An ending but not a conclusion
Philip Hensher
A WHISTLING WOMAN by A. S. Byatt
Chatto & Windus. f16.99, pp.423, ISBN 0701173807
With A Whistling Woman, A.S. Byatt concludes one of the grandest and most ambitious fictional projects anyone has undertaken since the war. This fourth and final novel in a sequence begun with The Virgin in the Garden and continued in Still Life and Babel Tower is full of new energy and a sense of new directions, and it is a very different novel in tone and technique from the first novel in the series, published 25 years ago. She is the most questing and restless of novelists, and decades of learning, ceaseless reinvention and imaginative growth have taken her a very long way from her starting point. There is, undeniably, a perceptible and sharp break in tone between the second and the third volume; by the third, the late-period fascinations with fables, with systems of ideology, with science, had moved into the foreground. An Edwardian like Arnold Bennett would have been interested by the first volume: this last volume, on the other hand, could only look to them like something H. G. Wells's Eloi would enjoy. We have come a long way.
The cycle has unarguably lost some unity of tone in the course of the long gestation. For instance, the novelist's increasing interest in allegory results in some very mild discords, so that the characters from the first volumes, who tend to be called high-realist things like Frederica Potter or Daniel Orton, have to talk to characters called Luk Lysgaard-Peacock or Elvet Gander. In practice, such discords add to the allure, the richness of the mixture. And, somehow, there is a sense of unity, of a single central direction and a single, unchanged, directing intelligence. Now that it is complete, the cycle seems contained by one unchanging imaginative concept; this volume clarifies the intellectual structure of the whole cycle.
The individual volumes have proved hard nuts to crack, and often their significance for the literary landscape as a whole has sunk in only slowly. It's generally conceded, now, what an important landmark in 1970s fiction The Virgin in the Garden is. Its conception, marrying an account of a specific historical moment with a reconstruction of the age's fantasies, and all told through personal histories of great intimacy, frankly baffled most reviewers at the time. By now, readers probably need to be reminded how extraordinarily original it was; in the last 25 years, it has engendered dozens of imitations. Its interest in history and its willingness to venture deep into extravagant fantasy set the tone for the English novel in the decades to come. Its faultless marriage of a provincial drama and a dazzlingly European technique would, however, prove hard to rival.
By now, everyone concedes the significance of The Virgin in the Garden, but I think in time the third volume, Babel Tower. will come to be seen as at least as
significant a moment in the novel of the 1990s. That one, too, rather puzzled reviewers, and it is still very underrated, but it is both a novel of daunting virtuosity and a statement of grand moral and historical force. Most of Byatt's novels are at some level an argument; The Virgin in the Garden is a long argument with E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf. and Babel Tower is a forceful confrontation with the sacred monsters of the 1960s counter-culture. Blake. Sade and Tolkien. Possession, that magnificently rigorous showpiece of the sybaritic intellect, had displayed the dazzling virtuosity Byatt had acquired: the ventriloquy in Babel Tower is just as impressive, and even when it is impersonating some very unsympathetic or preposterous accents, there is never any sense of mockery. It is devastating, and unanswerable, because it never caricatures what it despises.
Just as an argument, Babel Tower is a compelling piece of work, but what I think will ultimately propel it into a key position in the literature of the decade is its extraordinary and innovative technique. Byatt is, I think, a novelist with great respect for the realist novel, and extremely skilled in its means; all her novels excel in what Henry James was so good at, orchestrating a concise and ordinary physical action which summarises a long stretch of drama, or painting psychology indirectly, with suggestive and emphatic objects — the moment of formal perfection everyone remembers from Babel Tower is Frederica's small son embracing her wounded leg as she runs through a dark forest. Nevertheless, she doesn't work entirely within classic realist conventions, and the audacious thing about Babel Tower was that its form, as well as its interests, seemed to be organised by the sardonic genius of Foucault. Everything tended to dissolve into the constraint of social structures, conversations becoming interrogations or courtroom cross-examinations; experience seemed inseparable from narrative; increasingly elaborate intellectual systems exerted beneficial or baleful force on individual lives. The brilliance and originality of the novel lay in the fact that it was not content merely to discuss the great intellectual and social structures which Foucault wrote about, but that it allowed its own form to be influenced by them, and to flirt both with the inchoate and with elements of a ruthless machinery.
