A Whistling Woman

Format:	Paperback 448 pages

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Synopsis

This work presents the triumphant conclusion to Byatt's quartet depicting the clashing forces in English life from the early 1950s to 1970. While 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, tumultuous events in her home county of Yorkshire threaten to change her life, and those of the people she loves. In the late 1960s, the world begins to split. Near the university, where the scientists Luk and Jacqueline are studying snails and neurones and the working of the brain, an 'anti-university' springs up. On the high moors nearby, a gentle therapeutic community is taken over by a turbulent, charismatic leader. Visions of blood and flames, of mirrors and doubles, share the refracting energy of Frederica's mosaic-like television shows. The languages of religion, myth and fairy-tale overlap with the terms of science and the new computer age. Darkness and light are in perpetual tension and the meaning of love itself seems to vanish; people flounder - often comically - to find their true sexual, intellectual and emotional identity.

Book details

Published
04/09/2003

Publisher
Vintage

ISBN
9780099443391

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Jacket review

'Rich, acerbic, and wise, A Whistling Woman is the ambitious novel of ideas we've come to expect from Byatt, and tackles nothing less than what it means to be human' Vogue

UK Kirkus review

A S Byatt has written numerous works of fiction and criticism, all justly acclaimed, but her Frederica Quartet, of which this is the final and greatest volume, is unparalleled in its ability to reach both heart and mind. In The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life and Babel Tower the reader has followed Frederica Potter from clever awkward schoolgirl to mother and lecturer, and now it is the end of the 1960s and Frederica is venturing onto television to present a new arts discussion programme. Meanwhile, in the moor-country where Frederica grew up, the freedom-loving spirit of the decade is being transmuted to something more sinister. The University of North Yorkshire is challenged by an 'anti-university' dedicated to escaping the restraints of the syllabus and reclaiming self-expression, and a religious community led by a damaged charismatic is led away from its therapeutic foundations to a terrifying form of Manichaeism. This is a novel foaming with ideas - art, science, love, freedom, redemption, evolution and a host of other themes flow from every page. Byatt's delight in making connections is obvious and infectious, especially in her descriptions of Frederica's dazzlingly erudite television programmes, and although she sometimes gets carried away from her narrative she always takes the reader with her. Her ability as a writer is also evident in the way she marshals her plot; despite the vast number of characters and ideas she never loses momentum, and the sense - increasingly - that something dreadful is going to happen. But her greatest achievement is her depiction of character. Early in the book Byatt says of Frederica's feelings for her son, Leo, 'the person she was recognised fiercely and absolutely the person he was, and respected him', and the same can be said for Byatt's attitude to her creations, each of whom - from sharp clever Frederica to the gentle Vice-Chancellor Wijnnobel and the obsessive cult leader Joshua Ramsden - seems to have an independent existence off the page as well as on it. This is an astonishing book, simultaneously gripping and intoxicating, and dazzling with the depth and range of its insight. A masterpiece. (Kirkus UK)