A Whistling Woman

Rating:
Summary: Daunting.
Review: Byatt offers huge challenges to the reader in this complex intellectual novel set in a university, a hospital for the insane, a religious commune, an Anti-University, and, finally, a London TV studio in the late 1960's. Continuing the lives of characters she has established earlier in Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, and Babel Tower, Byatt spends little time here developing them further or in creating an action-filled plot. Instead, she concentrates primarily on further developing the themes and philosophical questions which have occupied her earlier novels, using the characters and plot in an almost allegorical sense to illustrate these issues.

This is not light entertainment or escape reading. In the first hundred pages, Byatt introduces approximately forty characters, their roles, and their interrelationships, all of whom figure in the action in the novel. Frederica Potter, the main character in the previous novels, is the main character here, but other characters also receive close attention. All of these are deeply concerned with some aspect of memory, learning, creativity, or spirituality as it impacts issues of good and evil, reality, nature, love, and language.

Luk Lysgaard-Peacock and Jacqueline Winwar, engaged in pure science, are studying the population genetics of a variety of snail. Sir Gerard Wijnnobel, running the University of North Yorkshire, is planning an important Body-Mind Conference in which Hodder Pinsky, famous for cognitive psycho-linguistics and the use of computers to explore "the deep structure of linguistic competence" will debate Theobald Eichenbaum, a man who differs in his ideas of the learning process and of the growth of societies. Other characters include an institutionalized, charismatic visionary who practices Manichaeism, a sociologist who goes undercover at a secluded commune, several characters whose lives have been touched by violence, and a man working to destroy the traditional university system. Frederica herself, as hostess of a television program, "Through the Looking Glass," believes that the ability to change the world and its politics rests with the language of television, which "might take the place of the hearth in 19th century fiction."

Challenging and thoughtful, the novel is far more compelling in its ideas than its action, much of which is talked-about, rather than recreated. Long sections of academic papers, detailed letters between two researchers, the full agenda for the Mind-Body Conference, and descriptions of places and even furnishings severely limit the dramatic tension, however much they may illustrate the themes. Hugely conceived and richly imagined, this novel never lets up, giving the reader an intellectual workout rare in modern fiction. Mary Whipple

Rating:
Summary: Not up to Byatt standards
Review: I have read the first three novels in the series perhaps five times a piece. I have lived deeply in the lives of the characters. My knowledge of English literature and history has added depth because of those novels.
Thus, I must admit to deep disappointment in the Whistling Woman. It seemed Byatt just wanted to end the lives of the characters as quickly as possible. The plot was shaky and not quite believable. For me there was no closure. I hate to admit to identifying so greatly with fictional people, but it seemed Byatt had forgotten the lives she created and was thoughtlessly butchering the intricate world she had built.
The final novel does not contain enough social and academic theory to satisfy the thirst Byatt so thoroughly quenches.
If you love the series, don't read the final book. Make up your own ending. Trust me, it will be much better than the hack job Byatt has handed us.

Rating:
Summary: Thinking, thinking ...
Review: I should say up front that AS Byatt's novel, Possession, is my all time favourite read, so other books inevitably pale in comparison for me - including A Whistling Woman.

I strongly recommend *not* reading this book without first reading the others in the series. It's been a long while since I read the earlier instalments, and I found myself struggling to remember details from the earlier novels that are mentioned only in passing in A Whistling Woman.

It is a refreshing pleasure to read the work of an intelligent author who credits her audience with intelligence, but I found reading A Whistling Woman a bit too much like hard work at times. I'm not intimate with the philosophy of Wittgenstein, or the psychological theories of Jung and Freud; I don't know what a Fibonacci spiral is, and I've never read Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. Byatt made me pay for my ignorance with tantalising but insubstantial references, which left me floundering at times.

As for Byatt's treatment of her heroine, Frederica Potter ... well, please madam, I want more! We are granted glimpses into Frederica's life and mind, but are left (on the last page!) with this most "thinking" of women facing a future where she hasn't the "slightest idea what to do".

I do admire Byatt's restraint in ending this series with a declaration by one of her characters that "We shall think of something". Too often, in my opinion, great novels are resolved to death, and leave a reader feeling flat, with nothing left to imagine ... but, Antonia, what did you stop *there* for?

I did chuckle when I re-read the first chapter and re-discovered Frederica discussing this very issue (ie, books' ends). She asks the rhetorical question "What's a real end?", and concludes that "The end is always the most unreal bit..."