So what is the cycle about? What gives it the powerful unity now evident? At one level, it is the compelling story of one woman's life over 20 years, a life which takes on a secondary, emblematic interest, how women's minds and lives changed between the early 1950s and the 1970s. But I think, more centrally, what binds the books together is a decision to tell a twofold history of England; the first, the social conditions, the possibilities of lives, questions of public events; the second, an account of the imaginative fantasies which seized the English mind as the decades passed. The successive dreams of The Faerie Queene, of Van Gogh's lonely sense of vocation, of Blake and Sade and Tolkien are explored, and they bear as clearly on the minds of the characters as, say, the changes in family law and censorship do. In this last book, the dreams are not primarily literary; they are fantasies about grander intellectual systems; some rational, like science, some primeval and cruel, like astronomy. The book has moved outwards, but that double scheme remains, and is pursued to the end.
A Whistling Woman introduces quite a new tone into the cycle: previous volumes were capable of extraordinary violence, but none leaves such an impression of violence unleashed as this does. In part, it is to do with recurrent images of fire and blood — the novel's action starts from an inexplicable act of violence, and returns to the violence within sane and insane minds, and to the amoral violence of observed nature. The conversations, too, even on the most abstract matters, are often teetering on the verge of furious arguments — this, of course, is a very fair reflection of the tone of the intellectual debate of the period. Most of all, I think one becomes aware of the extraordinary violence innate in the act of storytelling — how narratives subjugate reality, how they cruelly torment and distort the lives of anyone who listens to them. The opening pages of the novel are a tour de force, as a fairy tale goes horribly wrong, and the brutal energy of Byatt's own mastery of narrative is afterwards something that the reader both submits to and observes. (This, at the very beginning, is the moment when one appreciates how far this infinitely protean novelist has moved on even since Babel Tower; the marvellous inwardnesses of The Biographer's Tale have in the interim quite transformed the Byatt landscape). Stories destroy lives; and when The Winter's Tale enters, that most beautiful and evil play, persuading us that a happy ending may justify the sacrifice of decades of a woman's life, we watch the phantom of Frederica's dead sister rise up, and start to wonder what other sacrifices have been made on the altars of art.
It is always tempting, with this novelist, to talk about the ideas or the observations, unfailingly rich and tantalising. The superb mastery of it, however, is in what Arnold Bennett would have admired: the skill of the novelist with character, story, world. The plot has a driving ferocity, the huge and extraordinary cast marshalled with exceptional dexterity. The physical details are effortlessly redolent of the period, and exactly evocative of the individual psychology. One could quote anything, but two examples stick in my mind; a character has a vase filled with honesty and peacock feathers; a mildly deranged character, Lady Wijnnobel, paints her downstairs cloakroom black, with spatterings of stars. The impressive thing about these tiny touches is that one always feels that, yes, that is exactly what this particular mind would have done in this particular place and time. Most novels about the late1960s and early 1970s are satisfied with randomly assigned pine tables from Habitat. Byatt's details are exact, and peculiar to each specific character, and, more often than not, make a general, abstract point unemphatically — in a way, it is terribly funny that most early-1970s intellectuals thought honesty was something you bought, stuck in a vase and threw out when you were bored with it. This is a novel with grand, general interests, but the mastery over the particular never flags.
I freely admit that I am still coming to terms with A Whistling Woman — it is a book which deserves criticism rather than a review. It is, too, a novel where the conventional approach of a reviewer, to run through the plot, seems at once peculiarly inadequate — enough to say that the story is immediately beguiling, and maintains its tautness to the end. This is a novel quite out of the ordinary, and its atmosphere and flavour are very difficult to explain or convey. The last volume of a remarkable cycle, it dramatically insists on not tying up knots in the plot, not coming to any conclusions, but rather setting off in new intellectual directions and leaving its huge cast on the verge of the rest of their lives; to that extent there is nothing final about it.
But as one reads, there is a feeling of a series of almost musically overwhelming cadences, one after another, and the grandeur of the last pages comes from the long line of people, one after the other, slipping away quietly, one story after another reaching an ending, but no conclusion or solution. Byatt sometimes picks an argument with the long centuries of literature in England; sometimes, those august ranks have opened up and welcomed the heckler into the company of undeniable greatness. I don't see how you can deny that. And here, in the bewilderingly new and thunderously authoritative last pages, I felt something like the marvellous and sonorous movements of the last act of Cymbeline, the radiant complexities at the end of the fourth book of The Faerie Queene; moments when the reader suddenly appreciates in retrospect the gigantic scale and boldness of what, until that point, had seemed airily simple and innocently absorbing. I could not imagine a reader who did not reach the end without wanting to return to the beginning of the first novel. This is a novel, a cycle of novels, a body of work for the rest of your life.
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