A Whistling Woman A S Byatt Chatto & Windus, 422pp, £16.99 ISBN 0701173807

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 Whistling Woman 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 Byatt's 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 didn't 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 independent-minded 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 Byatt's 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, half a kind of symbolist masque about virgin queens and transposed myth - and it informed one of the chief dilemmas: Stephanie's decision to throw over her career as a Newnham bluestocking and marry a burly 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 Byatt's 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. Frederica's 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 Garden's 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. Wilkie's 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 vice-chancellor, 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 novel disappears 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 Byatt's 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.

D J Taylor is a novelist and critic

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website