Novel Of Everything

There’s no slash-and-burn approach to writing for Byatt, no clearing of cultural space to locate a novel and thence move on to another subject — no, she insists on squeezing it all into her novels of everything. Equally, she puts up no signposts in her works of imaginative history. There are no encyclopaedic digressions on scientific milestones or the restlessness of the young in 1968, or demographic data on the splintering of familial engagements and the new patterns of intimacy fostered in a London hurtling towards meritocracy and hipness or communes articulating a new spirituality.

It’s all there in A Whistling Woman, but evoked through the experiences of a sprawling cast of characters, the texture of her prose and a passion for symbols (birds, fires, mirrors). A few years back, upon the publication of the third Frederica novel Babel Tower, she recalled the wages of fame after the 1990 Booker for Possession catapulted her to bestseller lists. Could you please hush some of the obscurities in your books like passages from Victorian poetry, asked her publishers. “I did think,” she recalled, “you’re just going to have to give up and write women’s-novely novels.” Thankfully, that thought was perished.

To the book. Frederica, drifting out of a desultory affair and engrossed in raising her precocious son, quits her university job. The young are intoxicated with questioning — and as a pop poet tells her, they are stumbling upon an era when being young is in no way connected to chronological age. What’s poetry and literature to do with life, ask her students; she finds herself repeatedly going back to first principles to explain why rigorous pursuit of knowledge could have practical value. On the peripheries of college campuses, anti-universities are taking shape. It’s too much, and she gives up teaching “because she wanted to teach”.

And turns to television. Its potential is just being gauged, there’s a sense that it will soon take the place of “the hearth in 19th century fiction”, that with language being subordinated to images, it could be the future arena for mind-flexing. (By the end of the novel, television is seen to be predicated on soundbites and advertising, with reduced attention spans slicing debate and analysis into easily digestible morsels.)

Through it all, she must battle loneliness, care for her endearingly precocious son, contemplate companionship at last, stay with the fashions of the times, and keep curs-

ory checks on Byatt’s rapidly multiplying cast. And through it all, we groan as yet another birdy reference wends its way into the tale, while giggling delightedly at the twists in Byatt’s intellectual feat.