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Synopsis
This triumphant conclusion to A. S. Byatt's great quartet of postwar English life and manners stands on its own as a magical and thought-provoking novel of ideas made flesh.
Frederica, the spirited heroine of The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, and Babel Tower, falls almost by accident into a career in television in London, while tumultuous events in her home county of Yorkshire threaten to split her world. In the late 1960s, the languages of religion, myth, and fairytale overlap with the terms of science and the new computer age. The meaning of love itself seems to vanish and people flounder, often comically, while searching for their true sexual, intellectual, and emotional identities.
Through her wayward, lovingly drawn characters and breathtaking twists of plot, A. S. Byatt illuminates the effervescence of intellectual and social life in 1960s Britain.
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