AS Byatt, Babel Tower

I've read this rather long novel, the third in Byatt's Frederica Quartet, twice now. The protagonist, Frederica Potter (=, more or less, Antonia Byatt), last seen in Still Life shortly after the sudden death of her sister Stephanie, is now married with a son, although her choice of husband (Nigel Reiver) has turned out to be an unwise one. Nigel is manipulative, violent and chauvinist, refusing to let Frederica put her prodigious mental capacities to use in any kind of paid work. He resents her for having mainly male friends (a natural consequence of being at Cambridge in the 1950s), and is deeply suspicious of books. So when Frederica decides to leave for London, and her son Leo decides quite firmly he's coming with her, it's no surprise that Nigel is desperate for her to return, and even more desperate to regain custody of their child. A lawsuit ensues.

Meanwhile, Frederica gets involved in the world around the Samuel Palmer School of Art, teaching literature classes there (and also extra-mural ones). Through this she meets Jude Mason, a repellent, troubled and charismatic writer whose book, Babbletower, is published and then immediately prosecuted for obscenity. It's a pivotal, symbolic event, with the memory of the Lady Chatterley trial still fresh, and in the midst of debates about the teaching and value of language and literature in schools (intersecting with the traumatic bullying at a fictional boys' public school, presumably Eton), as well as the rapidly diverging discourses of science and art. Frederica battles like a wildcat to stay connected to the intellectual arenas where she feels most comfortable, to sustain connections to her family, and to try to forge new friendships and relationships as a single mother in London.

AS Byatt has always been great at portraying the intellectual life. I read somewhere that it's impossible to create a character who is cleverer or better-educated than you are, and if that's true then Byatt must have a phenomenal mind and have read and remembered sheer mountains of books. Yet she's never, ever cold: the characters are deeply and fiercely emotional, sexual, physical beings, and I always come out the other end of a Byatt novel (for it is a tunnel-like experience) desperate to read more, write more, and talk more to people I love. The second novel in the series, Still Life, made me cry like a child, and Babel Tower wasn't far from achieving the same effect.

The book was published in 1996, and is set in the 60s, and there are some parts of it that either haven't dated well (this is certainly true of the first in the series, The Virgin in the Garden) or were slightly monochrome to begin with. Nigel, his sisters and his housekeeper are all really loathsome upper-class idiots, and I did wish at times that Byatt could be more impartial. As a consideration of the emergence of postmodern discourse in the 60s, it is sporadically successful and a bit irritating: in one rather "look-at-me-i'm-being-all-meta-now" passage, Frederica cuts up a lawyer's letter and rearranges it, pace Burroughs, to form a new and disorientating nonsense-text.

But for me the overwhelming impressions is of a novel about people who enjoy thinking deeply and passionately about life and art. One of the cover-quotes uses the word "heady", and that seems accurate to me -- the book sweeps you into a world where everyone can quote Rilke in German, if they want, or effortlessly write Tolkien-esque novels for their children. It's not quite realist, but it's exciting, and heart-rending, and that's what I read Byatt for.