A Whistling Woman Review_C J Sullivan Reynolds

7/26/2019 A Whistling Woman Review_C J Sullivan Reynolds

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A Whistling Woman review by C. J. Sullivan Reynolds

Dissatisfied and annoying to almost everyone, complaining Im in the wrong place, atthe wrong time, Frederica Potter seems an unlikely and unsatisfactory central character

for a novel, particularly one about the 1960s. But as protagonist of the quartet which

concludes with A.S. Byatts latest, A Whistling Woman, she proves a surprisinglyanimated off-centerpiece for a long view of the making and mien of 1960s Britain.Byatt has said that she resisted the publishers and readers calling these the Frederica

novels; she intended there to be several central characters. But here Frederica is, in thelast in the series, A Whistling Woman (2002), just as she is, in the first, The Virgin in the

Garden (1976) the first of many dualities to be noted. Fredericas evolution through thefour books (Still Life, 1985 and Babel Tower, 1996) from lively English schoolgirl with

literary ambitions to struggling single mother is the prosaic backbone for Byattsambitious intentions which are made flesh in the intersecting plots and numerous

metafictions. These embody themes which run through all of the novels, as Byatt haswritten, the shifting relation between language and reality language and social life,

language and ideas.Thats Byatt. Her aims are always reaching and always out in front. Not for her the

reticence of a DeLillo to whom she has been compared, as she has to George Eliot andIris Murdoch. A portentous trio? Or not?

Byatt was already an influential novelist and critic in Britain when her best-selling,Booker Prize-winning novel, Possession (1990) (from which a disappointing movie was

made), gained her notice in the U.S. More recently she has achieved notoriety on bothsides of the Atlantic for a critique published in The New York Times charging the Harry

Potter series with appealing to imaginations bred on TV and pop culture, and contendingthat its success with adults reflects their infantile desire to regress to a safer world where

good and evil are readily identifiable and controlled by magic. Her essay provoked itsown debate in the media about whether the piece was a boorish insult or a polemical

account of what drives reassuring pop culture in opposition to the demandingcomplexities of art. In any case, she has been charged by Harry Potter fandom with

shouldering the mantle of high culture (shudder!) and, worse, labeled a snob.A.S. Byatt is more than a snob. She is a certain kind of English intellectual, of polymath

breadth, often Oxbridge educated (Aldous Huxley comes to mind, but so does VirginiaWoolf, who had no university education at all), among whom have been some of the

most thinking novelists of the last century. Alongside fiction, each has produced asubstantial body of criticism, essays, and other writings reflecting a wide range of

interests, among Byatts more recent, Emma Bovary and How We Lost Our Sense ofSmell. In all, Byatt has published over a dozen works of fiction, six books of criticism,

and innumerable articles. Her published output makes her a demanding subject in anycase, but her outspoken habit is trying.

In peeved remarks made at a reading I attended during her Babel Tower publicity tour,Byatt complained that fiction deserves criticism not review, emphasizing the critics

responsibility to follow a writer in order to develop a full grasp of their opus and intent.(Having since read many reviews of her work, I gather her peevishness was provoked by

those American writers who reviewed Babel Tower having previously read onlyPossession.) For Byatt, just as writing a novel is an act of criticism (her own novels rejoin


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Wordsworth, Lawrence, Forster, Woolf, and others), an act of criticism is an extension ofwriting the novel. Byatt agrees with Virginia Woolf: It is true that we get nothing

whatsoever except pleasure from reading. Criticism, according to Byatt, engages thewriter in order to give readers an approach to enjoying a book, not to its politics, nor any

-ism, nor any value other than the underlying value of pleasure.

As Woolf continues, it is true that the wisest of us is unable to say what that pleasuremay be. But Byatts own criticism may set an example: her essays on Madame Bovary(Scenes from a Provincial Life) moved me to reread the novel. And set me on a track of

reading works inspired by Flaubert.But be wary, Byatts are not the simple pleasures: Unless the novel gives pleasure of a

complicated kind, she has said, its better to be like the Quakers, where silence is thehighest form of contemplation.

With the publication of A Whistling Woman, Byatt completes a 40 year project. The first

two volumes in the series were well-received in Britain and largely ignored in the UnitedStates. Not until after the successes of Possession and Angels & Insects (1992) (from

which Philip Haas has made a movie) did the third volume, Babel Tower, appearsimultaneously on both sides of the pond to widespread praise.

The series was conceived from the start as a quartet, making A Whistling Woman, asByatt has described Babel Tower, a novel about the 1960s which was planned, more or

less, in the 1960s, and not written until the 1990s . . . both a novel about my own timeand a historical novel.

