A Whistling Woman

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

Penelope Mesic

As A Whistling Woman opens, it becomes clear that the three previous volumesof A.S. Byatt's magnificent quartet of modern British life (The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life and Babel Tower) have led inexorably to the feminism, divisive protest and cultural ferment of the late 1960s.

Frederica Potter, the protagonist of the earlier novels, is now a single mother in her early thirties teaching literature at a London art school. Beset by radical students protesting the "authoritarianism" of lectures and reading lists, she finds she must "[give] up teaching because she wanted to teach." Brilliant and adaptable, she lucks into a job hosting a pioneering talk show at the BBC. This proves a clever narrative choice. The show captures the appealing qualities of the period—intellectual playfulness, a then-new mix of high and low culture and a frank examination of issues previously taboo. More important, it puts Frederica at the center of opinions and events.

This is crucial for Byatt, who displays a great-hearted determination to present a cross section of society ardent with ideas. Biologists and geneticists, psychotherapists and clerics, playwrights and poets and pop stars and fledgling computer scientists—even a charismatic madman—stream through this final volume. This gives Byatt the opportunity to put into her characters' hands every sort of literary product: pop song, committee report, scientific study, protest poem, sermon, letter, journal, commonplace book. Her command of such forms is effortless, joyous and exact, and the result is characters who seem to embody a separate universe of ideas.

Byatt briefly defers the hubbub of twentieth-century thought by choosing to begin her novel with the charm and simplicity of myth. The first character to speak is a small, comically self-important thrush, the narrator of the concluding episode of an epic bedtime story Frederica's friend Agatha is reading to their children. The fairy tale tells of three young travelers journeying through the bleak land of the Whistlers, bird women with beaks like knives who are "angry because no one can hear [their] speech." Those strong but lonely compound creatures, the Whistlers, suggest women such as Agatha and Frederica, who are raising their children as single parents and seeking relationships with men capable of regarding women's work to be as valuable as their own. The final chapter of this fairy tale is a key to the novel's two main narrative strands, one relating to the emerging feminism of the 1960s and the other to the mastery of knowledge in all its forms, from the genetic code to the language of dreams.

Many of the characters struggling with the issues occupying women like Frederica peopled the earlier volumes of Byatt's quartet, particularly those encountered in Yorkshire, England, Frederica's childhood home, which she revisits here. It is in Yorkshire that the struggle between tradition and liberation plays out on a larger scale, as the local university and its kindly administrator are confronted by a disruptive, ragtag "anti-university" that is calling for the abolishment of requirements such as foreign language.

Meanwhile, beyond the university and the protest movement lies a remote farm, where, as the novel unfolds, an episode of grisly domestic abuse has taken place. During the course of the book, the farm becomes the farthest outpost of rash inquiry and disorder, beginning as a psychiatric halfway house and ending as the headquarters of a religious cult.

The figure around whom the cult forms, Josh Lamb, is mentally disturbed, yet uncannily insightful and magnetic. The survivor of his father's homicidal religious mania, Lamb is alive to evil and its potential to overwhelm good. He is plunged into horrific, near-constant visions. Once, ecstatic, he sees "hundreds of thousands of creatures made of light, men, women, winged things and swimming things, all dripping with brilliance ... swarm[ing] up and down toward the moon...." Another time, he topples headlong into a claustrophobic hell where a false moon "gave off a miserable light, like inadequate fluorescent tubing in cheap canteens." There his family, in postures of violent death, yammer and clack, and a voice commands him: "You must take in what you do not want, to finish the Work." The precision with which Byatt tracks the progress of the group Lamb first joins as a patient, then comes to lead, is absolutely chilling.

With so much going on, in so many different heads, a reader might envision the accumulated throng of Byatt's characters pressing forward, each eager to dominate the narrative. Yet none alone offers a complete vision of the world, and the book's inside joke is that fiction embraces and contains all manner of other mental realms. This teeming realm, so crammed with idea and incident, so intertwined with opinion and description that the richness of it is like a drug, must finally have a last page. And even though Byatt has from the first prepared us, by showing us the children, outraged when the story of the Whistlers is suddenly over, the reader ends up sharing their reaction: "an appalled silence," a sense of loss and grief at having now to live outside the book.

