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Overview
At the heart of Babel Tower are two law cases, twin strands of the Establishment's web, that shape the story: a painful divorce and custody suit and the prosecution of an "obscene" book. Frederica, the independent young heroine, is involved in both. She startled her intellectual circle of friends by marrying a young country squire, whose violent streak has now been turned against her. Fleeing to London with their young son, she gets a teaching job in an art school, where she is thrown into the thick of the new decade. Poets and painters are denying the value of the past, fostering dreams of rebellion, which focus around a strange, charismatic figure — the near-naked, unkempt and smelly Jude Mason, with his flowing gray hair, a hippie before his time.
We feel the growing unease, the undertones of sex and cruelty. The tension erupts over his novel Babbletower, set in a past revolutionary era, where a band of people retire to a castle to found an ideal community. In this book, as in the courtrooms, as in the art school's haphazard classes and on the committee set up to study "the teaching of language," people function increasingly in groups. Many are obsessed with protecting the young, but the fashionable notion of children as innocent and free slowly comes to seem wishful, and perilous.
Babel Tower is the third, following The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life, of a planned quartet of novels set in different mid-century time frames. The personal and legal crises of Frederica mirror those of the age. This is the decade of the Beatles, the Death of God, the birth of computer languages. In Byatt's vision, the presiding genius of the 1960s seems to be a blend of the Marquis de Sade and The Hobbit. The resulting confusion, charted with a brilliant imaginative sympathy, is as comic as it is threatening and bizarre.
Synopsis
At the heart of Babel Tower are two law cases, twin strands of the Establishment's web, that shape the story: a painful divorce and custody suit and the prosecution of an "obscene" book. Frederica, the independent young heroine, is involved in both. She startled her intellectual circle of friends by marrying a young country squire, whose violent streak has now been turned against her. Fleeing to London with their young son, she gets a teaching job in an art school, where she is thrown into the thick of the new decade. Poets and painters are denying the value of the past, fostering dreams of rebellion, which focus around a strange, charismatic figure — the near-naked, unkempt and smelly Jude Mason, with his flowing gray hair, a hippie before his time.
We feel the growing unease, the undertones of sex and cruelty. The tension erupts over his novel Babbletower, set in a past revolutionary era, where a band of people retire to a castle to found an ideal community. In this book, as in the courtrooms, as in the art school's haphazard classes and on the committee set up to study "the teaching of language," people function increasingly in groups. Many are obsessed with protecting the young, but the fashionable notion of children as innocent and free slowly comes to seem wishful, and perilous.
Babel Tower is the third, following The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life, of a planned quartet of novels set in different mid-century time frames. The personal and legal crises of Frederica mirror those of the age. This is the decade of the Beatles, the Death of God, the birth of computer languages. In Byatt's vision, the presiding genius of the 1960s seems to be a blend of the Marquis de Sade and The Hobbit. The resulting confusion, charted with a brilliant imaginative sympathy, is as comic as it is threatening and bizarre.
Laura Miller
Although A.S. Byatt's new novel is set in 1960s London and the action centers around two very modern trials -- a divorce/custody battle and an obscenity prosecution -- and although the characters read and argue about Kafka and D.H. Lawrence and the heroine is a woman struggling for independence, the heart of Babel Tower belongs to the 19th century. This is the sort of fat, serious, passionate book that George Eliot and Thomas Hardy wrote, a good read and an ambitious creation by an author who behaves as if James Joyce never existed -- and gets away with it.
The novel begins as the fiercely bookish Frederica Reiver realizes she's made a terrible and irrevocable mistake. Stricken by the accidental death of her sister and dazzled by sex, she married Nigel, a rich, wolfish squire with whom she produced one beloved son, Leo. The marriage has degenerated into captivity and violence, and she flees for the city, Leo in tow, to resume her life as an intellectual surrounded by her Cambridge-educated friends. "I must work," Frederica avers, landing a job with a publisher who, on her recommendation, puts out a book, "Babeltower: A Tale for the Children of Our Time," about an anything-goes utopian community where everything goes very, very bad. The hair-raising Sadean hijinks depicted by the book's author, Jude Mason, land both author and publisher in court.
If Byatt never successfully captures the fizzy, fragmented sensibility of the pop-maddened '60s, she does something more rare: frame the usually simplified "social issues" of the era with the agonized moral complexity of her Victorian forebearers. There are no easy, self-righteous answers here. As for sheer fun, Byatt flaunts her gift for literary mimickry to excellent effect. From Jude Mason's creepily over-ripe fairy tale prose, to a scientific treatise on snail sexuality, to the minutes of a committee charged with reporting on "language and children," to tantalizing slivers from an engaging fantasy-adventure yarn, this novel, like all of Byatt's, teems with the voices of a dozen imaginary books.
Byatt has described her love of the novel as something "you can put the whole world into." Often enough, however, she and her characters have made a world of books. "They are her books," thinks Frederica of her collection, "and not only her books, but part of herself." Byatt writes like a novelist who believes that her work really can matter that deeply, and more often than not, she's right. -- Salon
Editorials
Laura Miller
Although A.S. Byatt's new novel is set in 1960s London and the action centers around two very modern trials -- a divorce/custody battle and an obscenity prosecution -- and although the characters read and argue about Kafka and D.H. Lawrence and the heroine is a woman struggling for independence, the heart of Babel Tower belongs to the 19th century. This is the sort of fat, serious, passionate book that George Eliot and Thomas Hardy wrote, a good read and an ambitious creation by an author who behaves as if James Joyce never existed -- and gets away with it.
