr Byatt was not so famous and so
formidable, a sharply critical editor might have improved it. But then you could say the same
of Middlemarch, and AS Byatt is the George Eliot of our time.
ALLAN MASSIE. Book reviews: A Whistling Woman: Satirical swing through the Sixties
with a modern George Eliot. The Scotsman. Scotsman Publications. 2002. Retrieved January
21, 2011 from HighBeam Research:http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-12991502.html
Well think of something; New fiction.(A Whistling Woman )(Brief Article)
Article from:
The Economist (US)
Article date:
September 21, 2002
THIS isnt the end, expostulates Leo, Fredericas small son, as the serial story being read to
him comes to a final stop. You feel the same about A Whistling Woman, the last in A.S.
Byatts magnificent quartet of novels on intellectual life and thought in the 1950s and 1960s.
But 1970 has been reached, a scattering of the characters on her huge canvas have been killed
off, or paired off, and it is time to stop.
A Whistling Woman can be read on its own. Rich in metaphor and glancing allusion, it is a
tale of learning and anti-learning, sects and cults, the complex sexual relationships of humans
and snails. The snails, the pursuit of two scientists, get locked away behind the fence of a selfdestructive community led by a charismatic blood-haunted Manichee. The minor humans, a
fairground of oddities, are named with Dickensian ear: Elvet Gander, a creepy psychoanalyst,
Avram Snitkin, an itinerant ethnomethodologist, Mickey Impey, a pretty pop poet, Jonty
Surtees, an agitator, Eva Wijnnobel, a terrible astrologer.
A knowledge of the earlier books does, however, help. Some characters must seem twodimensional without knowing, beyond a brief recap, what has made them as they are: guiltridden, for instance, or melancholic. Frederica, for one, will suffer from reading the new book
only. Born (like her author) in 1936, her life threads through all four volumes. Clever, thin,
pushy Frederica reaches for the sky, and keeps falling. A natural academic, possibly creative
(though her only book sounds a ghastly 1960s contraption), she ends up a mini-celebrity on a
TV chat-show, feeling, in her words, a mermaid in a raree-show.
But A Whistling Woman, like its predecessors, is predominantly a novel of ideas. Not about
politics, foreign or domestic, but about philosophy, psychology and literature; the excitement
of genetics and computer science edging towards their breakthrough. As before, Ms Byatt has
to find a framework for all this thought: a book embedded in a book, a university seminar on
body and mind, television discussion. As before, some of the talk invites a bit of skipping. But
then the narrative resumes, pulling you along. It makes a fine conclusion to the quartet,

leaving you properly thoughtful. We havent the slightest idea what to do, says Frederica at
the end. We shall think of something, says her lover.
A Whistling Woman.
By A. S. Byatt.
Well think of something; New fiction.(A Whistling Woman )(Brief Article). The
Economist (US). Economist Newspaper Ltd. 2002. Retrieved January 21, 2011 from
HighBeam Research: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-91917420.html

Instinct and intellect weigh heavy

Article from:
The Herald
Article date:
September 7, 2002
Author:
Rosemary Goring
A Whistling Woman A S Byatt Chatto & Windus, (pounds) 16.99 According to AS Byatts
grandmother, a whistling woman and a crowing hen is neither good for God nor men. It was
a sinister phrase, and you could say that all Byatts fiction has been written in its shadow.
As she elaborately portrays the life of intellectual women struggling with the often
contradictory demands of emotion and intelligence, Byatt is an eloquent advocate for the
complex nature of female aspiration and fulfilment. Whether her difficult, questioning women
are good for nothing is hard to say, but one thing is sure: they dont make life easy for anyone
close by.
The whistling woman in this story is at first glance the spiky heroine Frederica, familiar from
earlier novels and a fascinating, if unfathomable, cipher for her times. As more women crowd
the scene, however, it soon becomes evident that the title encompasses any of Byatts female
characters who tries to find the balance between a life of the mind, and the almost irresistible
forces of sexual convention.
As Byatt regretfully makes plain, even in the giddy days of supposedly free love, the balance
between instinct and intellect was weighted against the mind.
The fourth part of Byatts ambitious quartet about English culture from the early 1950s to
1970, A Whistling Womanfollows on from The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life and Babel
Tower.
As in these, Byatt challenges the reader to a mental dual. You cant picture her at a writers
workshop absorbing the adage show dont tell. She is determined to tell, and in
considerable detail. How else to depict the ferment that was the social and political crucible of
the late sixties?
One of the pivots of this difficult and at times laborious novel is Fredericas role as a
television presenter. An academic who left university life because she realised that students
did not want to learn what she could teach, she finds an invigorating forum for her wit in this
new medium.

It is only one of the many antiphonies of the book that this world is juxtaposed against the
realm of academic rigour. Byatts obsession with academia is given a quasi-comic rein here in
her study of university life under threat of student revolt.
In the hands of David Lodge the theme would be social and sexual farce; with Byatt it
becomes a deadly conflict between reason and unreason. Indeed, this theme of the rational
versus the irrational is the crux of the novel, played out in so many different arenas that the
effect is, at times, dizzying.
Setting science against art, religion against disbelief, sex against solitude, Byatt offers little
relief from her intellectual barnstorming. We have to wade through the contents of Fredericas
brittle, clever television shows, the details of scientific speeches and academic research; we
are even, at one point, offered the agenda for a university conference.
Theres scant cerebral respite, but when it arrives, it is deeply affecting, showing Byatts
profound compassion for those in spiritual or emotional torment.
The most potent symbol of Byatts fears about the limits of unreason and instinct is her
depiction of the growth of a dangerously isolated spiritual community. Joshua Lamb, the
leader of this group, is a man haunted from childhood by his fathers murder of his mother
and sister. Joshua too was intended to die, a burnt offering to his preacher fathers God.
Entering this characters fevered but outwardly gentle mind, Byatt recreates the crazy parallel
universe of the religious maniac. Throughout this plotline there is a vein of violence which is
mirrored in the political and social upsurgences of the time. And Byatt is nothing if not fierce.
Following through the consequences of her ideas, she allows the novel to charge headlong
into near disaster, chaos swamping the carefully constructed personal life of each character.
Such drama is cathartic and frightening, retributive and healing in equal measure.
It is the hallmark of this uncompromising author that she can provide as many ideas as she has
pages, yet refuses to offer answers. As this novel illustrates, her fiction is not for those who
want their hand held.
Rosemary Goring. Instinct and intellect weigh heavy. The Herald. 2002. Retrieved January
21, 2011 from HighBeam Research: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-23515146.html
REWARDING END TO A QUARTET.(Entertainment/Weekend/Spotlight)(Review)
Article from:
Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO)
Article date:
December 27, 2002
Author:
Uhland^, Vicky
Byline: Vicky Uhland
SPECIAL TO THE NEWS
To understand the scope of A.S. Byatts latest novel, take a look at the acknowledgments
page.
Byatt thanks experts in snails, genetics, physiology and cognition, religion, the culture of the
1960s, television, dyslexia, birds, group therapy and charisma.

This isnt the type of book you skim while riding the bus. It doesnt have one, easy-to-follow
theme. It tackles all of the subjects listed on the acknowledgments page and manages to hold
widely disparate elements together.
It visits Byatts pet interests, themes that have appeared in her previous novels and short story
collections: fables, literature, academia, science, romance.
A Whistling Woman is the final book in the quartet of Byatt novels featuring Frederica Potter.
The series began with The Virgin in the Garden in 1979 and tracks not only Fredericas
adventures, but also English culture in the 1950s and 60s.
The title comes from a childrens story written by Fredericas roommate. The fable features a
flock of bird-women known for their high-pitched whistle that has the power to pierce any ear
and kill the listener.
``In Veralden, only men were shape-shifters, says one of the whistling women. ``Women
stayed in the valley, spinning and teaching, tending fruit-trees and flowers. They never left the
valley. We wanted to go out, we wanted the speed and the danger of the wind and the snow
and the dark. We charmed a young student into parting with his knowledge, and we made
feather-coats, as you see, and rode the storm-winds at night. We flew in, over the mountainwall, before dawn, plaited our wild hair, put on gown and slippers, and went to sing sweetly to
the fruit-trees. But we were spied on, by a traitress, and shamed. And an angry crowd burned
our womens clothes outside the gates of Veralden, and almost burned us. But we put a little
fear into them, and whistled in their minds, so that they merely drove us away like a flock of
geese, calling us evil, and unclean. So we have lived here, where nothing lives, riding the
winds, evading hunters and snow-eagles. We have grown angry because no one could hear
our speech. Until you came.
Byatts newest novel has the narrowest focus of the quartet, taking place in only one year,
1969. Frederica is divorced and the mother of 8-year-old Leo. She lives in London and
teaches literature until, fueled by the 60s search for meaning, she quits her job and becomes a
presenter on an intellectual, avant-garde television show.
Theres a parallel story in Yorkshire, home of Fredericas parents and brother, featuring a
university where scientists research the sexual life of snails, an anti-university with lectures
on astrology and a cult headed by an emotionally disturbed man.
A Whistling Woman is the least plot-driven of the quartet. Not much happens to Frederica
and the dozens of other characters. Instead, it is a book about ideas, mirroring the late 60s
English fascination with open-mindedness and change.
It is a left-brained book, unlike Byatts famous novel Possession, which kept the reader
balanced between the intellectual and romantic. A Whistling Woman is an ambitious novel,
recreating the chaos and energy of a remarkable time.
But the problem with such a novel is that it takes work to read. Put it down and pick it up a
month later, and youve forgotten who half the characters are. Skip past the boring parts and
you miss the beauty of Byatts sentence structure and her command of the language.
Ironically for a novel about the anti-establishment 60s, its a book that demands commitment.
Though tedious at times, it rewards the reader who stays with it. It is an unashamed novel
from a master of her craft, a novel that refuses to be stuffed into a tidy niche.
As Byatt writes, `` We are neither birds nor women, said the Whistler. We can never have
mates, for we would have to choose, men or birds, and we will not give up our feathers.

INFOBOX
A Whistling Woman
Uhland^,
Vicky.
REWARDING
END
TO
A
QUARTET.(Entertainment/Weekend/Spotlight)(Review). Rocky Mountain News (Denver,
CO). Thomson Scientific, Inc. 2002. Retrieved January 21, 2011 from HighBeam
Research:http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-95885314.html
Spreading Their Wings
Article from:
The Washington Post
Article date:
December 8, 2002
Author:
Reviewed by Alice K. Turner
A WHISTLING WOMAN
By A.S. Byatt
Knopf. 429 pp. $26
This is the fourth and final fat volume of what many readers, including me, think of as A.S.
Byatts alternate autobiography. Frederica Potter (veteran of The Virgin in the Garden, Still
Life and Babel Tower) is not Antonia Byatt, but there are plenty of matches: Yorkshire,
Cambridge, London, a divorce, academic bookishness, ambition, a somewhat truculent
personality. They have lived through turbulent decades together (Byatt reportedly began
writing the first book 40 years ago), and we may safely infer that they share a number of
views, even some adventures. Proust, Anthony Powell, Doris Lessing and Philip Roth have
worked this tack before.
Of the Big Three of British postwar women novelists, the others being Iris Murdoch and
Doris Lessing, Byatt is the frontrunner; she is at the height of her powers, and this series is an
important one. The first book, The Virgin in the Garden, begins in 1953, the year of Queen
Elizabeths coronation, when Frederica is 17. (It was published in 1978.) The new book,
which directly follows Babel Tower (published in 1996 and covering 1963-67), takes us
through 1968. It is Byatts Sixties novel, in which she takes on the turmoil of the times. Its
much more playful than Babel Tower, though just as complex. It reunites old acquaintances;
some, like the elegant playwright Alexander Wedderburn, Edmund Wilkie (who briskly
divested Frederica of her virginity back in 53), and Fredericas curate brother-in- law, Daniel
Orton, have been around since the first book, as has her Yorkshire family. They circle the new
(fictional) University of North Yorkshire, still in the planning stages back then, now up and
running under Sir Gerard Wijnnobel and about to hold an important Body-Mind Conference,
drawing scholarly stars from afar.
A Whistling Woman and a Crowing Hen
Is neither good for God nor Men.
That was Byatts grandmothers epigraphic adage: Dont get uppity in a mans world. But this
is the late 60s, just before the womens movement broke into full cry, and the book is
chockful of whistling women. Frederica is now the host of a highbrow BBC talk show called
Through the Looking Glass. Jacqueline Winwar is fiercely passionate about her work on

