Babel Tower

Rating:
Summary: What Fiction was Meant to Be
Review: A. S. Byatt's Babel Tower integrates one woman's complicated journey into the story of the troubled 1960's with masterful results. Frederica has married an upper-class gentleman who expects her to stay at home and take care of their child without exercising her intellectual gifts or being allowed to see her friends. When he turns violent, she flees with her son back to London and her artistic peer group. In her part-time job reading unsolicited manuscripts, she comes across a vibrant, disturbing book called Babbletower and recommends it for publishing. The rest of the novel deals with Frederica's divorce trial and the prosecution of the novel for obscenity. All of it is set, however, in the swirling, chaotic upset of the 1960's and the redefinition of an entire culture's values.

Byatt is a masterful fiction writer. The many voices of the novel - Frederica's, the fanatic recluse author's, the liberal clergyman's, even Anthony Burgess' - are rendered in believable and splendid detail. We believe them all, whether they repulse us or not. The surrounding culture mirrors Frederica's changing identity - reading the Hobbit to her son, short skirts, hash brownies, happenings. Excerpts of Babbletower indeed read like a work of subversive genius - and it's all created by Byatt. I believe the English have an edge on the subtle development of character and plot. Read this great one to know how it's done.

Rating:
Summary: A woman and literature, both on trial
Review: Even though "The Babel Tower" is the third volume in a tetralogy, one need not have read the first two books to enjoy it. (I hadn't read any other novels by Byatt, and I dove right into this one.) This entry has been described as a novel of the Sixties, but such a characterization is misleading. Byatt never really leaves the ivory tower: the turbulence of the streets, the counterculture, the mod scene, the social upheavals all remain on the periphery throughout. The novel depicts more calm than storm, exploring instead the far narrower (but still interesting) milieu of the literati.

Byatt presents two parallel plots. After the death of her sister, Frederica (the subject of all four novels) is trapped in a marriage that quickly seems unsuitable, eventually becomes oppressive, and finally turns violent. Since it's 1964, a divorce is not simply for the asking; after escaping with her son, she finds her suitability as a mother on trial (both literally and figuratively). The scenes describing the spousal abuse are among the most harrowing I've read, even though, compared with similar episodes in other works, the horror is more psychologically distressing than physically violent. Byatt explicitly links Frederica's subsequent emotional and legal ordeal with Lady Chatterley's trial (both of the book and of the character); Frederica represents a late-twentieth-century woman judged by lingering puritanical nineteenth-century standards.

The second story concerns a thematically similar trial: the ban of "Babbeltower," a book recommended to a publisher by Frederica that is subsequently deemed pornographic by the British government. Tame by today's standards (and even when compared to "Last Exit to Brooklyn," which served as Byatt's model), this fable portrays a sexually uninhibited utopia that evolves into a masochistic and totalitarian dystopia. The recently concluded obscenity trial of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" lingers in the background, although the prosecution asserts that "it was Lady Chatterley herself who was on trial, for the fact of her sexuality. In the case of 'Babbeltower' it is the prisoner in the dock who is on trial, his imagination, the world he created, the tendency of the messages he offers."

While "Babel Tower" is often riveting and stimulating, if Byatt herself were on trial, she might be found guilty of excess. Byatt's most obvious mentor is Iris Murdoch, whose influence she confirms in both the text and the acknowledgments. Murdoch, however, doesn't always spell out her many cultural, philosophical, and literary references; she leaves it for the reader to discover or disregard. Byatt, in contrast, seems to believe that her audience is not well-read; she assumes the role of literary critic for her own work. Her characters quote a dizzying parade of passages to each other, to themselves, or to the reader. Sometimes this approach works, but the technique reaches its nadir when she reprints Frederica's scrapbook, a collage of excerpts and scrambled texts(which Frederica herself correctly disparages as unsatisfying and incoherent). There's also a bizarre and not entirely satisfying subplot which evokes Cronenberg's "Dead Ringers" but can't match its creepiness; it involves identical twins, one of whom courts Frederica, while the other is a jealous psychopath.

Despite these excesses, Byatt still succeeds with her portrait of the young woman artist whose confusion is aggravated by clashes between desires and expectations, nonconformity and morality, literature and society.