Publishers Weekly

Byatt, like George Eliot and Doris Lessing, aims to show in her fiction the exemplary struggle between self-consciousness and the precepts of culture. She produces "novels of ideas"-which is an all too bloodless label for this beautifully realized, smart novel, the final volume of the tetralogy she began with The Virgin in the Garden. It is 1968. To capture the millenarian atmosphere of that year, Byatt situates her action around several different centers: a fashionable TV chat show hosted by Frederica Potter (whose divorce was the center of Babel Tower); an Anti-University going up in the moor near the University of North Yorkshire; a conference on body and mind being planned by the vice-chancellor of UNY; Dun Vale Hall, also in the moors near the university, an alternative therapy site whose titular head, R.D. Laing-like psychoanalyst Elvet Gander, is increasingly under the sway of his patient, the charismatic Joshua Ramsden; and UNY's biology department, where Luk Lysgaard-Peacock and Jacqueline Winwar are working within the relatively recent neo-Darwinian synthesis. As Frederica's producer sets up a documentary around the UNY conference, all the circles begin to overlap. Against the rationality of the novel's scientists is pitted the stubborn truth of their finding: that the brain isn't made for reason, but for the body. In Frederica, Byatt has produced a model proto-feminist: literate, shrewd and knowing, a character who could only be the product of centuries of Enlightenment. The countertheme belongs to the dark, ecstatic Ramsden, whose psychotic episodes begin to bleed into his essential, charismatic goodness. "We are shimmering on the edge of transfiguration," writes Gander. The terror, as Byatt shows, is what lies over that edge. (Dec. 17) Forecast: The scope of Byatt's quartet of novels, the first of which was published in 1979, is impressive. The release of the final installment should prompt overviews of all four and appreciations of Byatt's career to date. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Mirror images pervade Byatt's new work, a study of England in the Swinging Sixties that suggests exactly what went wrong. Having abandoned university teaching, Frederica Potter finds herself the host of a cutting-edge TV show called Through the Looking-Glass that is bringing her some unwanted fame. She's a single mom struggling with young son Leo, who is having trouble learning how to read, and in addition can't commit to lover John, whose twin, Paul, heads up a rock band called Zag and the Syzygy Zy-goats. Events conspire to draw these characters to a Body- Mind conference at a northern university plagued by an Anti-University, even as a religious cult is getting started at a farm across the way. Byatt (Possession) does a remarkable job of balancing her interlaced plots, which can barely be summed up here, but the structure is so dense that occasionally one feels one cannot enter. Nevertheless, this is intelligent, polished writing. For all collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 8/02]-Edward Cone, New York Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The life of the mind and the confusions of the spirit confront one another to often telling effect in Byatt's lavishly orchestrated eighth novel. This big, somewhat unruly book concludes the quartet Byatt began 25 years ago with The Virgin in the Garden (1978), which, along with its hefty successors, Still Life (1985) and Babel Tower (1996), focused with mandarin precision on the moral and intellectual growth of ever-optimistic Frederica Potter. As this story begins, Frederica, still hoping to become a writer, is employed as a television hostess and interviewer-a position that "educates" her through introductions to a society full of eccentrics, cranks, and obsessives. There's a hint of C.P. Snow's vast Strangers and Brothers series in the broad sociopolitical range, which extends to the minutiae of genetic research and computer science, the politics of higher education (including the establishment of a combative "anti-university," on the outskirts of an actual college), and a seeming epidemic of pathological violence, one instance of which produces a radical religious group that calls itself "Spirit's Tigers." A great deal of specific information is thus crammed into this formidably complex story, but the sometimes oppressively learned Byatt has a compensatory gift for locating what she has elsewhere called "passions of the mind" in vivid and interesting characters-painstakingly real, searching ones like the well-meaning (and genuinely intelligent) Frederica and her brother Marcus, a compassionate, thoughtful scientist-and flamboyant Dickensian grotesques, including New Age psychoanalyst Elvet Gander, pop poet of the moment Mickey Impey, and fundamentalist charismatic "Josh Lamb," amuscular Christian with a murderous agenda. Images of blood and fire are worked (rather laboriously) into the narrative, yet whenever the reader's brain isn't simply too overburdened, A Whistling Woman excites and satisfies, because Byatt has learned from her idol Iris Murdoch the technique of creating characters whose obsessions appear to rise from deep within, and appropriate their rich, mysterious personalities. Not a perfect work, but an unarguably major one. Byatt's quartet is well worth the time and attention it demands.