snails and the physiology of memory; Agatha Mond is a determined writer; the absurd but
powerful Lady Wijnnobel has her own occult agenda; the ethnomethodologist (and spy)
Brenda Pincher maneuvers madly toward fame in her field; and a score of walk-ons (some of
them real women) on Fredericas show or at the conference are making marks in the big
world.
Communes, hallucinations, willful excursions into altered states a{grv} la R.D. Laing -- that
was the 60s. Unorthodox sex: Check. Drugs: Check. Norman O. Brown, Tolkien, the Beatles.
And student protests. The students of North Yorkshire produce a doozy, to embarrass the
Body-Mind Conference and the administration. Its quite well-organized, considering its of
the do what thou wilt mindset; they call it the anti-university.
This, then, is the novels frame. The (many) leading characters play out their private scripts in
and around these three opposed but often overlapping factions -- the university, the antiuniversity, the commune -- in rural Yorkshire, where there isnt much distraction. Someone or
other watches Fredericas London show from time to time, so we view the BBCs approach to
color television, which seems odder now -- at least to Americans -- than it may have at the
time. (The set for the shows intellectual pundits is based on Tenniels Alice, but in
descriptions it sounds just like a Monty Python-esque Peewees Playhouse.) Everything
comes together, including the BBC camera crew to observe it, at the Body-Mind Conference.
Readers will expect mayhem, and wont be disappointed.
Byatt once said of Still Life, second in the cycle, that she tried to write a book without
metaphor but found it impossible. No such restraint here. A profusion of birds flaps and
wheels through these pages. Men (only men -- this is her joke) have birds names: Crowe,
Peacock, Ravenscar, Gander, Swan, Parrott. (There are also a male Reiver -- a hunter or
poacher -- a Bowman and a Quarrell, or arrow.) At one point, a barnyard of domestic birds is
turned loose from their pens to scratch for themselves: chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys. These,
I surmise, symbolize women.
The central metaphor is the Whistler. A flock of them is introduced in the first few pages in
a fairy story Agatha Mond is telling: Sailing on outstretched grey wings . . . their long
slender necks held out before them like swans, their thin legs trailing like herons, their
bright beaks like curving scimitars, pale red-gold. . . . Mark saw with horror that their faces
above their beaks were human, that they had dark, human, forward-looking eyes under arched
eyebrows, that their feather-hoods covered, or flowed into, long hair, which they shook out
over their shoulders, that the legs above the bird-talons that struck and gripped the icy stones
were human above the feathered ankles, that the bodies inside the great cloaks of grey
pinioned wings were human, female, with high breasts and slender waists, but covered in
white down.
The second major metaphor is blood, some of it real, much remembered or fantastical. Im
sure the author looks forward, with arched ironic brow, to the first lot of academic papers on
Imagery of Blood and Feathers in Byatts A Whistling Woman. Not that the future BodyMind Conference on Byatt wont have other topics to ponder. Insanity and obsession, for
instance. Introduced in the first book is Fredericas younger brother Marcus, who has asthma
and ecstatic mathematical visions. In Still Life, where the (somewhat labored) allusions are to
painting, mad Van Gogh lurks behind him. In Babel Tower, Fredericas brother-in-law Daniel
works with the depressed and delusional, one of whom, a rancid, filthy dropout with a voice
like a saw striving through wire, takes up half the book with his loving Tolkien-esque tribute
to the Marquis de Sade. But this new book offers a lush cornucopia of 60s types. Chief
among them is the epileptic visionary Josh Lamb, a charismatic Manichaean messiah who

leads a religious commune, drawing to him the Joyous Companions and Spirit Tigers, lesser
nutcases some of whom we have met before under saner circumstances. Not so lesser is Lady
Wijnnobel, astrologer and witch.
To go further into the plot of a large and complex book like this seems like folly, though I
would like to point out that this novel is a model of how to use many voices and formal
literary techniques to tell a rousing story. Instead, I will answer a few questions. Is this a good
novel? Yes, it is a very good novel. Should you read it? Yes, you should. Can you read A
Whistling Woman without reading the first three books? Yes, I think so, but Im not sure
since I read them all (eagerly) as they came out, and just now again. Will you like it? That
depends how you respond to a formidably well-read writer, dauntingly crafty (in all senses of
the word), who will not condescend to you for a moment, who expects you to keep up with
her every step of the way, not only in remembering her characters and their needs, but in
literature and the sciences. Its not work, exactly, for she is graceful, droll, knows how to
move a drama (or three) along, and is good at descriptions, but it does keep you on your toes.
As a minimal study guide to the series, heres an (entirely personal) appraisal. The Virgin in
the Garden is her Iris Murdoch effort and should appeal to early Murdoch fans; I first read it
in 1978 because a review said just that and I liked Murdoch. Still Life is her Margaret Drabble
novel, mostly domestic realism and Cambridge coming-of-age (she would probably hate this
description because rumor has it that relations with Drabble, her younger sister, are cool).
Technique changes a great deal with Babel Tower, but, minus the de Sade extracts, its sort of
a Doris Lessing novel. But A Whistling Woman is triumphantly her own, a terrific show-off
whiz-bang. Think of this: She gives an account or a precis of all the papers given at the BodyMind Conference. Could you do that? And be funny about it? And make your messiah threedimensional? And direct that television show, that university, that commune and that student
revolt?
If you are new to Byatt and unsure, I suggest starting with her bestselling Possession (an
easier book) or with Angels and Insects, two wonderful short novellas in one slim volume. If
your wet toes feel good, take the plunge. But if you have already ventured on this series of
novels, Ill offer a tiny but tasty plot tidbit. Remember Marcus, wanly, weakly wavering
around the edges of them all? Well, it looks to me as though he gets a happy ending at last.
Hooray!
Alice K. Turner is a former fiction editor of Playboy and the author of The History of Hell.
Reviewed by Alice K. Turner. Spreading Their Wings. The Washington Post. Washington
Post Newsweek Interactive Co. 2002. Retrieved January 21, 2011 from HighBeam
Research: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-388669.html
ra of pseuds and cults Too much richness makes this novel both brilliant and disappointing,
finds Caroline Moore
Article from:
The Sunday Telegraph London
Article date:
September 8, 2002
Author:
CAROLINE MOORE
A Whistling Woman
by A. S. Byatt
Chatto & Windus, pounds 16.99, 421 pp

pounds 14.99 ( pounds 1.99 p&p) 0870 155 7222

THIS IS THE fourth novel in A. S. Byatts ambitious quartet, which spans the cultural life of
England from the 1950s to 1970. The blurb makes the routine claim that that this
intoxicating novel stands on its own: I did find it intoxicating, but am not at all sure that it
would work in isolation from its predecessors.
Frederica Potter is still the heroine: and she would leap off the page even for a reader starting
from a standing-jump. Frederica is pushy, conceited, yet vulnerable: she is often disliked by
other characters, yet as often dislikes herself. She is intellectually bumptious, yet has an
emotional cold space in her head, that she protects and is afraid of. She talks too much
to listen, and is used to being at least probably the cleverest person in the room.
By this novel, Frederica has been educated out of her early dreams of becoming a writer.
She is forced to acknowledge that Agatha, the friend with whom she shares a house after
escaping from her abusive husband, naturally inhabited the world of living metaphor, while
she is second-best, confined to stitching and patching the solid, and you could still see the
joins.
By a twist of irony, competitive Frederica achieves fame in a medium she was brought up to
despise, television. She hosts a pseudo- intellectual chat-show forum - brilliantly parodied, but
with the twist that some of the discussions actually contain interesting ideas.
Byatts vision of the late Sixties, indeed, is an of era of pseuds and cults, verging upon and
creepily merging into madness. Fredericas pretentious show is only one aspect of this: central
to the novel is the depiction of the terrifying proliferation of a semi- religious cult, The
Spirits Tigers.
We initially met this potentially sinister group in Babel Towers. In A Whistling Woman it is
taken over by a traumatised visionary, Joshua Lamb, whose religio-maniac father murdered
his mother and sister when he was an 11-year-old boy with pitiful fat thighs. Some of the
best parts of this book describe Lambs self-feeding states of mind, from light-obsessed
visions (poised between Blake, Christopher Fry and Samuel Palmer), through to a
dangerously mad belief in Manichean purification of the flesh.
Joshua is a new character, fully realised. The problem is that there are too many other
characters - all too often disturbed, or on that borderline between charlatanism and charisma
which so fascinates Byatt - that rely upon previous acquaintance. Yet some of these crazed
characters are the most vivid.
A Whistling Woman is both magnificent and unsatisfactory. It does not exactly stand up on its
own: but it is positively bursting at the seams with both ideas and characters.
CAROLINE MOORE. Era of pseuds and cults Too much richness makes this novel both
brilliant and disappointing, finds Caroline Moore. The Sunday Telegraph London. Telegraph
Group
Limited.
2002.
Retrieved
January
21,
2011
from
HighBeam
Research: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-8896475.html
Topsy-turvy treat for thinkers.(Review)
Article from:
The Mail on Sunday (London, England)
Article date:
October 6, 2002
Author:
Byline: JANE OGRADY

Byline: JANE OGRADY

A Whistling Woman
by A.S. Byatt
Chatto and Windus pound sterling16.99 pound sterling13.59
(0870 165 0870) ****
The popular saying goes: If you can remember the Sixties you werent there.
A Whistling Woman depicts the era with meticulous period detail, and makes us see its
silliness more than feel its headiness.
Is this one of the novels for which A. S. Byatt can be accused of being too cerebral?
The heroine, Frederica Potter, is certainly clever, although less irritatingly selfobsessed and
arrogant than she has been in Byatts three earlier novels. She is now 32, divorced with a
child, and the presenter of a cutting-edge television arts programme in which academics and
media people chatter to her in a studio full of mirrors.
The world outside the screen is also trompe loeil and topsy-turvy. At the University of North
Yorkshire, near Fredericas home town, scientific research on memory is being conducted.
But outside the campus, an antiuniversity has been set up in tents and caravans -
Antiknowledge, anti-ignorance, anti-teaching, anti-students, anti-Christ, anti-Buddha,
antispinach . . . - where lectures on Marxism, Maoism and astrology last anything from a
minute to five hours.
Meanwhile, on the high moors nearby, a religious cult called the Spirits Tigers has sprung
up, led by the charismatic, deranged Joshua Ramsden.
Such volatile strands inevitably lead to combustion.
As Byatt shows, the Sixties generation sought to abolish the past; but overturning old
certainties and conventions only inflames our irrational cravings for myth and rubric, which
Freudian insights, humanism and science cannot satisfy.
Why cant there be singing and ritual and meaning and a grand purpose, as men once thought
there was? demands a psychoanalyst who gets sucked into the cult. Like the other
protagonists, he is forced to work out his salvation in the new world washed clean of human
stories.
It is fashionable to sneer at intelligent novels and to applaud those of blood, guts and grit.
But we should not cavil if A Whistling Woman is not as viscerally wild as its subject matter,
just be grateful for its prolific ideas.
OGrady, Jane. Topsy-turvy treat for thinkers.(Review). The Mail on Sunday (London,
England). Solo Syndication Limited. 2002. Retrieved January 21, 2011 from HighBeam
Research: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-92541141.hs subject matter, just be grateful
for its prolific ideas.
The Novel as Information Superhighway
By Daphne Merkin
Published: January 19, 2003

