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Babel Tower

by A. S. Byatt

Summary

This third installment in Byatt's planned series of four novels (after THE VIRGIN IN THE GARDEN and STILL LIFE). set in 1964, is about Frederica, who, with her four-year-old son, leaves her abusive husband Nigel and goes to London to earn her living alone. She becomes involved with the publication of a nihilistic novel, which is subsequently banned after a lengthy court case.

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Media Reviews

"Clever, with moments of wit and insight..."

   -- Kirkus

"In [Byatt's] enterprise, which blends sweeping moral realism and anxious estheticism, 'Middlemarch' meets 'The Golden Notebook'. Ms. Byatt is full of ambivalence about fiction's status, and full of old-fashioned novelistic ambition. If that makes her sound terribly serious, she is-but she is also a gifted satirist. In 'Babel Tower', she shows her usual impressive command of slippery ideas and the solidest of details, which...mix and move with new energy, even abandon. Ms. Byatt, a relentlessly talky novelist, has met a good match in the larger-than-life 60's."    -- Ann Hulbert

   -- New York Times Book Review

"...[M]any of Byatt's favorite literary devices and thematic concerns are on display in this imposing 625-page tome: the interpolated narrative, the parallel stories that both intersect and comment upon one another, a deliberate self-consciousness about language and literature, a preoccupation with violence and eroticism....'Babel Tower' is an extraordinarily ambitious, even admirable novel. Like much of Byatt's work, it makes great demands on its reader-demands that it only partially repays....[[H]er prodigious imagination and literary skills will keep the patient reader happily engaged within the fallen world of 'Babel Tower'."    -- Julia M. Klein

   -- Philadelphia Inquirer

Bibliographic Details

Publisher: Vintage Books
Published date: 1997
Size: 5.5 x 8.25 inches
Weight: 1.1 pounds

Publisher's Notes

At the heart of Babel Tower are two law cases, twin strands of the Establishments 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 schools 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.

Other Editions

• Hardcover - Random House Inc (1996) - from $1.00
• Paperback Reprint - Random House Inc (1997) - from $1.00

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