In summing up, I can't imagine any fan of Byatt's being disappointed with A Whistling Woman. On the other hand, I can't imagine anyone who's not a fan of Byatt finding this book terribly rewarding - my advice to non-fans is to read the first in the series (The Virgin in the Garden) immediately!

Rating:
Summary: Laminations
Review: This book is so much bigger than the pages it encompasses. Yes, it has a weak narrative arc compared with more popular fiction but the layers of metaphor and meaning enrich the story while the ending leaves all things possible. One word defines the core of this book. A word I had not heard before and one I looked up in the dictionary - Syzygy. This word means both "opposition" and "conjunction," and this is what this novel is all about. Opposite schools of thought and scholarly disciplines are seen to be in conjunction when discussed on Fredrica's TV show, the anti-university tries to be opposite to the real university but remains in conjunction in a weird way - it cannot survive as an anti-university without a university, the Ottaker Twins are in a strange syzygy dance throughout the novel and end up scarred by the same experience. Apart from this idea of conjunction and opposition, which I guess defined a lot of the sixties, there are many other wonderful literary games in the book. Fredrica's search for the meaning of metaphor plays a small but important part in our understanding of the whole while Bill Potter's epiphany about art is a fascinating place for this curmudgeon character to end up at. Philosophy is pitted against psychology, science against symbolism and love against destruction and everything ends up being linked at the end of the day. This is my favorite of the Fredrica books as I believe that A.S. Byatt has achieved more clarity here than ever before - or maybe I'm just getting it better!

Rating:
Summary: Laminations
Review: This book is so much bigger than the pages it encompasses. Yes, it has a weak narrative arc compared with more popular fiction but the layers of metaphor and meaning enrich the story while the ending leaves all things possible. One word defines the core of this book. A word I had not heard before and one I looked up in the dictionary - Syzygy. This word means both "opposition" and "conjunction," and this is what this novel is all about. Opposite schools of thought and scholarly disciplines are seen to be in conjunction when discussed on Fredrica's TV show, the anti-university tries to be opposite to the real university but remains in conjunction in a weird way - it cannot survive as an anti-university without a university, the Ottaker Twins are in a strange syzygy dance throughout the novel and end up scarred by the same experience. Apart from this idea of conjunction and opposition, which I guess defined a lot of the sixties, there are many other wonderful literary games in the book. Fredrica's search for the meaning of metaphor plays a small but important part in our understanding of the whole while Bill Potter's epiphany about art is a fascinating place for this curmudgeon character to end up at. Philosophy is pitted against psychology, science against symbolism and love against destruction and everything ends up being linked at the end of the day. This is my favorite of the Fredrica books as I believe that A.S. Byatt has achieved more clarity here than ever before - or maybe I'm just getting it better!

Rating:
Summary: Wow
Review: While reading A Whistling Woman, I kept wishing that more novelists wrote as well, as wonderfully, as A.S. Byatt. A Whistling Woman is a terrific novel, in my opinion almost as good as her phenomenal Possession. The story of Frederica Potter comes to a close (at least for us readers) at the end of the novel, and what a story it is--not for plotting reasons, but for how it is told. A Whistling Woman is an intelligently written, thoughtful and thought provoking novel of ideas focusing on one woman, Frederica, and a number of others who touch her life. Byatt shifts back and forth between plot lines and characters in a manner similar to Iris Murdoch. Like Murdoch, Byatt draws heavily from philisophical learning. All of the characters are highly intelligent and not afraid to show it. This is a wonderful, wonderful novel--one of the best I have read in quite some time. Enjoy!

Rating:
Summary: Wow
Review: While reading A Whistling Woman, I kept wishing that more novelists wrote as well, as wonderfully, as A.S. Byatt. A Whistling Woman is a terrific novel, in my opinion almost as good as her phenomenal Possession. The story of Frederica Potter comes to a close (at least for us readers) at the end of the novel, and what a story it is--not for plotting reasons, but for how it is told. A Whistling Woman is an intelligently written, thoughtful and thought provoking novel of ideas focusing on one woman, Frederica, and a number of others who touch her life. Byatt shifts back and forth between plot lines and characters in a manner similar to Iris Murdoch. Like Murdoch, Byatt draws heavily from philisophical learning. All of the characters are highly intelligent and not afraid to show it. This is a wonderful, wonderful novel--one of the best I have read in quite some time. Enjoy!