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SINGLE-PAGE

A WHISTLING WOMAN
By A. S. Byatt.
427 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf. $26.
A .S. BYATT has never met an idea -- or a symbol or an archetype -- she didnt like. She is
one of the few contemporary fiction writers -- Don DeLillo is another -- for whom the
conceptual world, as evidenced by nuggets of cutting-edge theory and arcane facts, is almost
as important as the characters they invent and the passions they explore. Byatts novels teem
with cerebration: one piece of rarefied information keeps jostling against another, as though
her thoughts were always racing ahead of her writing. Her most obvious models are George
Eliot, with whom she shares what V. S. Pritchett once described as the Victorian emphasis
on brainwork, and Iris Murdoch (about whom she has written two critical studies), but she is
more lighthearted than the one and less formulaic than the other.
Byatt, who is the older sister of the writer Margaret Drabble, first came to the notice of the
larger American reading public in 1990 with her best-selling, Booker Prize-winning novel,
Possession, which was in fact her sixth work of fiction. Two earlier novels, The Virgin in
the Garden and Still Life, had revolved around the life of an academic English family in
Yorkshire as its various members -- the spiky and bookish Frederica Potter in particular -made their way from the imperturbable and classbound 1950s, beginning with the coronation
of Queen Elizabeth, through the galvanizing 60s. Filled with a populous cast and scads of
detail, they were conceived as part of a quartet, which had as its apparent goal nothing short
of tracing the cultural and social evolution of modern-day England. The third installment,
Babel Tower, published in 1996, tracked the fortunes of Frederica as she escaped an
oppressive marriage by fleeing to London with her young son, Leo, and taking up the dodgy
existence of a single mother caught up in the flower power and anarchic energies of a younger
generation.
Now, 25 years after The Virgin in the Garden first appeared, Byatt brings her vaulting
project to a close with A Whistling Woman, which rivals Babel Tower in both its scope
and the dense interplay of its refracted realities. Her canvas, never modest to begin with, is
here stretched to bursting, as though she wanted to get in everything she had ever been

curious about and hadnt already apprised us of in the earlier books, whether its
Wittgensteins taste in interior dcor (deck chairs and card tables) or the physiology of
memory as revealed by the mating habits of snails. There are enough minor characters with
elaborately colorful names to satisfy Dickens or Trollope -- though some of them make so
little impression that they require the reader to check back to see if theyre new or not.
It would be foolhardy to attempt to summarize the plot of A Whistling Woman, if only
because it keeps dividing and spawning new story lines, as though by narrative
parthenogenesis; the best one can hope to do is to point out some of the more memorable
sights as the scenes and players rush unstoppably by. The novel gets off to a disheartening
start with an embedded text in the form of a Tolkien-like fable -- the sort of metafiction that
Byatt is inexplicably fond of and has already used to tiresome effect in Babel Tower. The
fable (which, thankfully, is kept brief) seems intended mostly to establish the authors
familiarity with the postmodernist dither about the arbitrariness of fictional closure as
opposed to the implausible, sloppy nature of lived life. The children who listen to the fable as
it is read aloud by Agatha Mond, a single mother who shares a household with Frederica,
loudly protest its conclusion: There was no satisfaction in the end of the story. It was as
though they had all been stabbed. Agatha looked shaken by their vehemence; but closed her
mouth, and closed her hands on the book.
The time is 1968, and Frederica, now 33 and no longer convinced of her own writerly genius
(she publishes a trendy book-length pastiche called Laminations, which is described by
one critic as an I Ching for Intelligent Chicks), has given up on teaching because she
believes it to be irrelevant in a university where students are devoted to noisy agitation: We
Demand that courses in Literature and Philosophy be made conceptually relevant to Jewelry
Design. Instead, she becomes the star of a television show called Through the LookingGlass, on which she interviews guest-savants about everything from Tupperware to Freud.
(In what seems to be a stab in the back of Drabbles oeuvre, one of the guests on Fredericas
program is a female novelist whose subject is the lives of women and whose titles are
witty variations on confinement. The Bright Prison. The Toy Box. I Cannot Get Out,
Said the Bird. ) The conflict between romantic attachment -- giving in to the moments
grace that is the moment of being in love -- and holding fast to the seduction of work
(being a woman with a solid place in the world), which has haunted Frederica from the
first novel on, continues to trouble her as she has to decide whether to give up her glamorous
London career to join her lover in his new academic post in Yorkshire.
Meanwhile, Byatt weaves in many other threads, some of which -- like the multidisciplinary
Body and Mind Conference, which is being planned by the university in a bid to keep its
students happy, and the Anti-University of self-regarding hippies, which sets itself up in
caravans on the moors -- provide her with plenty of material for withering satire and sustained
parody. Byatts method is one of providing thick description in the way of the cultural

anthropologist: she insists on letting us know what all her characters -- the good, the bad and
the ugly -- wore and ate and read and deluded themselves about. Indeed, there were moments
when, having made it to the end of one of her convoluted and bristling paragraphs, I was
reminded of the way I felt when I first read late Henry James -- wondering whether there was
anyone else out there with me or whether I was the only reader left standing in an empty field.
By far the strongest parts of A Whistling Woman have to do with the unfolding drama of a
Quaker therapeutic community called the Spirits Tigers, which is gradually taken over and
turned into a religious cult by a former mental patient named Joshua Lamb, who, while still a
plump, pitiable boy, witnessed his fathers murder of his mother and sister. Byatts writing
about Lambs gradual descent into self-protective madness and the way in which unbearable
personal trauma becomes organized into a lunatically meaningful philosophical system is
superb, and demonstrates the empathic powers that are available to her every bit as much as
her daunting intellectual reach.
A Whistling Woman is defiantly not for everyone, especially since Byatt is less concerned
with keeping the reader happy than with keeping her eye on the vast prospect before her, and
the larger arc of her vision is hard to keep in sight even if youre familiar with the three earlier
novels. I wondered once again why no one has done Byatt the service of editing her. When
the novel is not being tedious, it is mesmerizing; though I frequently wanted her to put a lid
on it, I often wanted to read on and on. There is a good deal of fascinating reflection here, and
memorable images, especially of the natural landscape, by the dozen: The curtains were
open, and the stars were scattered across a clear sky, interspersed with thin cloud, and the
purposeful linear winking of man-made lights. If the book can be faulted with too much of a
muchness -- with an excess of the sort of mental vigor that tries to spin a biological-cognitive
Theory of Everything -- Byatt also continues to prove that she is as capable of writing a
straightforward realistic scene, especially when it comes to human mating habits, as anyone:
They slept entangled, as though their bodies belonged together. In the morning they were
formal and cautious, with that complicated courtesy adult humans use to show they have not
been using another human for selfish purposes. There was no milk and no butter, so they had
black coffee and more pumpernickel.
There is no other writer alive who is as interested as Byatt in creating characters who are
thinking women and men while at the same time recognizing the limits of cognition in the
face of unreason, or love. By the novels end the old assumptions -- Who is the father was an
outdated Victorian question -- have been pushed aside in favor of a more tenuous and
lonely-making absence of conviction: Things became untrue, disproved overnight. We
leave Frederica uncharacteristically off balance, wearing one of her Laura Ashley dresses
from Through the Looking-Glass, pregnant by a man she wasnt expecting to go to bed
with, full of life, and afraid. Its hard to imagine that Byatt wont want to bring us the

gossip on her complicated, skeptical heroine and the people who swirl around her as they
move into the coming decades, but until Frederica catches her fancy again, this headstrong
character will no doubt have to make way for a whole new -- and very talky -- crowd.
The Novel as Information Superhighway - New York Times. The New York Times. 2003.
Retrieved January 21, 2011 from HighBeam Research: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1S19200301190773514.html

episodes of solace in storm of ideas

Article from:
The Sunday Herald
Article date:
September 8, 2002
Author:
Reviewed by Susan Flockhart
a whistling woman by AS byatt (chatto & windus, (pounds) 16.99)THE ultimate novel of
ideas made flesh is how the press blurb sums up the fourth and final volume of AS Byatts
ambitious literary chronicle of the post-war English zeitgeist. It is, the books Alice- like
protagonist would doubtless acknowledge, a curious metaphor, given the novels
preoccupation with the venerable question of how such ghost-like intellectual entities as
thoughts, ideas and minds relate to the hulking, fleshy machine of the human body.
It is 1968, and the enemies of the academic establishment are baying at the gates of the ivory
towers. Scientists and psychologists debate the relative importance of nature and nurture; a
biologist dissects snails brains in search of the precise physiological location of snail
thoughts; and dons at the University of North Yorkshire are planning a conference on Body
and Mind.
Meanwhile, the anti-university - a smelly, hirsute group of wannabe revolutionaries who
proclaim themselves anti-knowledge, anti- knickers and anti-Christ - threatens to sabotage the
conference and demolish the foundations of bourgeois thought. In the midst of this intellectual
bun-fight, Frederica - the clever, bookish, sexy heroine of The Virgin In The Garden, Still
Life and Babel Tower - is dazed and confused. A single mother with a failed marriage and an
unsuccessful literary career behind her, she finds herself hosting Through The Looking Glass,
a psychedelic TV talk show whose topics include a heated debate on the question: what, in the
new age of sexual freedom, do women want?
What do I want? wonders the dazed, confused Frederica. And what has art, literature, the life
of the mind, got to do with love, sex, the bodily craving for skin on skin?
These, and other ruminations, preoccupy Frederica and the rest of the populous cast of A
Whistling Woman. Gestalt psychology, the science of memory, theories of faith, mathematics,
language and something called ethnomethodology are among the complex topics masticated
by the numerous psychoanalysts, mathematicians, philosophers, grammarians and biologists
whose impressive brains we are invited to inhabit. Its hard work keeping ones own brain
engaged during some of this - still harder to trace threads between all these ideas and the
broader narrative aims of plot and character.

Still, as the Duchess said to Alice, everythings got a moral if only you can find it - so perhaps
you need an intellect like Byatts to grasp the whole picture. The rest of us can take solace in
the less overtly cerebral sections, which are, in any case, the most powerful elements within
the novel.
The story of Joshua Ramsden, for instance, must rate among the most fascinating creations in
contemporary literature. As an awkward, fat-thighed boy growing up in pre-war Darlington,
he narrowly escapes being murdered by his father, Joseph, a religious zealot and probable
lunatic who heard an angel telling him to slaughter his family in order to save them from the
coming holocaust. Alone in the house with his dead, festering mother and sister, Joshua
glimpses the mysterious other who will haunt and control the rest of his troubled existence.
When Joseph is eventually arrested, Joshua is adopted by an aunt who never mentions his
experience, or his father, who is executed after refusing to plead insanity. From snippets of
evidence - a newspaper in which Joseph Ramsden shares the front page with Adolf Hitler,
some postcards bearing biblical references to Abraham and Isaac, the voices in his head Joshua constructs his own story to explain the horrific events in his childhood, and the role
that he, Joshua - the sacrificial lamb who was spared - must play in eliminating darkness from
the world.
After studying theology and spending time in psychiatric hospital, the adult Joshua becomes
the charismatic leader of a Quaker community- turned-cult, which strives to attain a kind of
spiritual nirvana by denying such fleshly banalities as sex, childbirth and even food. Joshuas
association of his own pre-enlightened state with his childhood puppy-fat thighs is significant.
In this concrete sense, the starving cult members assert the pre- eminence of mind over
matter, wreaking catastrophe in their emaciated wake when the novels various strands
converge climactically in 1960s- style student riots.
Joshuas story is breathtaking: beautifully written, devastatingly moving and profoundly
thought-provoking. Did his madness stem from his fathers genes, or the impact of grotesque
childhood events coupled with his efforts to fill gaps in his memory with a warped rationale?
Here, Byatts treatment of some of the debates that dominated late 1960s thought (naturenurture, truth-fiction) is all the more effective because the ideas are elicited from, rather than
foisted upon, the reader.
There are lots more marvellous things. Byatt is strong on sexual relationships, and the
mindsets that nurture or hinder them. There are wonderfully evocative descriptions of
Yorkshire landscapes, and of the sights, sounds and smells of mansion houses, chicken coops
and bedrooms.
There is hilarity, too, in the antics of the great unwashed and unfed - members of the antiuniversity cult. Personally, however, Id have preferred a less cartoonish treatment of the
student activists, whose concerns about the bankruptcy of academia and the traditional
education system are never presented as anything short of ridiculous.
By avoiding serious consideration of their doubts about formal education and academic
relevance, she presents the ruminations of the academic elite as the only thoughts worth
hearing - ironically, bolstering the anti groups case against the ivory towers of bourgeois
thought, and diminishing the scope of her novel of ideas.
Reviewed by Susan Flockhart. episodes of solace in storm of ideas. The Sunday Herald.
Newsquest (Herald & Times) Ltd. 2002. Retrieved January 21, 2011 from HighBeam
Research: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-9991278.html