Are you wondering where this is going, or when well be getting down to the review?Have you noticed that this essay has a string of beginnings, probably foreshadowing

multiple endings; or, alternately, could be viewed as a series of digressions?Thats Byatt. Never more so than in A Whistling Woman.

Byatts publisher claims that A Whistling Woman, although the conclusion to the quartet,stands on its own. On the contrary, I found its full appreciation to be dependent on having

read its predecessors. Prior to reading A Whistling Woman, I had read Babel Tower, withwhich it shares a populous cast and an embedded narrative which begins in the one and

ends in the other. I then read all four novels successively, and having read the first two,found the final pair to be quite different books the second time around. All four share a

complex mega-structure, multifaceted symbolism, repeated scenes, sub-rosa dialogueswith innumerable literary voices, and uncountable self-referential allusions. From the

long view, there are other central characters and many minor characters developed overthe four novels. Mysteries about Fredericas brother-in-law, Daniel, and her brother,

Marcus, which are spelled out in previous volumes, are an important subtext to AWhistling Woman. Minor characters, canon Gideon Farrar for one, are raised from mere

parody to crazed comedy when enriched by their early history. The impact of theconcluding scene is altered by the prologue to Still Life.

The publisher calls the series a quartet, but it would be better served by the more rigorousterm tetralogy, which puts demands on both reviewer and reader to treat the series as a

unified work. The word derives from the Greek for four, the number of plays required ofeach playwright for the City Dionysia competition. Originally consisting of three

tragedies and a satyr play, the tetralogy was expected to reflect both narrative and


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thematic unity. Modern examples include Thomas Manns Joseph novels and JohnUpdikes Rabbit novels.

Is this telling you more than you think you need to know? Thats Byatt. Her quartet is agrandiose portrait of the cultural evolution of modern-day Britain: the blossoming after

the deprivations of World War II; the undoing of class-bound tradition; the gap between

people for whom the war was the formative experience and those who came after; thechanges in the family and in the lives of women.The broad sweep begins with the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and culminates

in the summer of 1968, when A Whistling Woman begins. But Byatts summer of 68 is aburlesque an oh so British one, blinkered and bookish, disassociated from the crises of

the outside world; where the Aquarian Conspiracy is running amok among gentry,academics, clergy, psychologists, media, students, and hippies alike; where Frederica, the

former literature teacher who owns no television, is hired as hostess of the firsttelevision show about television; and where the study of snails is a highpoint of

scientific sophistication.This world is framed and reframed with postmodern enthusiasm: in a university

conference on Body and Mind; in fragments of two books embedded within the novel; inpsychologists correspondence about their patients; in meetings of the universitys Non-

Maths Group, which met every fortnight to study maths; and in Fredericas televisionprogram, which focuses on a different person, idea, and thing in each episode.

The quartet begins simply enough in The Virgin in the Garden as a family drama that of

an academic family in Yorkshire, not unlike the one in which Byatt was raised. Meet thePotters: Bill, a histrionic, erudite schoolmaster; Winifred, his well-educated wife; their

intellectual daughters, blond, brilliant Stephanie, 21; redheaded, clever Frederica, 17; andtheir strange, mathematically gifted son, Marcus. They are a family of readers for whom

Shakespeare, Milton, Eliot, and Lawrence are subjects of daily interest. Their internaldrama is drawn into the production of a theatrical drama: Astrea, by Alexander

Wedderburn. Written to honor the coronation of Elizabeth II, the play is about QueenElizabeth I, who is portrayed by young Frederica.

Fredericas tale is a female coming of age story: young girl bent on dispensing withvirginity target of her pursuit, an older man, Alexander Wedderburn. Stephanies story

is more complex. Over her atheistic fathers disapproval, she marries Daniel Orton, aplump clergyman. It may be the triumph of love or it may be promising young woman

gives it all up for wrong man. Marcuss dark story of abuse by a mentor is a clearerportent of the descent to come.

One chapter in The Virgin in the Garden is called Women in Love, other chapters referto Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Freud. Byatts complex references to other writers, their

works, and ideas, are just beginning to entwine.Both the first and second novel open with a prologue, a leap forward in time, placing the

story to follow in the memory of a particular present. The Virgin in the Garden begins inLondons National Portrait Gallery in 1968, a visit which appears again in A Whistling

Woman, but there stops at the door to the museum. The first volume narrates a meeting ofFrederica Potter, Alexander Wedderburn, and Daniel Orton. Alexander is brooding on

the irreversibility of art and time. Frederica is nostalgic for All the beginning therewas in the 1950s.


