DJ Taylor
BABEL TOWER by AS Byatt (Vintage, R57,95)
AS BYATT’S novel The Virgin in the Garden (1978), a chronicle of the self-absorbed Potter family and its two contending sisters, Stephanie and Frederica, showed every sign of turning into a kind of symbolist masque. Still Life (1985), its successor, was less experimental but still managed to double as a debate about signification.
In Babel Tower, now in paperback, this cast, with several deletions and many additions, moves onward to 1964-5. Harold Wilson is on course for Downing Street, the scientists are uncoiling DNA spirals, and the King’s Road, Chelsea, is pullulating with improbable human traffic.
Frederica finds herself at the centre of this ferment. A philosophical semi-vagrant named Jude Mason has written a Sadean novel, Babbletower, which – after Frederica helps get it published -becomes a contemporary cause clbre.
In a novel whose subject is transparently order and limitation, it was inevitable that Byatt’s chief metaphorical vehicle should be language itself. Much of the first half is taken up with the deliberations of a government committee of inquiry into the teaching of English in schools, and if Babel Tower has a foundation stone it is the section in which the committee’s chairman meditates on linguistic structures. Byatt’s own language blows effortlessly along.
She takes risks in Babel Tower, which not only includes huge gobbets of Babbletower, but examples of Frederica’s readers’ reports and her “collaging” (the literary mode of the moment). In a sense, though, the biggest risk was taken at the close of Still Life when she killed off Stephanie and left us only the intolerable Frederica. What redeems her is the passion to work and create that enables her to endure not only her vicious husband but a host of minor characters with names straight out of Iris Murdoch (Elvet Gander, Laurence Ounce …).
Many who bought Byatt’s Booker-winning Possession (1990) will be perplexed by this novel, but it is the better book.