Life distracted by snails and other spirals.(BOOKS)(ON BOOKS)

Article from:
The Washington Times (Washington, DC)
Article date:
December 22, 2002
Byline: Carol Herman, THE WASHINGTON TIMES
In A Whistling Woman, A.S. Byatts final installment to a quartet of novels about English
life, characters gather around a Christmas tree, but it is not an ordinary one. Trimmed with
gold and silver spirals, abstract lapped cones and Fibonacci angels, this tree comes with
intellectual dazzle.
Consider the angels. They are named for Leonardo Fibonacci, the 13th-century Italian
mathematician who worked a sequence of numbers into something marvelous, perfect and
infinite. Born in Pisa, the son of a trader, he was able to travel to trading posts in Africa where
he learned the Arabic numerals that made his computations possible and allowed him, when
he returned to Pisa, to predict the breeding cycles of rabbits. For Ms. Byatts tree, one
imagines that Fibonaccis formulation inspired a pattern that set the angels along a trail that
has the appearance of a widening gyre.
Like the decoration she has provided for her tree, Ms. Byatt employs a virtual arsenal of
interesting facts, symbols, poems, apercus and the like to decorate the rest of her narrative.
Sometimes these luscious nuggets show up more than once, sometimes not. The material of
each digression is altogether interesting and pithy, but unfortunately these same treats upstage
the characters and distract readers from a plot that, more often than not, spirals out of control.
The time is the 1960s and the characters assembled for this holiday celebration sing the
Messiah and, when the children look blank, one remarks that No one knows the Bible any
more. . . How can they read Milton and Lawrence and Dickens and Eliot without knowing
their Bibles?
But this is a universe in which characters - above all else - think. Frederica Potter is the
central character, and it is her life in the 1950s and 1960s that is the putative focus of what has
come to be known as the Frederica Quartet, including The Virgin in the Garden, Still
Life, and Babel Tower. Not as widely acclaimed as the hugely successful, Booker Prizewinning Possession, the Frederica books are volumes in which Ms. Byatt attempts, and to
some extent succeeds, in giving a complete portrait of a woman of this era and of the era
itself.
But despite her starring role, it is the minor characters of this book that give it its shape. One
of these, Sir Gerard Wijnnobel, is busy planning a conference on Body and Mind. His desk
was covered with neat lists of possible speakers (and listeners.) His mind drove toward
inclusiveness. There would be linguists, philosophers, biologists, mathematicians,
sociologists, medical men. There would have to be physicists, there would have to be
discussion of the way modern physics saw the observer affecting-changing -the observed . . .
He believed strongly that universities should be what their name implied, places for the study
of everything. He had with passion, cunning, and meticulous determination constructed a
revolutionary syllabus for his institution, which required all students to study some science,
more than one language, an art form. And so it is that this book, whose narrative moves

toward the realization of that conference, includes all manner of discourse on the very
subjects that Sir Wijnnobel identifies, and Ms. Byatt seems at home with them all.
However, it is Fredericas struggles with love, motherhood and career that particularly pale
when juxtaposed against such flights of random erudition. And the Sixties, whose cultural
topography is filled with plenty to ponder seem more of an adversary than she can
comfortably manage. Most of the decades preoccupations, as identified here, can be folded
under the umbrella of Revolution, primarily in academics and womans rights. Frederica
does in fact, and at last, begin to find a real career, taking a position as a BBC talk show host
on a program that covers - what else - all manner of intellectual discourse on the issues.
A central motif of the novel is the creation by Sir Wijnobbels enemies - including his wife of an anti-university in Yorkshire, where a motley group of characters find themselves
bedeviled by emotional demons, cult leaders, potted political drives. They would all be at
home in a Ken Kesey novel (or ward).
By the time readers get to the climax of the book, a flashy conflagration that seems a little
artificially imposed, the reader is exhausted. How many times can we be expected to
contemplate the mysteries of mirrors, how often do we need to read about Lewis Carrolls
Alice to be reminded of her adventure and dilemma? Then there are all the creatures of the
natural world to consider, notably birds and snails. Ludwig Wittgenstein does a turn, so too
Alan Turing, the computer pioneer. And just in case this isnt stmulating enough, how about
FORTRAN.
But all of this does little to flesh out Frederica or her challenge. She does not move us because
she does not weep or laugh or feel. Attired in tidy Mary Quant dresses, it is even hard to
believe in her relationship with John Ottakar, a lover who has moved to Yorkshire to teach at
a university there. It is even harder to imagine that she gets all of Ms. Byatts allusions.
The author opened her book with a folk tale populated by characters with Nordic sounding
names. The tale, set in a wood, is italicized and runs for eight pages, and it is terribly hard to
follow. Subsequent sequences, appearing throughout the novel do not help. The talking bird
who imparts wisdom and warnings to the people is difficult to identify. When the body of the
real story begins after this introduction, characters voice their dismay at how this tale has
ended. But what does it mean? What is its relationship to the Fredericas life, and how does it
serve the narrative? One never finds out.
The wood tale does reappear midway through the book, and reads: All your book learning
will be of no use in the wilderness, said the page-boy to the Prince. In this often captivating
but finally unruly book, one has something to say to the page-boy. Ditto for the fiction
beyond.
Life distracted by snails and other spirals.(BOOKS)(ON BOOKS). The Washington Times
(Washington, DC). News World Communications, Inc. 2002. Retrieved January 21, 2011
from HighBeam Research:http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-95686753.html
An ending but not a conclusion
Article from:
The Spectator
Article date:
September 7, 2002
Author:

Hensher, Philip
With A Whistling Woman, A.S. Byatt concludes one of the grandest and most ambitious
fictional projects anyone has undertaken since the war. This fourth and final novel in a
sequence begun with The Virgin in the Garden and continued in Still Life and Babel Tower is
full of new energy and a sense of new directions, and it is a very different novel in tone and
technique from the first novel in the series, published 25 years ago. She is the most questing
and restless of novelists, and decades of learning, ceaseless reinvention and imaginative
growth have taken her a very long way from her starting point. There is, undeniably, a
perceptible and sharp break in tone between the second and the third volume; by the third, the
late-period fascinations with fables, with systems of ideology, with science, had moved into
the foreground. An Edwardian like Arnold Bennett would have been interested by the first
volume; this last volume, on the other hand, could only look to them like something H. G.
Wellss Eloi would enjoy. We have come a long way.
The cycle has unarguably lost some unity of tone in the course of the long gestation. For
instance, the novelists increasing interest in allegory results in some very mild discords, so
that the characters from the first volumes, who tend to be called high-realist things like
Frederica Potter or Daniel Orton, have to talk to characters called Luk Lysgaard-Peacock or
Elvet Gander. In practice, such discords add to the allure, the richness of the mixture. And,
somehow, there is a sense of unity, of a single central direction and a single, unchanged,
directing intelligence. Now that it is complete, the cycle seems contained by one unchanging
imaginative concept; this volume clarifies the intellectual structure of the whole cycle.
The individual volumes have proved hard nuts to crack, and often their significance for the
literary landscape as a whole has sunk in only slowly. Its generally conceded, now, what an
important landmark in 1970s fiction The Virgin in the Garden is. Its conception, marrying an
account of a specific historical moment with a reconstruction of the ages fantasies, and all
told through personal histories of great intimacy, frankly baffled most reviewers at the time.
By now, readers probably need to be reminded how extraordinarily original it was; in the last
25 years, it has engendered dozens of imitations. Its interest in history and its willingness to
venture deep into extravagant fantasy set the tone for the English novel in the decades to
come. Its faultless marriage of a provincial drama and a dazzlingly European technique
would, however, prove hard to rival.
By now, everyone concedes the significance of The Virgin in the Garden, but I think in time
the third volume, Babel Tower, will come to be seen as at least as significant a moment in the
novel of the 1990s. That one, too, rather puzzled reviewers, and it is still very underrated, but
it is both a novel of daunting virtuosity and a statement of grand moral and historical force.
Most of Byatts novels are at some level an argument; The Virgin in the Garden is a long
argument with E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, and Babel Tower is a forceful confrontation
with the sacred monsters of the 1960s counter-culture, Blake, Sade and Tolkien. Possession,
that magnificently rigorous showpiece of the sybaritic intellect, had displayed the dazzling
virtuosity Byatt had acquired; the ventriloquy in Babel Tower is just as impressive, and even
when it is impersonating some very unsympathetic or preposterous accents, there is never any
sense of mockery. It is devastating, and unanswerable, because it never caricatures what it
despises.
Just as an argument, Babel Tower is a compelling piece of work, but what I think will
ultimately propel it into a key position in the literature of the decade is its extraordinary and
innovative technique. Byatt is, I think, a novelist with great respect for the realist novel, and
extremely skilled in its means; all her novels excel in what Henry James was so good at,
orchestrating a concise and ordinary physical action which summarises a long stretch of

drama, or painting psychology indirectly, with suggestive and emphatic objects - the moment
of formal perfection everyone remembers from Babel Tower is Fredericas small son
embracing her wounded leg as she runs through a dark forest. Nevertheless, she doesnt work
entirely within classic realist conventions, and the audacious thing about Babel Tower was
that its form, as well as its interests, seemed to be organised by the sardonic genius of
Foucault. Everything tended to dissolve into the constraint of social structures, conversations
becoming interrogations or courtroom cross-examinations; experience seemed inseparable
from narrative; increasingly elaborate intellectual systems exerted beneficial or baleful force
on individual lives. The brilliance and originality of the novel lay in the fact that it was not
content merely to discuss the great intellectual and social structures which Foucault wrote
about, but that it allowed its own form to be influenced by them, and to flirt both with the
inchoate and with elements of a ruthless machinery.
So what is the cycle about? What gives it the powerful unity now evident? At one level, it is
the compelling story of one Philip Hensher
A WHISTLING WOMAN by A. S. Byatt Chatto & Windus, 116.99, pp.423, ISBN
0701173807
womans life over 20 years, a life which takes on a secondary, emblematic interest, how
womens minds and lives changed between the early 1950s and the 1970s. But I think, more
centrally, what binds the books together is a decision to tell a two-- fold history of England;
the first, the social conditions, the possibilities of lives, questions of public events; the second,
an account of the imaginative fantasies which seized the English mind as the decades passed.
The successive dreams of The Faerie Queene, of Van Goghs lonely sense of vocation, of
Blake and Sade and Tolkien are explored, and they bear as clearly on the minds of the
characters as, say, the changes in family law and censorship do. In this last book, the dreams
are not primarily literary; they are fantasies about grander intellectual systems; some rational,
like science, some primeval and cruel, like astronomy. The book has moved outwards, but
that double scheme remains, and is pursued to the end.
A Whistling Woman introduces quite a new tone into the cycle; previous volumes were
capable of extraordinary violence, but none leaves such an impression of violence unleashed
as this does. In part, it is to do with recurrent images of fire and blood - the novels action
starts from an inexplicable act of violence, and returns to the violence within sane and insane
minds, and to the amoral violence of observed nature. The conversations, too, even on the
most abstract matters, are often teetering on the verge of furious arguments - this, of course, is
a very fair reflection of the tone of the intellectual debate of the period. Most of all, I think
one becomes aware of the extraordinary violence innate in the act of storytelling - how
narratives subjugate reality, how they cruelly torment and distort the lives of anyone who
listens to them. The opening pages of the novel are a tour de force, as a fairy tale goes
horribly wrong, and the brutal energy of Byatts own mastery of narrative is afterwards
something that the reader both submits to and observes. (This, at the very beginning, is the
moment when one appreciates how far this infinitely protean novelist has moved on even
since Babel Tower; the marvellous inwardnesses of The Biographers Tale have in the interim
quite transformed the Byatt landscape). Stories destroy lives; and when The Winters Tale
enters, that most beautiful and evil play, persuading us that a happy ending may justify the
sacrifice of decades of a womans life, we watch the phantom of Fredericas dead sister rise
up, and start to wonder what other sacrifices have been made on the altars of art.
It is always tempting, with this novelist, to talk about the ideas or the observations, unfailingly
rich and tantalising. The superb mastery of it, however, is in what Arnold Bennett would have