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Still Life begins with an even greater leap forward to 1980, the latest date to appear in thefour novels. Again Frederica, Alexander and Daniel gather, this time at the Royal

Academy of Arts. Frederica makes a late entrance. Daniel is hoping she has news fromhis alienated son, Will. Alexander muses over The Yellow Chair, his play about Van

Gogh and Gauguin which features in the novel, another parallel to the first book.

If The Virgin in the Garden portrays youth, Still Life painstakingly dissects what follows:marriage, birth, and death. When their children empty the nest, Winifred and Bill areembittered by Marcus alienation. Fredericas misadventures at Cambridge and in France

figure prominently, but this books heart is the family of Stephanie and Daniel, who haveDaniels mother and Marcus living with them. Marcus is afraid of their first born, Will,

and afraid for him as well; their second born has a large hematoma on her face. In theend, in a plot twist narrated with stomach-turning intensity, the extended family is

undone and everyones life utterly transformed. Having completed her education,Frederica, in imprudent haste, marries a disturbingly unsuitable man.

Seemingly the most realistic, this novel has been called experimental by Byatt anexperiment elucidated by Alexander Wedderburn, a character who as author embodies

much of Byatt. In the prologue, he describes his play The Yellow Chair as a failedexperiment:

At first he had thought he could write a plain, exact verse with no figurative language, in

which a yellow chair was the thing itself, a yellow chair, as a round gold apple was anapple or a sunflower a sunflower . . . But it couldnt be done. Language was against him,

for a start. Metaphor lay coiled in the name sunflower, which not only turned towards butresembled the sun, the source of light.

Byatt has said that when she began these novels she was very much defending realism

against the rather trivial kind of experimental novels that were then going on in England.The presumption that James Joyces achievement meant, in the words of B.S. Johnson,

It will never again be possible to give people names, or to write narrative that goesforward, or to describe things, just made me very angry, Byatt said:

because it seemed to me that life was so varied and complex that it took up all your

energy, and yours would never be the same as anybody elses description unless youwere a bad writer. The only definition I give [of a bad novel] is: one, if its derivative,

totally derivative; and two, if the sentences are limp. I cant think of any other.The nice thing about a novel is that everything can go into it, because if youve got the

skill between sentence and sentence, you can change genre, you can change focus, youcan change the way the reader reads. And yet you can keep up this sort of quiet

momentum of narration. It is a wonderful form... You can do anything.

Indeed, shes been accused of doing anything and everything in the third and fourthnovels.

Babel Tower is a decided departure from the earlier volumes, challenging Blake, deSade, and Tolkien in their roles as sacred heroes of the counter-culture. Elements of

unreality and sustained parody appear. A trio of alternate beginnings is offered. Namestake on a Dickensian mix of the possible with the preposterous: Pippy Mammott, a


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woman who needs no further description; Rupert Parrott; the law firm Tiger and Pelt. OrLuk Lysgaard-Peacock and Elvet Gander, minor characters here, who like the bird motif

they exemplify, will assume major roles in the fourth volume. Discordant voicesconvene: the embedded novel Babbletower; legal depositions; Fredericas book reports

for a publisher; Flight North, her housemates ersatz-Tolkien tale for children; quotations

she collects under the name Laminations, a word which represents a way of survival forher, of being able to be all the things she was: language, sex, friendship, thought, just aslong as these were kept scrupulously separate, laminated, like geological strata....

The dualities are more blatant: two trials at the center of the plot; Fredericas affair withJohn Ottakar, an identical twin, who tests her ability to tell him apart from his brother.

The metaphors are barefaced. Daniel works in the basement of a London church. Upstairsa stained-glass window has been reassembled from the remains of an original destroyed

during World War II. Pieces have been rearranged randomly, new pieces added, creatingabstract images mixed with the occasional animal face: what falls apart always comes

back together as a fusion of the old with the new, another theme that runs through all fourbooks.

The novel charts the demise of Fredericas abusive marriage and her flight to Londonwith her young son, Leo. There she befriends Jude Mason, a strange man shades of her

brother living at the edge of society. He has authored a novel, Babbletower, about anidealistic group of men and women who escape Paris during the Terror to start a remote

utopian community. Isolated from society, Culvert, the groups leader, pushes freedomto ever more extreme limits until the group descends into violence. The issues

confronting Frederica education, individual freedom, the role of women, love andpassion are larger-than-life in the fable Babbletower, lengthy selections of which are

peppered throughout the novel.When Frederica helps Mason get his book published, it is quickly banned on grounds of

indecency. Frederica becomes involved in two trials: her own contested divorce, and theprosecution of Jude Mason and his publisher for obscenity. An outstanding trial scene has

Anthony Burgess and Alexander Wedderburn appearing for the Babbletower defense.Frederica is unable to defend herself against lies. She sees herself as a caged or netted

beast.... The net is made by words which do not describe what she feels is happening.Babbletower is exonerated on appeal.