The novel begins as the fiercely bookish Frederica Reiver realizes she's made a terrible and irrevocable mistake. Stricken by the accidental death of her sister and dazzled by sex, she married Nigel, a rich, wolfish squire with whom she produced one beloved son, Leo. The marriage has degenerated into captivity and violence, and she flees for the city, Leo in tow, to resume her life as an intellectual surrounded by her Cambridge-educated friends. "I must work," Frederica avers, landing a job with a publisher who, on her recommendation, puts out a book, "Babeltower: A Tale for the Children of Our Time," about an anything-goes utopian community where everything goes very, very bad. The hair-raising Sadean hijinks depicted by the book's author, Jude Mason, land both author and publisher in court.
If Byatt never successfully captures the fizzy, fragmented sensibility of the pop-maddened '60s, she does something more rare: frame the usually simplified "social issues" of the era with the agonized moral complexity of her Victorian forebearers. There are no easy, self-righteous answers here. As for sheer fun, Byatt flaunts her gift for literary mimickry to excellent effect. From Jude Mason's creepily over-ripe fairy tale prose, to a scientific treatise on snail sexuality, to the minutes of a committee charged with reporting on "language and children," to tantalizing slivers from an engaging fantasy-adventure yarn, this novel, like all of Byatt's, teems with the voices of a dozen imaginary books.
Byatt has described her love of the novel as something "you can put the whole world into." Often enough, however, she and her characters have made a world of books. "They are her books," thinks Frederica of her collection, "and not only her books, but part of herself." Byatt writes like a novelist who believes that her work really can matter that deeply, and more often than not, she's right. -- Salon
Publishers Weekly -
One does not usually associate Byatt, who has often worked on a small-even miniature-scale, with the notion of an epic novel; but that, in terms of scope and ambition, is just what she has created here. It is an invigorating spectacle, as well as a welcome reminder of how a fine novelist can illuminate a whole era in ways not even the most skilled social historian can. Set in England in the mid-1960s, the novel focuses on Frederica, an attractive, highly intelligent and bookish young woman who cut a swath at Cambridge University, then married Nigel Reiver, a well-to-do member of the landed gentry with a country house, two doting sisters and a way of life that soon seems utterly stifling to Frederica. Her small son, Leo, passionately loved by both parents, is soon the only vital element in her existence; and when friends from her former life come calling, and are rudely rebuffed by Nigel, Frederica rebels. When Nigel, ever apologetic, but convinced it is for her own good, starts knocking her about, Frederica flees to London, with Leo clinging to her in desperation. Thereafter, the book is an account of the drawn-out custody battle over Leo, climaxing in a divorce hearing that exquisitely renders the issues of a woman's independence. More impressively, it is a riveting account of changing mores, as England begins to emerge from its ancient certainties into the shifting priorities, freedoms and follies of the "Swinging Sixties." Among the manifestations of such changes is a book written by an eccentric, Nietzschean acquaintance of Frederica's-a fantasy, with sado-erotic overtones, about the pleasures and limits of freedom. This book (a reprise of the book-within-a-book device Byatt employed in Possession) becomes the focus of another court case when its author is prosecuted for obscenity. Through the two cases (which leap from the page much more enthrallingly, convincingly and thought-provokingly than most legal thrillers) Byatt represents a whole society trying to come to terms with new values. The narrative is mesmerisingly readable, except for long excerpts from Babbletower, the prosecuted novel, and Frederica's own rather hermetic attempts at self-expression-though even these are perfectly believable in their own right. In many ways, this is a book about language, and how it is used to conceal and reveal (there is a wonderfuly satirical subplot about a commission examining English educational methods). But it also employs language, brilliantly, to create a large cast of characters whose struggles, anxieties and small triumphs are at once specific to a time and place, and universal. Simultaneous Random AudioBook; author tour. (May)Library Journal
After collecting her Booker Award (Matisse Stories, LJ 4/1/95) and scrapping with Martin Amis, Byatt found time to write a novel set against the shifting moral, political, and musical sands of the 1960s.Kirkus Reviews
An ambitious, intelligent work that, while aiming to get Britain's swinging '60s down pat, unfortunately scants the usual fictional elements, putting in their place a mordant and always perceptive historical critique.This third installment in Byatt's planned quartet (after The Virgin in the Garden, 1979; Still Life, 1985) is set in that small, cozy Brit world where everyone knows everyone else because they've all been to prep school or Oxbridge together. They're insular people, smug about their politics, their unbelief, and their intellectual acumen, which, paradoxically perhaps, makes them particularly vulnerable to change. In 1964, as the story begins, Frederica, married to Nigel and the mother of four-year-old Leo, wants to put her Cambridge English degree to use. But Nigel, a quick-tempered male chauvinist, won't hear of it, of course, so after he's roughed her up a couple of times, Frederica flees with Leo to London. There, old Cambridge pals find work for her, and she begins to make a life. Revolution, however, is in the air: Students test the limits, drugs are omnipresent, grammar is under assault, the environment is polluted, nuclear war threatens, and sexual freedom is a given—all of which is crystallized in a work of fiction, Babbletower: A Tale for the Children of Our Time, that Frederica reads for a publisher and recommends. Written by Jude, a homeless vagrant with a pedigree, the novel—chapters of which are excerpted here—graphically describes a dystopia where freedom has reached its ultimate and nihilistic limits. Babbletower, and Frederica's desire to work and raise her child as a divorced woman, define the times, and the lengthy court cases in which the book is banned and Frederica granted her divorce are both fully covered. Nothing is really resolved, though the publisher of Babbletower eventually wins on appeal and Frederica gets her freedom, since what matters is the Zeitgeist, not the characters.
Clever, with moments of wit and insight, but a somewhat lumbering dance to the music of time. Not Byatt's best.