admired: the skill of the novelist with character, story, world. The plot has a driving ferocity,
the huge and extraordinary cast marshalled with exceptional dexterity. The physical details
are effortlessly redolent of the period, and exactly evocative of the individual psychology.
One could quote anything, but two examples stick in my mind; a character has a vase filled
with honesty and peacock feathers; a mildly deranged character, Lady Wijnnobel, paints her
downstairs cloakroom black, with spatterings of stars. The impressive thing about these tiny
touches is that one always feels that, yes, that is exactly what this particular mind would have
done in this particular place and time. Most novels about the late-- 1960s and early 1970s are
satisfied with randomly assigned pine tables from Habitat. Byatts details are exact, and
peculiar to each specific character, and, more often than not, make a general, abstract point
unemphatically - in a way, it is terribly funny that most early-1970s intellectuals thought
honesty was something you bought, stuck in a vase and threw out when you were bored with
it. This is a novel with grand, general interests, but the mastery over the particular never flags.
I freely admit that I am still coming to terms with A Whistling Woman - it is a book which
deserves criticism rather than a review. It is, too, a novel where the conventional approach of
a reviewer, to run through the plot, seems at once peculiarly inadequate - enough to say that
the story is immediately beguiling, and maintains its tautness to the end. This is a novel quite
out of the ordinary, and its atmosphere and flavour are very difficult to explain or convey. The
last volume of a remarkable cycle, it dramatically insists on not tying up knots in the plot, not
coming to any conclusions, but rather setting off in new intellectual directions and leaving its
huge cast on the verge of the rest of their lives; to that extent there is nothing final about it.
But as one reads, there is a feeling of a series of almost musically overwhelming cadences,
one after another, and the grandeur of the last pages comes from the long line of people, one
after the other, slipping away quietly, one story after another reaching an ending, but no
conclusion or solution. Byatt sometimes picks an argument with the long centuries of
literature in England; sometimes, those august ranks have opened up and welcomed the
heckler into the company of undeniable greatness. I dont see how you can deny that. And
here, in the bewilderingly new and thunderously authoritative last pages, I felt something like
the marvellous and sonorous movements of the last act of Cymbeline, the radiant complexities
at the end of the fourth book of The Faerie Queene; moments when the reader suddenly
appreciates in retrospect the gigantic scale and boldness of what, until that point, had seemed
airily simple and innocently absorbing. I could not imagine a reader who did not reach the end
without wanting to return to the beginning of the first novel. This is a novel, a cycle of novels,
a body of work for the rest of your life.
Hensher, Philip. An ending but not a conclusion. The Spectator. Spectator. 2002. Retrieved
January 21, 2011 from HighBeam Research: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P3181589661.html

Trials by fire
Alex Clark finds AS Byatts new novel, A Whistling Woman, full of curiosity and ideas,
and aiming for a kind of fictional unity that few other writers could even imagine
Share

Alex Clark
The Guardian, Friday 6 September 2002
Article history
A Whistling Woman
by AS Byatt
422pp, Chatto & Windus, 16.99
The first thing that you are told about AS Byatts new novel, if you go in for inspecting
publishers blurbs, is that it stands on its own; in other words, dont feel you have to
read through the quartets three previous volumes - which reach right back to The Virgin
in the Garden in 1978 - in order to understand it. This is undoubtedly true; A Whistling
Woman presents a perfectly comprehensible internal world, even if skipping its
predecessors means forgoing the inevitable readerly pleasure involved in spotting
recurring characters, images and patterns, and its central character, Frederica Potter,
remains strong enough to attract the sympathy of those who dont already know her well.
But in the sense that the quartet is a project that only really works through a deep
engagement of intellect and interest, and the acknowledgement that its most profound
themes are continuously being developed and refined, it is demonstrably untrue.
So why do we owe Byatt our loyalty? In 1985, she abandoned us for 11 years in order to
go off and write the crowd-pleasing Possession; worse still, she had just killed off one of
her major characters in the most gut-wrenching manner. In soap opera terms - and much
of the quartets energy derives from the simple impetus of what happens next - this was
an almost unforgivably attenuated cliff-hanger. When Babel Tower appeared in 1996,
there was a palpable shift in tone and style; winding together large sections of an
imagined fantasy novel, its trial for obscenity and Fredericas own messy divorce case, it
was both fractured and self-consciously ludic, a sign that Byatts thinking on narrative
was becoming more complicated and deliberately disruptive. It also meant that the nearly
insupportable loss at the close of Still Life was somehow permanently written into the
texture of the continuing narrative.
So far, then, this was a series whose ambitions and concerns were so diverse that its
course had necessarily become fluid and unpredictable. He was aiming at a vigorous
realism, and had great trouble with a natural warp in the work towards pastiche and
parody; that summary of playwright Alexander Wedderburns creative anxieties at the
start of The Virgin in the Garden was a charge that one could clearly level at his creator,
and at Babel Tower in particular. A Whistling Woman accommodates pastiche, parody

and even satire in an entirely different way, but what Byatt is really attempting is to make
it even more capacious.
We begin again with Frederica, whom we have seen as a precocious 1950s schoolgirl, a
Cambridge student, a bereaved sister, an unhappy and fleetingly battered wife and
latterly, as a woman tentatively exploring her own intelligence and will. By 1968, she is
about to publish her first book, an old-fashioned collection of commonplaces overlaid
with the modish idea of the Burroughs-style cut-up. Entitled Laminations, its her attempt
to pin down the random detritus of a whirling world; a review dubs it an I Ching for
Intelligent Chicks and Frederica a new mini-personality. Simultaneously, her celebrity
advances when she hosts a new television programme, Through the Looking Glass, on
which the likes of Jonathan Miller discuss subjects ranging from female desire to
psychotherapy to the aesthetics of Tupperware. Determinedly innovative, knowing and
arch, it is, its creator assures Frederica, at the crux of this new form of thought.
Frederica is the quartets great questing figure, its truth-seeker as much as its unstably
stable centre, and hitherto we have always returned to her. Not by coincidence, her own
intellectual focus was primarily literature-derived. Here, we sense her being cast off, as
the novel becomes increasingly diffuse and begins to pose serious questions about the
nature and limits of literature. Science duly makes an appearance, largely through two
young scientists working on snail communities in Fredericas native Yorkshire.
Apocalyptic religion arrives with Joshua Ramsden, the disturbed survivor of an
exceptionally brutal childhood, whose charismatic brand of Manichaean faith - involving
the belief that good and evil are engaged in constant battle, and that the light entrapped in
the world can be released largely by renunciation - attracts a motley bunch of emotional
refugees, Blakeans and psychotherapists.
Ramsdens acolytes bed down in a local farmhouse, where their leaders blood-drenched
visions drive them to increasingly extreme feats of self-denial and from which an
undercover sociologist sends panic-stricken and very entertaining dispatches. Meanwhile,
the University of North Yorkshire prepares for its ground-breaking Body-Mind
conference and attempts to hold the line against the pranks and protests of the student-led
Anti-University. Also running throughout the novel is a series of couplings and
uncouplings; between the snail scientists Jacqueline Winwar and Luk Lysgaard-Peacock,
between Frederica and John Ottokar, and between John and his uncontrollable, menacing
identical twin, Paul.
There is, in short, a lot going on. But besides the narrative traffic, there is also a constant
parade of dense and complex ideas. There is the matter of snail memory, which
Jacqueline attempts to map by dissecting their brains, her work descending at the slip of a
scalpel into mash and inert stuff. There is the debate over whether language and
creativity are hard-wired into the brain or the product of a raid by the intrepid conscious
mind on the inchoate seething mass of the undifferentiated unconscious. There are faceoffs between free speech and censorship, faith and reason, passion and rationalism, all of
them eloquently elaborated and set running, like so many clockwork mice, by a writer
fired with genuine curiosity.

But it is in animating these debates that Byatt encounters her most serious problems. It
occurred to me about halfway through A Whistling Woman that one of the things we
were witnessing was its authors own fantasy of intellectual life; that it consists of a set of
permanently engaged characters, whose lives are concerned entirely with the inner trial of
their beliefs and theories. Their relationships break down when these inner worlds
collide; impasse is nearly always reached, illuminatingly, by people not speaking to one
another. But what Byatt has never been able to convey - to understand, perhaps - is
indifference or random stupidity, or the ability of people to come to more pragmatic and
productive alliances.
At the same time, her world is saturated with sensual and physical detail, as if to counter
the charge of not being fully alive. Some of this writing - the snails edging across the
grass, the constant richness of colours, blood-crimson rosebuds on a moss-green
ground, the smell and taste of food and drink, sexual desire and its satisfaction - is Byatt
at her best, but sometimes, it becomes almost too vivid, too real to be real.
That may be why shes also attracted to fire, to the tempting liberation of burning the
entire edifice down. The scorched arm of Fredericas dead sister Stephanie lies at the
centre of the quartet, followed by the book-burning of Babel Tower. Here too there are
catastrophic flames, bonfires of the vanities that signal both the approach of the novels
conclusion and the imminent melt-down of its precarious patterns. For Joshua Ramsden,
a sane lunatic, fire is purification; at the pitched battle between the university and its
assailants, it is sheer destruction. Quite what it is for Byatt is one of the novels most
intriguing questions.
Whatever the eventual failures of A Whistling Woman and of the tetralogy as a whole, its
massive ambition can never be called into question. Rejecting sensation and attitude,
Byatt has instead explored sense and thought, and the problematic notion of how they can
possibly be represented in fiction. And like the characters here whose ideas prefigure the
search for a Theory of Everything, she has attempted to create a kind of fictional unity
that few other writers could even imagine. Watching it break apart, one senses, is just as
interesting for her as watching it struggle to cohere. For her readers, this is not always the
case, but its a very close-run thing.

A Whistling Woman review by C. J. Sullivan Reynolds

Dissatisfied and annoying to almost everyone, complaining Im in the wrong place, at
the wrong time, Frederica Potter seems an unlikely and unsatisfactory central character
for a novel, particularly one about the 1960s. But as protagonist of the quartet which
concludes with A.S. Byatts latest, A Whistling Woman, she proves a surprisingly
animated off-centerpiece for a long view of the making and mien of 1960s Britain.
Byatt has said that she resisted the publishers and readers calling these the Frederica
novels; she intended there to be several central characters. But here Frederica is, in the
last in the series, A Whistling Woman (2002), just as she is, in the first, The Virgin in the
Garden (1976) the first of many dualities to be noted. Fredericas evolution through the
four books (Still Life, 1985 and Babel Tower, 1996) from lively English schoolgirl with
literary ambitions to struggling single mother is the prosaic backbone for Byatts
ambitious intentions which are made flesh in the intersecting plots and numerous
metafictions. These embody themes which run through all of the novels, as Byatt has
written, the shifting relation between language and reality language and social life,
language and ideas.
Thats Byatt. Her aims are always reaching and always out in front. Not for her the
reticence of a DeLillo to whom she has been compared, as she has to George Eliot and
Iris Murdoch. A portentous trio? Or not?
Byatt was already an influential novelist and critic in Britain when her best-selling,
Booker Prize-winning novel, Possession (1990) (from which a disappointing movie was
made), gained her notice in the U.S. More recently she has achieved notoriety on both
sides of the Atlantic for a critique published in The New York Times charging the Harry
Potter series with appealing to imaginations bred on TV and pop culture, and contending
that its success with adults reflects their infantile desire to regress to a safer world where
good and evil are readily identifiable and controlled by magic. Her essay provoked its
own debate in the media about whether the piece was a boorish insult or a polemical
account of what drives reassuring pop culture in opposition to the demanding
complexities of art. In any case, she has been charged by Harry Potter fandom with
shouldering the mantle of high culture (shudder!) and, worse, labeled a snob.
A.S. Byatt is more than a snob. She is a certain kind of English intellectual, of polymath
breadth, often Oxbridge educated (Aldous Huxley comes to mind, but so does Virginia
Woolf, who had no university education at all), among whom have been some of the
most thinking novelists of the last century. Alongside fiction, each has produced a
substantial body of criticism, essays, and other writings reflecting a wide range of
interests, among Byatts more recent, Emma Bovary and How We Lost Our Sense of
Smell. In all, Byatt has published over a dozen works of fiction, six books of criticism,
and innumerable articles. Her published output makes her a demanding subject in any
case, but her outspoken habit is trying.
In peeved remarks made at a reading I attended during her Babel Tower publicity tour,
Byatt complained that fiction deserves criticism not review, emphasizing the critics
responsibility to follow a writer in order to develop a full grasp of their opus and intent.
(Having since read many reviews of her work, I gather her peevishness was provoked by
those American writers who reviewed Babel Tower having previously read only
Possession.) For Byatt, just as writing a novel is an act of criticism (her own novels rejoin

