AS Byatt - A Whistling Woman

The concluding novel in AS Byatt's quartet about the brilliant and eccentric Potter family begins, appropriately enough, with a fairy-tale quest coming to an end. Agatha Mond, the single mother and civil servant who lives with the divorced Frederica and her son in South London, has been keeping friends and family amused with a fantasy novel. The children are "appalled" at the ending, which as Frederica's son Leo points out, tells them nothing about various key elements for which they've "waited and waited". Nevertheless, Agatha tells them, her story ends where she always meant it to - and we must infer that A Whistling Woman does too.

To many, this will come as a parallel disappointment. AS Byatt wrote two novels before The Virgin in The Garden brought her to a wider readership in 1978, and her fans have followed her with increasing interest ever since. Set mostly in 1953, the year of the coronation, the first novel took the device of a theatrical performance in a Yorkshire country house to explore the Potter family and themes of ambition and sexuality. Frederica, then a bright schoolgirl, played the Virgin Queen and tried, desperately, to lose her own virginity. In the second, Still Life, Frederica discovered France, then Cambridge while her married sister Stephanie struggled with motherhood and the Church before meeting an untimely death. By Babel Tower, Frederica's marriage to a rich, conventional bully has gone horribly wrong, and she escapes with her son to London where her affairs and friends became entangled in the metafiction of Babel Tower, a fantasy novel that attracted a prosecution for obscenity [check - blasphemy?].

One pleasure of Byatt's quartet is her interest in and skill at creating complex characters, moving through a period in recent history. Minor people, such as Alexander Wedderburn, who began as an amateur playwright now become a BBC director; academic witnesses in the Babel Tower trial reappear, as do Frederica's lover John Ottakar and her brother Marcus who finally accepts his homosexuality. As two new characters, Jacqueline Winwar and Luk Lysgaard-Peacock study the effects of heredity and environment on snails these same factors conflict in the human beings Byatt summons for inspection.

Frederica, a rare portrait of an intellectual woman who is also a carnal one, remains central to each novel. Her boniness, bossiness and lack of sentiment risk alienating the reader, but she lives in the imagination because of it. In Babel Tower, she tried to leave her son behind when running away from her husband; here, although she believes there isn't an ounce of maternal feeling in her she recognises that "the person she was recognised fiercely and absolutely the person [Leo] was, and respected him." I think most red-heads will see Frederica as a portrait from the outside, not the inside, because what this misses is the vulnerability and generosity that exist beneath the contra mundum attitude of the genetic freak. In A Whistling Woman, the on-going drama is whether she will follow her lover to the University of North Yorkshire. Instead, she chooses to stay in London, forging a career as a minor celebrity in the Joan Bakewell mould. While Jacqueline experiences what would now be called sexual harassment, Frederica somehow navigates the 1960s without ever encountering any professional prejudice, and this, too, strains credibility.

Byatt is the self-appointed heir of two great women authors, George Eliot and Iris Murdoch, combining the phenomenal intellectual curiosity of the first with the highly patterned symbolic structures of the second. However, her two best books - Possession, and the novella Morpho Eugenia - show that her real gifts lie in describing the world of the senses. What you revel in as a reader are not, in fact, the second-hand ideas but the remarkable evocations of colour, taste, what it feels like to be intelligent (not what it is to be so) and, above all, erotic passion.

When she permits herself, Byatt is also a superb story-teller. The influence of Tolkien pervades this novel at every turn, with Marcus's eventual lover thinking of himself as a hobbit, the University and the Anti-University at its gates being seen as the Two Towers. The rebellious students chant (and misquote) the marching song of the Ents; Agatha Mond's novel becomes a cult best-seller, much as Lord of the Rings did earlier. This goes beyond period effect and is a more successful theme than the repeated and unenlightening references to birds. The novel's central preoccupation is the struggle between the fictional and the real, the delusional and the truthful, and it is these that form the incendiary climax before being partially resolved by Frederica's belated discovery of love.

Yet it is in her descriptions of the painful life and death of Joshua Ramsden, former theology student and survivor of a murderous father that Byatt's prose catches fire. Concerning suffering she is always both exact and poetic, and the religious hysteria that grips Ramsden and turns him into a disastrously messianic figure, is a stupendous piece of writing conveying obsession with the compassion and dispassion of the greatest authors. The passages concerning the rise of the "anti-University" alongside the University, are also vivid, and unexpectedly funny but seem to be by another novelist. The effort to make them mesh is palpable.

The biggest problem with the novel is its use of scientific advances, particularly in biology. The hand of CP Snow lies heavily on A Whistling Woman, which makes every effort to unite the "two cultures". What is aggravating is that the natural audience for Byatt's works are precisely those who will already be familiar with the works of Stephen Pinker, Matt Ridley, E.O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins. Seeing their ideas on natural selection or animal behaviour voiced through absurdly-named characters such as Luk Lysgaard-Peacock becomes mildly insulting. Similarly, the TV programme that Francesca fronts, archly dressed as Alice Through the Looking Glass, suggests connections between subjects for debate that are indicative of the concerns of the era without really advancing our understanding of, or feeling for, the characters. The danger of the novel of ideas (as with the latest Tom Stoppard plays) is that you see the writer's study not their imagination. To succeed they need artistic inspiration rather than what seems to be a hunger to somehow encapsulate exciting discoveries in a fictional carapace.

Towards the end of the novel, Luk says, "Is there any real difference between a really intelligent piece of work and a creative piece of work? I don't think so." Critics must beware of believing that an author believes any of the opinions he or she puts into the mouth of their creations, but this is precisely what is wrong with A Whistling Woman. Byatt is never less than intelligent, but we do not turn to fiction for intelligence, unless it be of a more subtle kind.

The Times August 2002