Rating:
Summary: Perhaps not as tight as Still Life or The Virgin...
Review: I found A.S. Byatt's elegant portraits of the late fifties in The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life immensely satisfying, and had wondered for some time before the publication of Babel Tower how she might approach the sixties. Babel Tower seems to represent a change of direction in her Yorkshire series. While its focus on the publication and subsequent prosecution of Babbletower is reminiscent of the dramatic chaos surrounding Astraea, which drives the narrative of The Virgin in the Garden, Babel Tower contains much more overt cultural analysis. At times this detracts from the Potter family narrative developed over the preceding books, however it seems neccessary in order to allow Byatt to evade a simplistic satire of the period. Her interweaving of cultural, social, political and environmental concerns of the time provides a valuable backdrop to Frederica's and Daniel's continued stories.

Character development is perhaps not as strong in this book as in The Virgin in the Garden or Still Life, although Leo Reiver and Agatha Mond represent useful additions to the cast. I was pleased to see peripheral characters-Jacqueline, Ruth and Thomas Poole-take on greater importance. However Ruth's retreat into religion was not entirely convincing and I felt that her increasing entanglement with Gideon's sect could have been better developed. Hopefully this sub-plot will be continued in the next installment.

On the whole, Babel Tower lacks some of the coherence of The Virgin... and Still Life, but it is worth noting that the events and period that Byatt documents in this work are not as easily defined as those of the previous two. She does very well with difficult material, and maintains the emotional force apparent in the rest of the series. Definitely a worthwhile read, and lovers of Byatt's incredible attention to detail would be well advised give it a second and third reading as well.

Rating:
Summary: Enormous...
Review: This book is huge. Not in page numbers, although its not exactly an overnighter, but in everything else. The story, or rather, the two stories, encompass a huge swathe of humanity. Byatt's penchant for the 'story-within-a-story' is also apparent in some of her other works, and she carries it off with aplomb. Catching the links between the modern tale and her fable of Babel Tower adds such a lot to the story. Her characters are all endearing and wonderful, understandably grey and mysterious, or despicable. Read it.

Rating:
Summary: Read it, it's great
Review: When people talk about Byatt, they tend to dwell on her academicism, on her allusions and quotes, on her historicism. But if this were all there were to Byatt, no one would read her. What makes Byatt a wonderful writer is that she has a tremendous sense of how the world works, how situations and relationships that seemed promising slowly unravel, how smart people can do stupid things, and how things and people who at first seem hopeless can wind up being wonderful. She understands process, and she understands complexity.

Babel Tower is about how people devoted to the life of the mind can survive in a society which is hostile to that life. Much of the book is taken up with trials, because a major character in this book is "society", which may be personified by juries, by expert witnesses, by journalists. Her character, Frederica, escapes from a marriage which first stultifies her mind, and then threatens to kill her. On a meagre living, she constructs a life and a support system that will give her young son what he needs, mentally and physically. But her husband is wealthy, and what he offers the boy seems superficially more wholesome, so in the trials for divorce and custody, Frederica is judged essentially for her surface, for what her life looks like from the outside.

In a parallel subplot, the writer Jude Mason has written a book that is judged for obscenity. But Mason wrote it as a moral book which tells the lessons he has learned in life. He is a vagrant. He was sexually abused in childhood. He understands how people torture those they love. In the book's obscenity trial, Mason, his neuroses, his appearance, and his intentions are judged and condemned; when his book is banned, he himself is banned.

And in the early part of the book, we have a debate about how children should be educated, and what they should learn. The proponents of throwing out classical and grammatical training win, and it is a blow for the life of the mind. In the end of the book we see the results.

Babel Tower has several interesting themes: 1) the way society reduces and [clouds] a person's identity, and the effect it has on them; 2) depravity and sadism as an integral part of human nature, where cruelty is the backside to love; 3) gender and class double-standards; 4) the debate of what constitutes a good education; 5) the impossibility of creating coherency between the disparate elements of your life, and what this does to you.

Byatt is a wise, courageous thinker who can turn a battle of ideas into an enthralling page-turner. But her understanding of life is what makes her work great.

Babel Tower was a great book. But you should read its prequel first, Still Life.