In parallel to Babel Towers beginning about beginnings, A Whistling Woman beginswith a beginning about endings. The novel opens with the conclusion of the belabored

fantasy, Flight North, begun in Babel Tower. Populated by a talking thrush and bird-women called The Whistlers, it makes a daunting authors note, signifying symbolic

complexity, perhaps off-putting to those who havent read the previous volumes, andwarning those who have that closure is not ahead. At its end, we discover that its author

Agatha, single mother, flat mate of Frederica and Leo in South London, has been readingaloud. The children are appalled when its abrupt finale leaves many mysteries

unresolved:

There was no satisfaction in the end of the story. It was as though they had all beenstabbed. Agatha looked shaken by their vehemence; but closed her mouth, and closed her

hands on the book.


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She tells them her story ends where she always meant it to end.Two interconnected tragedies follow that interplay in diverse ways and include

established and new characters. Both embroil members of three New Age-influencedmilieu. The domain of liberal, humanist values includes academia, Fredericas family,

friends, fellow workers, and even student leaders in an absurdity of distortions and

deceptions. The politicos, consisting of anti-university revolutionaries, hippies, andhangers-on encamped on the universitys outskirts, are both anti-intellectual and, inpractice, anti- their own stated values. The religious cult blooming nearby attracts the

seriously spiritual, the merely religious, the mentally ill, and the undercover sociologist.Hostilities within this New Age universe create the explosive climax.

The action takes place in Fredericas native Yorkshire where her sometime lover, JohnOttakar, has taken an academic post at North Yorkshire University, newly established on

the campus where The Virgin in the Garden occurred. The vice-chancellor is organizingan international multidisciplinary Body-Mind Conference which will discuss questions

about learning and intelligence. The conference is intended to fulfill a number of needs:the new universitys requirement for prestige, students demands for academic relevance,

and the vice-chancellors interest in the quest for a Theory of Everything. Theseambitions will all be debased by the self-important politicos who disrupt the conference

and run riot for a few destructive hours that go down in the universitys history as theBattle.

Nearby a Quaker therapeutic community called the Spirits Tigers moves into amembers mansion. First met in Babel Tower, this group involves Marcus, Gideon Farrar,

and, eventually, the chancellors wife. Under the influence of a charismatic self-proclaimed Manichean named Joshua Lamb, the group gradually transforms itself into a

religious cult. Joshua is a former mental patient, who as a young boy was spared when hisfather murdered their family. Byatts chronicle of Joshuas gradual mental and emotional

reorganization of this horrendous trauma into a psychotic world view is equallycompelling and repulsive because Joshua is neither a freak nor a fraud, but a man

genuinely tormented by his demons and genuinely seeking God. This portrayal, bothcompassionate and unflinching, makes the book worth reading even for those unwilling

to approach the tetralogy as a whole. Its depiction of charisma and its destructive effecton those drawn to it mirrors that of Culvert in Babbletower. Here again, the force is

loose in the world, not confined to metafiction.Frederica, now 33, ties this all together, A pompous and superficial sort of a clever girl,

with a failed marriage behind her, as another character describes her. But Frederica is anobserver not a participant in the events she attends their finale as a reporter. She is also

an observer, rather than a participant, in the exuberance of 1960s London: She is not achild of her time in this. Having abandoned her literary pretensions, she publishes her

pastiche, Laminations. Critics declare it clever, but readers ignore it. Publishedconcurrently, Agathas fantasy is ignored by critics, but becomes a word-of-mouth

bestseller. Yet Frederica becomes a mini-celebrity as moderator of a dreadfullyhighbrow, BBC television talk show called Through the Looking-Glass. Like the novel

itself, the show is a rapid and elaborate joke. Frederica wears Laura Ashley paisleydresses to look like a knowing and very adult Alice. On this stage Byatt scripts a multi-

media exploration of late-1960s culture, both serious and pseudo, always commenting onthe plot lines. Discussion trios include Charles Dodgson, nonsense, and an antique


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mirror; Sigmund Freud, creativity, and a Picasso ceramic. Male viewers squirm withdiscomfort as women guests frankly discuss their periods during an episode on George

