A. S. Byatt
A Whistling Woman
London: Chatto and Windus, 2002. Pp. 422. $38.95

Reviewed by Jane Campbell

A Whistling Woman concludes the quartet of novels which A. S. Byatt began in 1978 with The Virgin in the Garden. The first novel introduced the Potter family and their circle, living in North Yorkshire in the early 1950s. Its sequel, Still Life (1985), traced the family's progressespecially the experiences of the two sisters, Stephanie and Fredericato 1957, when Stephanie, who is married to Daniel Orton and the mother of two young children, dies in an accident and Frederica, at the age of twenty-one, graduates from Cambridge. Byatt did not return to her project until the mid-nineties. Together, Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman take the story through the sixties. Throughout the series, endings are resisted, and the last volume, true to the open form of most of Byatt's fiction, concludes with questions still unanswered and loose ends still untied. The strong narrative thread is carried throughout by Frederica, but there are chronological gaps, most notably the seven years between Stephanie's death and the beginning of Babel Tower, when Frederica reappears, miserably married to Nigel Reiver and the mother of four-year-old Leo, and Daniel, having survived the shock and grief of his wife's death, works on a telephone help line in London. The first two volumes are introduced by prologues that further disrupt the time sequence. The prologue to The Virgin is set in 1968, and part of its action is reconfigured in A Whistling Woman. This fourth volume ends in 1970, but the prologue to Still Life, dated 1980, has already marked the chronological end of the quartet. Byatt's story overflows its own boundaries.

Not only is linearity subverted, but our attention is dispersed in many directions. It has been clear from the beginning that Byatt was engaged in a much larger undertaking than the traditional family saga. In the second pair of novels in the series, the vastness of her project is especially apparent: She is depicting the artistic, intellectual, and social life of Britain in the years after World War Two. Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman are enriched by the work which Byatt produced in the decade after Still Life. The two large-scale volumes, Possession and Angels and Insects (the latter constituting two novellas), are major achievements in the re-imagining of historyespecially women's history; The Biographer's Tale (2000) extends her inquiries into science and biography. In these texts, as well as in the four volumes of short stories that began with Sugar (1987), the play between fiction and theory becomes more spontaneous, the movement among genres, including fairy tale, and the use of intertextuality (with paintings often appearing as texts) more assured. A Whistling Woman, with its multiplicity of discourses, its intellectual sweep, and the sheer scope and rapidity of its action, bears the fruit of the experimentation that has preceded it.

In this volume Frederica and her family recede somewhat; the Potter plot is only one of four interconnected narratives. At the new University of North Yorkshire, an academic conference on Body and Mind is organized; the university is threatened by a group of student protesters led by a professional rebel from the counterculture. Meanwhile, a third narrative is built around a religious commune where another struggle for power takes place. All three of these groups, like Frederica and Daniel in their own stories, are concerned with redefining the human in light of new knowledge. In the clash of languages that forms the book, the old binaries (sane/insane, altruistic/selfish, natural/unnatural, innate/learned) are all shown to be inadequate signposts. Byatt invents new characters, the most striking of whom is Joshua Ramsden, a religious visionary whose fervor leads the commune to its destruction. She also gives old characters new prominence. Academic figures from earlier booksGerard Wijnnobel, Vincent Hodgkiss, Luk Lysgaard-Peacockhave stronger voices now, while Frederica's old friend Alexander Wedderburn, whose play about Elizabeth I gave The Virgin in the Garden its title and whose second play about Van Gogh figured largely in Still Life, is relatively silent. Most interestingly, perhaps, Jacqueline Winwar, the young biological researcher, now appears in a story of women's history that parallels Frederica's. The vocabulary to articulate women's struggle for equality was still in the forming stages in the late sixties, and the experiences and needs of Jacqueline and Frederica are lived, not debated, in the text. In every area, however, the reader's retrospective judgment is invited. Implicitly warning against reductiveness and rigid systems (not least, about women), Byatt's text avoids dogmatic pronouncements by the narrator.

With considerable ingenuity, Byatt structures an ending that combines the tragic and the comic, the linear and the cyclical. In the midst of defeat and death, she offers the openness of surprise and renewal. Most importantly, perhaps, she has continued to create characters who live as compelling figures in the papery self-reflexive houses of postmodern fiction.