Wordsworth, Lawrence, Forster, Woolf, and others), an act of criticism is an extension of

writing the novel. Byatt agrees with Virginia Woolf: It is true that we get nothing
whatsoever except pleasure from reading. Criticism, according to Byatt, engages the
writer in order to give readers an approach to enjoying a book, not to its politics, nor any
-ism, nor any value other than the underlying value of pleasure.
As Woolf continues, it is true that the wisest of us is unable to say what that pleasure
may be. But Byatts own criticism may set an example: her essays on Madame Bovary
(Scenes from a Provincial Life) moved me to reread the novel. And set me on a track of
reading works inspired by Flaubert.
But be wary, Byatts are not the simple pleasures: Unless the novel gives pleasure of a
complicated kind, she has said, its better to be like the Quakers, where silence is the
highest form of contemplation.
With the publication of A Whistling Woman, Byatt completes a 40 year project. The first
two volumes in the series were well-received in Britain and largely ignored in the United
States. Not until after the successes of Possession and Angels & Insects (1992) (from
which Philip Haas has made a movie) did the third volume, Babel Tower, appear
simultaneously on both sides of the pond to widespread praise.
The series was conceived from the start as a quartet, making A Whistling Woman, as
Byatt has described Babel Tower, a novel about the 1960s which was planned, more or
less, in the 1960s, and not written until the 1990s . . . both a novel about my own time
and a historical novel.
Are you wondering where this is going, or when well be getting down to the review?
Have you noticed that this essay has a string of beginnings, probably foreshadowing
multiple endings; or, alternately, could be viewed as a series of digressions?
Thats Byatt. Never more so than in A Whistling Woman.
Byatts publisher claims that A Whistling Woman, although the conclusion to the quartet,
stands on its own. On the contrary, I found its full appreciation to be dependent on having
read its predecessors. Prior to reading A Whistling Woman, I had read Babel Tower, with
which it shares a populous cast and an embedded narrative which begins in the one and
ends in the other. I then read all four novels successively, and having read the first two,
found the final pair to be quite different books the second time around. All four share a
complex mega-structure, multifaceted symbolism, repeated scenes, sub-rosa dialogues
with innumerable literary voices, and uncountable self-referential allusions. From the
long view, there are other central characters and many minor characters developed over
the four novels. Mysteries about Fredericas brother-in-law, Daniel, and her brother,
Marcus, which are spelled out in previous volumes, are an important subtext to A
Whistling Woman. Minor characters, canon Gideon Farrar for one, are raised from mere
parody to crazed comedy when enriched by their early history. The impact of the
concluding scene is altered by the prologue to Still Life.
The publisher calls the series a quartet, but it would be better served by the more rigorous
term tetralogy, which puts demands on both reviewer and reader to treat the series as a
unified work. The word derives from the Greek for four, the number of plays required of
each playwright for the City Dionysia competition. Originally consisting of three
tragedies and a satyr play, the tetralogy was expected to reflect both narrative and

thematic unity. Modern examples include Thomas Manns Joseph novels and John
Updikes Rabbit novels.
Is this telling you more than you think you need to know? Thats Byatt. Her quartet is a
grandiose portrait of the cultural evolution of modern-day Britain: the blossoming after
the deprivations of World War II; the undoing of class-bound tradition; the gap between
people for whom the war was the formative experience and those who came after; the
changes in the family and in the lives of women.
The broad sweep begins with the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and culminates
in the summer of 1968, when A Whistling Woman begins. But Byatts summer of 68 is a
burlesque an oh so British one, blinkered and bookish, disassociated from the crises of
the outside world; where the Aquarian Conspiracy is running amok among gentry,
academics, clergy, psychologists, media, students, and hippies alike; where Frederica, the
former literature teacher who owns no television, is hired as hostess of the first
television show about television; and where the study of snails is a highpoint of
scientific sophistication.
This world is framed and reframed with postmodern enthusiasm: in a university
conference on Body and Mind; in fragments of two books embedded within the novel; in
psychologists correspondence about their patients; in meetings of the universitys NonMaths Group, which met every fortnight to study maths; and in Fredericas television
program, which focuses on a different person, idea, and thing in each episode.
The quartet begins simply enough in The Virgin in the Garden as a family drama that of
an academic family in Yorkshire, not unlike the one in which Byatt was raised. Meet the
Potters: Bill, a histrionic, erudite schoolmaster; Winifred, his well-educated wife; their
intellectual daughters, blond, brilliant Stephanie, 21; redheaded, clever Frederica, 17; and
their strange, mathematically gifted son, Marcus. They are a family of readers for whom
Shakespeare, Milton, Eliot, and Lawrence are subjects of daily interest. Their internal
drama is drawn into the production of a theatrical drama: Astrea, by Alexander
Wedderburn. Written to honor the coronation of Elizabeth II, the play is about Queen
Elizabeth I, who is portrayed by young Frederica.
Fredericas tale is a female coming of age story: young girl bent on dispensing with
virginity target of her pursuit, an older man, Alexander Wedderburn. Stephanies story
is more complex. Over her atheistic fathers disapproval, she marries Daniel Orton, a
plump clergyman. It may be the triumph of love or it may be promising young woman
gives it all up for wrong man. Marcuss dark story of abuse by a mentor is a clearer
portent of the descent to come.
One chapter in The Virgin in the Garden is called Women in Love, other chapters refer
to Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Freud. Byatts complex references to other writers, their
works, and ideas, are just beginning to entwine.
Both the first and second novel open with a prologue, a leap forward in time, placing the
story to follow in the memory of a particular present. The Virgin in the Garden begins in
Londons National Portrait Gallery in 1968, a visit which appears again in A Whistling
Woman, but there stops at the door to the museum. The first volume narrates a meeting of
Frederica Potter, Alexander Wedderburn, and Daniel Orton. Alexander is brooding on
the irreversibility of art and time. Frederica is nostalgic for All the beginning there
was in the 1950s.

Still Life begins with an even greater leap forward to 1980, the latest date to appear in the
four novels. Again Frederica, Alexander and Daniel gather, this time at the Royal
Academy of Arts. Frederica makes a late entrance. Daniel is hoping she has news from
his alienated son, Will. Alexander muses over The Yellow Chair, his play about Van
Gogh and Gauguin which features in the novel, another parallel to the first book.
If The Virgin in the Garden portrays youth, Still Life painstakingly dissects what follows:
marriage, birth, and death. When their children empty the nest, Winifred and Bill are
embittered by Marcus alienation. Fredericas misadventures at Cambridge and in France
figure prominently, but this books heart is the family of Stephanie and Daniel, who have
Daniels mother and Marcus living with them. Marcus is afraid of their first born, Will,
and afraid for him as well; their second born has a large hematoma on her face. In the
end, in a plot twist narrated with stomach-turning intensity, the extended family is
undone and everyones life utterly transformed. Having completed her education,
Frederica, in imprudent haste, marries a disturbingly unsuitable man.
Seemingly the most realistic, this novel has been called experimental by Byatt an
experiment elucidated by Alexander Wedderburn, a character who as author embodies
much of Byatt. In the prologue, he describes his play The Yellow Chair as a failed
experiment:
At first he had thought he could write a plain, exact verse with no figurative language, in
which a yellow chair was the thing itself, a yellow chair, as a round gold apple was an
apple or a sunflower a sunflower . . . But it couldnt be done. Language was against him,
for a start. Metaphor lay coiled in the name sunflower, which not only turned towards but
resembled the sun, the source of light.
Byatt has said that when she began these novels she was very much defending realism
against the rather trivial kind of experimental novels that were then going on in England.
The presumption that James Joyces achievement meant, in the words of B.S. Johnson,
It will never again be possible to give people names, or to write narrative that goes
forward, or to describe things, just made me very angry, Byatt said:
because it seemed to me that life was so varied and complex that it took up all your
energy, and yours would never be the same as anybody elses description unless you
were a bad writer. The only definition I give [of a bad novel] is: one, if its derivative,
totally derivative; and two, if the sentences are limp. I cant think of any other.
The nice thing about a novel is that everything can go into it, because if youve got the
skill between sentence and sentence, you can change genre, you can change focus, you
can change the way the reader reads. And yet you can keep up this sort of quiet
momentum of narration. It is a wonderful form... You can do anything.
Indeed, shes been accused of doing anything and everything in the third and fourth
novels.
Babel Tower is a decided departure from the earlier volumes, challenging Blake, de
Sade, and Tolkien in their roles as sacred heroes of the counter-culture. Elements of
unreality and sustained parody appear. A trio of alternate beginnings is offered. Names
take on a Dickensian mix of the possible with the preposterous: Pippy Mammott, a

woman who needs no further description; Rupert Parrott; the law firm Tiger and Pelt. Or
Luk Lysgaard-Peacock and Elvet Gander, minor characters here, who like the bird motif
they exemplify, will assume major roles in the fourth volume. Discordant voices
convene: the embedded novel Babbletower; legal depositions; Fredericas book reports
for a publisher; Flight North, her housemates ersatz-Tolkien tale for children; quotations
she collects under the name Laminations, a word which represents a way of survival for
her, of being able to be all the things she was: language, sex, friendship, thought, just as
long as these were kept scrupulously separate, laminated, like geological strata....
The dualities are more blatant: two trials at the center of the plot; Fredericas affair with
John Ottakar, an identical twin, who tests her ability to tell him apart from his brother.
The metaphors are barefaced. Daniel works in the basement of a London church. Upstairs
a stained-glass window has been reassembled from the remains of an original destroyed
during World War II. Pieces have been rearranged randomly, new pieces added, creating
abstract images mixed with the occasional animal face: what falls apart always comes
back together as a fusion of the old with the new, another theme that runs through all four
books.
The novel charts the demise of Fredericas abusive marriage and her flight to London
with her young son, Leo. There she befriends Jude Mason, a strange man shades of her
brother living at the edge of society. He has authored a novel, Babbletower, about an
idealistic group of men and women who escape Paris during the Terror to start a remote
utopian community. Isolated from society, Culvert, the groups leader, pushes freedom
to ever more extreme limits until the group descends into violence. The issues
confronting Frederica education, individual freedom, the role of women, love and
passion are larger-than-life in the fable Babbletower, lengthy selections of which are
peppered throughout the novel.
When Frederica helps Mason get his book published, it is quickly banned on grounds of
indecency. Frederica becomes involved in two trials: her own contested divorce, and the
prosecution of Jude Mason and his publisher for obscenity. An outstanding trial scene has
Anthony Burgess and Alexander Wedderburn appearing for the Babbletower defense.
Frederica is unable to defend herself against lies. She sees herself as a caged or netted
beast.... The net is made by words which do not describe what she feels is happening.
Babbletower is exonerated on appeal.
In parallel to Babel Towers beginning about beginnings, A Whistling Woman begins
with a beginning about endings. The novel opens with the conclusion of the belabored
fantasy, Flight North, begun in Babel Tower. Populated by a talking thrush and birdwomen called The Whistlers, it makes a daunting authors note, signifying symbolic
complexity, perhaps off-putting to those who havent read the previous volumes, and
warning those who have that closure is not ahead. At its end, we discover that its author
Agatha, single mother, flat mate of Frederica and Leo in South London, has been reading
aloud. The children are appalled when its abrupt finale leaves many mysteries
unresolved:
There was no satisfaction in the end of the story. It was as though they had all been
stabbed. Agatha looked shaken by their vehemence; but closed her mouth, and closed her
hands on the book.