Eliot, Doris Lessings idea of Free Women, and a Tupperware bowl. The best of thisattains the comic exuberance of an Anglicized Carl Hiassen, gleefully justifying the call

in Julian Barnes Flauberts Parrot for A total ban on novels in which the main character

is a journalist or television presenter.When her lover requests that she give up her London career to join him in Yorkshire,Frederica confronts the conflict between romantic attachment and being a woman with a

solid place in the world, as she sees Agatha. Having sought this from the first novel,Frederica thinks, You were exhausted by trying to make a life, trying to make sense, and

by the life of the young, which depended on your own no-longer-young energy.For Frederica, by the novels end, Things became untrue, disproved overnight. So what

ending is this? As Romantic Ending, Frederica is pregnant and contemplating life withher new lover. This satisfies the romantic impulse, but betrays Fredericas struggle

through the four novels. As Desultory Ending, Frederica is wearing one of her LauraAshley dresses from Through the Looking-Glass to cover her bulging belly. At the

insistence of 10 year old Leo, she has just informed a man she had bedded casually of herpregnancy.

In either case, the lovers havent the slightest idea what to do but shall think ofsomething.

To a reader unfamiliar with the earlier books, this ending seems wide-open: her lovereven talks about an opportunity in Australia. But the prologue of Still Life depicts

Frederica ten years later with a different position, but still working for the BBC inLondon. Fredericas education and emancipation enable her to balance motherhood and

career, and to make choices about sex and reproduction. But in the end, neither educationnor emancipation relieves sense and sensibility from the force of passionate unreason.

As Peter Shaffers Mozart is accused of composing with too many notes, A WhistlingWoman has been accused of having simply too many ideas. Its symbols can be

bewildering spiders, webs, spirals, twins, mirrors, helixes, fires, birds. True, the birdsbecome more maddening than threatening, but nothing is remiss; Byatt is using every

possible postmodern trope as homage and as spoof.A Whistling Woman makes a strong counterpart to Babel Tower in scope and

complexity, and outdoes it in garish excess. The religious cult story ends in conflagration,as cults do; the demonstration ends in riot and destruction, as happens. The woman

living-her-sexually-liberated-life story ends in pregnancy, of course. Livelyembellishment makes A Whistling Woman the most lurid and unreal of the novels, the

satyr play. Babel Tower, by comparison, confines its sensationalism, and its violence with the important exception of husband abusing wife to the embedded fiction

Babbletower.A Whistling Woman shares with the other volumes Byatts poetic prose, her skills at

Flaubertian description, and her extraordinary emotional force. The narrative maytransfix or annoy, assuming the viewpoint she is expressing. Her skill as ventriloquist

was first exercised in Possessions faithful Victorian poetry, neglected by so manyreaders. Here, as in Babel Tower, unsympathetic voices speak with disquieting reality.

Notably, the most powerfully written scenes in the novels seldom involve the annoyingFrederica. But she shines in the light of Byatts flair for depicting friendships between


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men and women, and for conveying the complex pleasures of reading. Frederica isappealing in her friendship with Alexander Wedderburn, and engaging when reading,

writing, and teaching about reading.Each novel captures the unique sensibility of a specific historical moment in the life and

times of Frederica Potter. Each, with its distinctive structure, plumbs personal histories of

great intimacy. Each is an integral part of a more comprehensive whole, expressingByatts complex thinking while sustaining the historical and narrative momentum. Thenovels reflect each other pair to pair, and mirror each other within the pairs, composing a

unified work of remarkable self-reflective complexity. Undoubtedly, taken together as asingle work, Byatts four novels work better than they do on their own.

Does this all seem long-winded? Well, thats Byatt. (And so your reviewer.) Read it or

not most readers, she has said, are not going to read every word shes got to get it allin. And annoying or not, theres something to be said for this. Possession, the movie, was

disappointing because it didnt get it all/enough in. Mysteries are often most mysteriousin the details, the subplots. The Name of the Rose suggests itself.

Do not doubt that Byatt is worth reading for pleasure of a complicated kind. If AWhistling Woman is not for the first-time Byatt reader, any of her briefer works would

make a likely introduction, particularly the historical novellas Insects & Angels, or, myvote for her best novel yet, The Biographers Tale, an enigma of the Borges variety.

At the beginning of A Whistling Woman, Agathas voice quavers as she says This iswhere I always meant it to end. There have been calls by reviewers and Frederica fans

for Byatt to revisit Frederica and answer unsettled questions. But I hope she is finishedwith Frederica. Not because Frederica has become tiresome, which she has. Nor because

A Whistling Woman is not her best novel, which it isnt (the consensus remains withBabel Tower). No, I hope shes done with Frederica because, having completed her

project, she is free to write her best novel yet.

C. J. Sullivan Reynolds13 December 2003

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A Whistling Woman Review_C J Sullivan Reynolds