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Synopsis
A Whistling Woman portrays the antic, thrilling, and dangerous period of the late ‘60s as seen through the eyes of a woman whose life is forever changed by her times.
Frederica Potter, a smart, spirited 33-year-old single mother, lucks into a job hosting a groundbreaking television talk show based in London. Meanwhile, in her native Yorkshire where her lover is involved in academic research, the university is planning a prestigious conference on body and mind, and a group of students and agitators is establishing an “anti-university.” And nearby a therapeutic community is beginning to take the shape of a religious cult under the influence of its charismatic religious leader.
A Whistling Woman is a brilliant and thought-provoking meditation on psychology, science, religion, ethics, and radicalism, and their effects on ordinary lives.
The New York Times
By far the strongest parts of A Whistling Woman have to do with the unfolding drama of a Quaker therapeutic community called the Spirit's Tigers, which is gradually taken over and turned into a religious cult by a former mental patient named Joshua Lamb, who, while still a ''plump, pitiable boy,'' witnessed his father's murder of his mother and sister. Byatt's writing about Lamb's gradual descent into self-protective madness and the way in which unbearable personal trauma becomes organized into a lunatically meaningful philosophical system is superb, and demonstrates the empathic powers that are available to her every bit as much as her daunting intellectual reach. — Daphne Merkin