She tells them her story ends where she always meant it to end.
Two interconnected tragedies follow that interplay in diverse ways and include
established and new characters. Both embroil members of three New Age-influenced
milieu. The domain of liberal, humanist values includes academia, Fredericas family,
friends, fellow workers, and even student leaders in an absurdity of distortions and
deceptions. The politicos, consisting of anti-university revolutionaries, hippies, and
hangers-on encamped on the universitys outskirts, are both anti-intellectual and, in
practice, anti- their own stated values. The religious cult blooming nearby attracts the
seriously spiritual, the merely religious, the mentally ill, and the undercover sociologist.
Hostilities within this New Age universe create the explosive climax.
The action takes place in Fredericas native Yorkshire where her sometime lover, John
Ottakar, has taken an academic post at North Yorkshire University, newly established on
the campus where The Virgin in the Garden occurred. The vice-chancellor is organizing
an international multidisciplinary Body-Mind Conference which will discuss questions
about learning and intelligence. The conference is intended to fulfill a number of needs:
the new universitys requirement for prestige, students demands for academic relevance,
and the vice-chancellors interest in the quest for a Theory of Everything. These
ambitions will all be debased by the self-important politicos who disrupt the conference
and run riot for a few destructive hours that go down in the universitys history as the
Battle.
Nearby a Quaker therapeutic community called the Spirits Tigers moves into a
members mansion. First met in Babel Tower, this group involves Marcus, Gideon Farrar,
and, eventually, the chancellors wife. Under the influence of a charismatic selfproclaimed Manichean named Joshua Lamb, the group gradually transforms itself into a
religious cult. Joshua is a former mental patient, who as a young boy was spared when his
father murdered their family. Byatts chronicle of Joshuas gradual mental and emotional
reorganization of this horrendous trauma into a psychotic world view is equally
compelling and repulsive because Joshua is neither a freak nor a fraud, but a man
genuinely tormented by his demons and genuinely seeking God. This portrayal, both
compassionate and unflinching, makes the book worth reading even for those unwilling
to approach the tetralogy as a whole. Its depiction of charisma and its destructive effect
on those drawn to it mirrors that of Culvert in Babbletower. Here again, the force is
loose in the world, not confined to metafiction.
Frederica, now 33, ties this all together, A pompous and superficial sort of a clever girl,
with a failed marriage behind her, as another character describes her. But Frederica is an
observer not a participant in the events she attends their finale as a reporter. She is also
an observer, rather than a participant, in the exuberance of 1960s London: She is not a
child of her time in this. Having abandoned her literary pretensions, she publishes her
pastiche, Laminations. Critics declare it clever, but readers ignore it. Published
concurrently, Agathas fantasy is ignored by critics, but becomes a word-of-mouth
bestseller. Yet Frederica becomes a mini-celebrity as moderator of a dreadfully
highbrow, BBC television talk show called Through the Looking-Glass. Like the novel
itself, the show is a rapid and elaborate joke. Frederica wears Laura Ashley paisley
dresses to look like a knowing and very adult Alice. On this stage Byatt scripts a multimedia exploration of late-1960s culture, both serious and pseudo, always commenting on
the plot lines. Discussion trios include Charles Dodgson, nonsense, and an antique

mirror; Sigmund Freud, creativity, and a Picasso ceramic. Male viewers squirm with
discomfort as women guests frankly discuss their periods during an episode on George
Eliot, Doris Lessings idea of Free Women, and a Tupperware bowl. The best of this
attains the comic exuberance of an Anglicized Carl Hiassen, gleefully justifying the call
in Julian Barnes Flauberts Parrot for A total ban on novels in which the main character
is a journalist or television presenter.
When her lover requests that she give up her London career to join him in Yorkshire,
Frederica confronts the conflict between romantic attachment and being a woman with a
solid place in the world, as she sees Agatha. Having sought this from the first novel,
Frederica thinks, You were exhausted by trying to make a life, trying to make sense, and
by the life of the young, which depended on your own no-longer-young energy.
For Frederica, by the novels end, Things became untrue, disproved overnight. So what
ending is this? As Romantic Ending, Frederica is pregnant and contemplating life with
her new lover. This satisfies the romantic impulse, but betrays Fredericas struggle
through the four novels. As Desultory Ending, Frederica is wearing one of her Laura
Ashley dresses from Through the Looking-Glass to cover her bulging belly. At the
insistence of 10 year old Leo, she has just informed a man she had bedded casually of her
pregnancy.
In either case, the lovers havent the slightest idea what to do but shall think of
something.
To a reader unfamiliar with the earlier books, this ending seems wide-open: her lover
even talks about an opportunity in Australia. But the prologue of Still Life depicts
Frederica ten years later with a different position, but still working for the BBC in
London. Fredericas education and emancipation enable her to balance motherhood and
career, and to make choices about sex and reproduction. But in the end, neither education
nor emancipation relieves sense and sensibility from the force of passionate unreason.
As Peter Shaffers Mozart is accused of composing with too many notes, A Whistling
Woman has been accused of having simply too many ideas. Its symbols can be
bewildering spiders, webs, spirals, twins, mirrors, helixes, fires, birds. True, the birds
become more maddening than threatening, but nothing is remiss; Byatt is using every
possible postmodern trope as homage and as spoof.
A Whistling Woman makes a strong counterpart to Babel Tower in scope and
complexity, and outdoes it in garish excess. The religious cult story ends in conflagration,
as cults do; the demonstration ends in riot and destruction, as happens. The woman
living-her-sexually-liberated-life story ends in pregnancy, of course. Lively
embellishment makes A Whistling Woman the most lurid and unreal of the novels, the
satyr play. Babel Tower, by comparison, confines its sensationalism, and its violence
with the important exception of husband abusing wife to the embedded fiction
Babbletower.
A Whistling Woman shares with the other volumes Byatts poetic prose, her skills at
Flaubertian description, and her extraordinary emotional force. The narrative may
transfix or annoy, assuming the viewpoint she is expressing. Her skill as ventriloquist
was first exercised in Possessions faithful Victorian poetry, neglected by so many
readers. Here, as in Babel Tower, unsympathetic voices speak with disquieting reality.
Notably, the most powerfully written scenes in the novels seldom involve the annoying
Frederica. But she shines in the light of Byatts flair for depicting friendships between

men and women, and for conveying the complex pleasures of reading. Frederica is
appealing in her friendship with Alexander Wedderburn, and engaging when reading,
writing, and teaching about reading.
Each novel captures the unique sensibility of a specific historical moment in the life and
times of Frederica Potter. Each, with its distinctive structure, plumbs personal histories of
great intimacy. Each is an integral part of a more comprehensive whole, expressing
Byatts complex thinking while sustaining the historical and narrative momentum. The
novels reflect each other pair to pair, and mirror each other within the pairs, composing a
unified work of remarkable self-reflective complexity. Undoubtedly, taken together as a
single work, Byatts four novels work better than they do on their own.
Does this all seem long-winded? Well, thats Byatt. (And so your reviewer.) Read it or
not most readers, she has said, are not going to read every word shes got to get it all
in. And annoying or not, theres something to be said for this. Possession, the movie, was
disappointing because it didnt get it all/enough in. Mysteries are often most mysterious
in the details, the subplots. The Name of the Rose suggests itself.
Do not doubt that Byatt is worth reading for pleasure of a complicated kind. If A
Whistling Woman is not for the first-time Byatt reader, any of her briefer works would
make a likely introduction, particularly the historical novellas Insects & Angels, or, my
vote for her best novel yet, The Biographers Tale, an enigma of the Borges variety.
At the beginning of A Whistling Woman, Agathas voice quavers as she says This is
where I always meant it to end. There have been calls by reviewers and Frederica fans
for Byatt to revisit Frederica and answer unsettled questions. But I hope she is finished
with Frederica. Not because Frederica has become tiresome, which she has. Nor because
A Whistling Woman is not her best novel, which it isnt (the consensus remains with
Babel Tower). No, I hope shes done with Frederica because, having completed her
project, she is free to write her best novel yet.
C. J. Sullivan Reynolds
13 December 2003

Robert MacFarlane
The Observer, Sunday 15 September 2002

A Whistling Woman
by AS Byatt
Chatto and Windus 16.99, pp422

The task which AS Byatt has undertaken in her so-called Frederica Quartet, of which A Whistling Woman
is the final instalment, is a formidable one: nothing less than the depiction of the social and imaginative
life of England throughout the 1950s and 1960s.

A more modestly inclined writer, confronted with such a massive historical terrain, might have settled
upon a technique of high-altitude mapping; noting familiar landmarks and large-scale cultural contours.
Byatt, by contrast, has tried to write history as seen from ground level, by creating a central character the sparky, spiky Frederica Potter - and pushing her forwards through two decades of English life.

More than this, by using her skills as a pasticheur and letting her prose take on the texture of whichever
idea, person, or writer she is describing at a given moment, Byatt has attempted to bring her readers to
feel the past, rather than simply telling them about it.

Looking back, we can see that the publication of the first novel in the quartet, The Virgin in the Garden
(1978), was the beginning of a gigantic effort of historiography. Nearly a quarter of a century on, Byatt's
ambition is unmistakable but the success of her project is increasingly less clear. For A Whistling
Woman, which covers the period from 1968 to 1970, suffers from the same sins which beset its
forerunners - the excessive use of symbols (spiders, spirals, fire, webs, mirrors), a narrative gnarliness,
an overbearing sense of allegory - but it suffers from them even more acutely.

The plot is too rangy to be usefully summarised, but Frederica Potter at least makes a financial success
of herself in this one: forging a career as a TV presenter on a cultural discussion programme. When not
in London, the novel spends much of its time on the Yorkshire moors, where Frederica's intermittent
lover, John Ottakar, has taken up a post in a 'university'.

The moors are also home to a variety of maniacs, dissenters and delusionists, many of whom harbour an
animus towards the university, and who are designed to represent various aspects of the late-60s
counter-culture. The hostility between these motley elements and the university leads eventually to the
conflagration with which the book, and the quartet, more or less concludes.

A Whistling Woman is a novel which, as the blurb says, is 'bursting with ideas'. 'Bursting' catches it
nicely, because there are simply too many ideas. Every major idea in the years Byatt is depicting needs a
mention before the book can be ended.

She has never been afraid of a symbol, and the bewilderment which the book's ideas induce isn't helped
by the tropes which proliferate throughout. Gnomic references abound to twins, mirrors, spirals (single),
helixes (double), fires and birds. Especially birds. The novel opens with an italicised eight-page fairy tale
about a talking thrush, and the birds just keep on coming after that.

Like the birds which silently mass on gables and wires in Hitchcock's film, they begin as an intellectually
threatening presence. Unlike the birds in the movie, they are ultimately neither memorable nor
dramatic, only obfuscating.

Other infelicities damage the novel, too, including the ludicrous names of almost all the characters (LukLysgaard Peacock; Elvet Gander etc - note the avian allusions), and the not infrequent stylistic botches.
At one point, for instance, two dogs come into a room 'agitating their sterns', which I presume is a
ghastly attempt to say 'wagging their tails' without, for some reason, saying so.

A Whistling Woman is an over-ambitious jumble. Byatt might well respond that the years she is
describing were themselves both over-ambitious and jumbled and that, as such, her novel stands in
symbolic relationship to them. But that's not enough. Byatt has always been the most nineteenthcentury of contemporary novelists. A Whistling Woman, however, lacks the essential clarifying power
which narrative can bring to history; it fails to provide an articulate critical relationship with the years it
treats. Too many symbols, ideas and names compete for attention and comprehension.

Critical Essay by The Times Literary

Supplement
To be the offspring of genius, even if not everyone considers it genius, must make
growing-up even more difficult than it is for most of us. And to write a novel about the
process, which involves creating someone whom your readers can believe in as a
genius, is even more difficult. That is what Mrs. Byatt has tackled in her first novel,
Shadow of a Sun.
It is easy to be somewhat cynical about the earnest sensitivity with which Mrs. Byatt
explores tortured relationships--she is a very feminine writer, careful to give us not
only the visual detail (which she does very well) but also the emotional convolutions
behind each utterance of her characters, which a tougher, more experienced writer
would have pruned. She luxuriates in tentative similes and asides which hold up the
dialogue. But these are not disastrous faults, because Mrs. Byatt feels deeply for her
characters and has a thoughtful, unhurried way of conveying precisely why they are
worth caring about.
"Living with a Genius," in The Times Literary Supplement ( Times
Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1964; reproduced from The Times Literary
Supplement by permission), No. 3227, January 2, 1964, p. 21.

Critical Essay by The Times Literary Supplement

Critical Essay by Iris Murdoch

[The Virgin in the Garden] is a very good book. It is a large, complex, ambitious
work, humming with energy and ideas. It is a highly intellectual operation. The
characters do a great deal of thinking, and have extremely interesting thoughts which
are developed at length. But this is no tract or treatise; it is a strong, confident, very
long traditional novel, a remarkable achievement. At a time when some critics doom
the novel to brevity, narrowness, dryness and ultimate degeneration into a 'text', Mrs
Byatt's lively monster triumphantly exhibits the form as a playground for a powerful
omnivorous intelligence.
This is, essentially, a historical novel, but set in a period which never seems remote.
There is a good deal of 'social comment', but this is never obtrusive and is subjected to
the strong necessities of the story. Irrepressible intellectual interests in a novelist may
obstruct the most important part of the task, which is the presentation of character.
General reflections may diminish the contingent reality of those who utter them. Mrs
Byatt has managed to render her people's thinking both individual and dramatically
effective.
Mrs Byatt exhibits a discreet mastery of metaphor in her many excellent descriptions
of the activity of thinking, its pace and texture. Not many novelists describe this
activity as well; and not many novelists have so many interesting thoughts with which
to endow their characters. The characters survive their creator's cleverness partly by
their own innate energy, and partly through the intense 'internal relations' of the
book.
There are a number of strong and separate centres of force. The sisters, similar but
different, with diverging destinies, are surrounded by a number of sturdy, well-studied
figures. Marcus's experience of the deep structure of the universe is imagined in
remarkable and convincing detail. (Indeed the novel may be said to be about deep
structure.) This tour de force, together with the drama of the schoolmaster who (with
Critical Essay by Iris Murdoch

Byatt, A(ntonia) S(usan) 1936 Literature Criticism

tragic consequences) treats Marcus as a religious phenomenon, would make a sizeable

novel in itself.
This long, energetic, poetic book has time for all sorts of surprising, though relevant,
diversions and treats. Not only literature but the visual arts come liberally to the
author's aid. Marcus offers us a remarkable perceptual analysis of a butcher's shop. An
Elizabethan house is described in loving and learned detail. The story is always strong
enough to assert itself, and though often impressively sad, is also at times zanily
funny.
Of course, there are criticisms to be made. There are things to be said against any
novel; it is the most essentially imperfect of all the great forms. There are perhaps too
many literary allusions and quotations (though I would not wish that fault undone, the
issue of it being so proper). And do schoolmasters really talk so much about Spenser
and Milton, rather than talk about their motor cars? Alexander is to my mind not yet a
clear enough character for his central place in the tale. But in the context of such an
achievement these are minor considerations.
Iris Murdoch, "Force Fields," in New Statesman ( 1978 The Statesman
& Nation Publishing Co. Ltd.), Vol. 96, No. 2485, November 3, 1978, p.
586.

Critical Essay by Iris Murdoch

Critical Essay by Michael Irwin

The action of this careful, complex novel [The Virgin in the Garden] takes place in
Yorkshire in Coronation year. Its theme is growing up, coming of age, tasting
knowledge. For the leading characters 1953 becomes the year that is to define their
temperaments and shape the future.
Each of the six characters caught up in these dramas is pushed to extremity, forced by
change, chance and exigency to come to terms with his or her intellectual or sexual
being. This is an ambitious novel, heightened by calculated exaggeration. The stories,
skilfully alternated, are linked by cunning echoes and symbolic commentary. The
narration everywhere displays knowledge and intelligence.
But the intelligence proves a weakness as well as a strength. The author's commitment
is to her ideas rather than to the imaginative life her story is apparently intended to
have. She obliges her characters to speak and enact what her themes require; they have
no off-stage existence. The sub-plots lapse as she alternately sets them aside. There is
no sense of the patterns of living, of the diurnal realities, to which the more
extravagant doings, the dramatized action of the novel, must be relative. The family
life of the Potters remains unimagined and unimaginable. The recurrent emotional
and psychological insipidity is closely connected to the fact that this is a very bookish
novel. Most of the main characters are chronically literary.
Since the narrative also is dense with literary allusion the effect is to diminish the
characters, to make them seem mere agents of the author's own very academic
intelligence. Her extensive use of indirect speech confirms one's sense of a
ventriloquist whose lips are never still. I found Marcus Potter much the most
interesting person in the book partly because his problems are extraordinary ones, but
partly, also, because he is mercifully inarticulate.

Critical Essay by Michael Irwin

Byatt, A(ntonia) S(usan) 1936 Literature Criticism

Since Marcus's afflictions derive largely from what he sees, his appearances in the
novel are often the occasion for extended passages of description almost clotted in
their exhaustiveness and insistence. In the peculiar circumstances this is reasonable
enough; but elsewhere, too, physical information is supplied chiefly through
occasional long inventories. There is not the skilful distribution of visual detail that
can bring a novel to continuous physical life.
The oddest defect in the novel, granted the writer's obvious thoughtfulness and
sensitivity, is the stodginess of some of the prose. Wherever the narrative is
indirect--there are numerous sequences of this kind--the style tends to thicken into
heaviness. In particular it becomes grammatically and rhythmically monotonous.
This is further evidence, perhaps, of the writer's comparative lack of interest in the
routine chores of realist fiction.
Michael Irwin, "Growing Up in 1953," in The Times Literary
Supplement ( Times Newspapers Ltd. (London) 1978; reproduced from
The Times Literary Supplement by permission), No. 3996, November 3,
1978, p. 1277.

Critical Essay by Michael Irwin

Critical Essay by Paul Levy

[The Virgin in the Garden] is a good example of proper literary ambition. It is, and
practically declares itself to be, a novel in the European realist tradition, and it
demands comparison with the masters in that tradition. The characters are full and
rounded. Mrs Byatt's talents are not confined to sketching members of a single
social class.
The integration of the matter of the book--the reign of the first Elizabeth, Astraea,
Shakespeare, the scholarship of Frances Yates and others, and Alexander's own
elaborate play--is complete, and works on whatever level the book is read. There is a
great deal of art in the book, and except for a little uncertainty about what becomes of
Frederica, whom the reader comes to like too much to see her simply disappear from
the stage without comment, the book as a whole is perfectly realised. What I liked
best about it was that Mrs Byatt has captured exactly, in her detailing of the events she
has invented for the summer of the Coronation, the atmosphere of the summer of the
Jubilee, the golden glow that suffused everything that was done during those magical,
but real, few lovely months. (pp. 58-9)
Paul Levy, "Lee Langley: Ambition and the Novelist" ( copyright Paul
Levy 1979; reprinted with permission), in Books and Bookmen, Vol. 24,
No. 4, January, 1979, pp. 57-9.

Critical Essay by Paul Levy

Critical Essay by Rosemary Dinnage

["The Virgin in the Garden"] is grave, solid, ample as a Yorkshire tea, with
deliberate hints of the Northern tradition of Mrs. Gaskell and Charlotte Bront, even
down to having a curate for one of its main characters.
Byatt's portrait of [a] hypersensitive, schizoid boy, his senses invaded by terrors and
visions, holding annihilation at bay by repeating mathematical formulae, is beautifully
empathetic. Self-defense through the intellect is practiced by other of her characters,
and something of the sort bedevils the author's own style. She is at her best in bringing
her characters alive, and they live on in the mind. But the book is overdecorated with
tags and references from Elizabethan literature that smell of the lecture room; her
characters quote lines of verse at one another in a way that I thought went out with
Dorothy L. Sayers.
But Byatt is essentially a fine, careful and very traditional storyteller.
Rosernary Dinnage, "England in the 50's," in The New York Times Book
Review ( 1979 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by
permission), April 1, 1979, p. 20.

Critical Essay by Rosemary Dinnage

Critical Essay by Daphne Merkin

[It] is clear why Byatt is unknown on these shores: She is very English--insularly
so. She writes out of an imperturbable tradition of English literature, a tradition that
takes note of contemporary currents without drifting away on them. The men and
women in [The Virgin in the Garden] bear some resemblance to present-day men and
women; they also resemble the men and women of Charlotte Bront, George Eliot and
Thomas Hardy--they even, most unfashionably, resemble each other in a way that the
sexes are no longer presumed to.
The Virgin in the Garden is a lushly-woven novel, a tapestry of conflicting
sensibilities. Byatt writes with a somewhat remote but unerring skill; she is always
intelligent, often witty, and frequently slips in the kind of humanly wise observation
for which one reads such novels in the first place: "Pain hardens, and great pain
hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though
it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame." All
the same she is too self-consciously literary: Her book is crammed with bits and pieces
of higher learning and sounds alarmingly donnish on occasion. Her characters cannot
get into bed without invoking T. S. Eliot or D. H. Lawrence; they are relentlessly
cultured, given to talking rather than doing. If, for American tastes they are
ludicrously cerebral, nevertheless, behind all the erudite chatter lurks the sad
knowledge "that poetry had no answer to pain." There is, surely, a terrible fragility
about people who try to live by imagination rather than instinct.
Daphne Merkin, "Writers & Writing: The Art of Living," in The New
Leader ( 1979 by the American Labor Conference on International
Affairs, Inc.), Vol. LXII, No. 9, April 23, 1979, p. 16.

Critical Essay by Daphne Merkin

Critical Essay by Louise Bernikow

Besides the intellectual artifice, at the heart of the boxes within boxes, puns, parodies,
donnish and in-groupy references, which I imagine an American reader will feel
impatient with, there is something important and accessible, relevant and potentially
gripping in The Virgin in the Garden. Consider the virgin, consider the garden. The
virgin is Frederica and Queen Elizabeth I and, beyond that, the idea of female
intactness, Virgo-Astraea, the Greek sense of belonging to oneself (the original
meaning of "virginity").
Alexander's play and especially Frederica's part in it focus on Elizabeth's (actual)
declaration that she would not bleed, her choice of lifelong virginity, and the perhaps
concomitant "masculine" strength of her character and her reign. Hovering over the
play and Byatt's novel are questions: what is female strength? how is it possible?
Frederica is surrounded by women whose "submission" to sexual life has left them
less than they were: her mother hides her own education in the face of a blistering,
overbearing husband; her sister seems to die as her pregnancy advances. (p. 36)
The garden's symbolism draws on Renaissance literary convention: Paradise, Eden,
place and time when everything seemed closed and perfect. The play itself is
performed in the garden of a great house. The time of the novel, the fifties, is seen as a
period of blissful ignorance, especially about matters of consciousness and sexuality:
Frederica had wanted traditional things of Alexander--that he save her, teach her,
make love to her. (p. 38)
By the end of the novel, serenity and enclosure have fallen away. A Prologue that puts
what comes afterward in a peculiarly ironic light shows Alexander, Frederica, and
Daniel in London, in 1968, attending a program about Elizabeth I. It is a scene full of
empty dissatisfaction--among the characters and in their relation to the world. In this
context the fifties, the garden, the virginity, are seen with rueful nostalgia. The present
seems a time when things have fallen apart, to Byatt's eye, quite lost, bereft of the
Critical Essay by Louise Bernikow

Byatt, A(ntonia) S(usan) 1936 Literature Criticism

energy that came with misguided certainty. (pp. 38-9)

Louise Bernikow, "The Illusion of Allusions," in Ms. ( 1979 Ms.
Magazine Corp.), Vol. VII, No. 12, June, 1979, pp. 36, 38-9.

Critical Essay by Louise Bernikow