Babel Tower [Paperback]

Byatt's style has been described as "postmodern Victorianism". This sounds a surreal phrase; but she does combine the tricksy literary gamesmanship of the postmodernists (stories within stories, self-referential narrative, occasional flash-forwards to the future) with a Victorian interest in intricacy of plot and characterisation. "Babel Tower" is a densely written tome of 600-plus pages, making extensive use of the story-within-a-story and riddled with Byatt's usual literary allusion; yet it reads like the tensest of thrillers. I stayed up all night reading it. For me, what makes the book so compelling is the utterly personal and visceral account of the violent breakdown of Frederica Potter's marriage to Nigel Reiver, and the traumas of her subsequent divorce. The reader will know Frederica from the previous two novels: cocky and fiercely intelligent. It is deeply shocking to find her, as the book opens, trapped by a domineering husband and his unmarried sisters in reluctant domesticity, isolated from her own friends, family and interests. If it can happen to her, it can happen to anyone. Frederica's escape, and subsequent divorce, have the intensity of a personal account and the pace of a thriller.

Interspersed with this are passages from the fictitious novel "Babbletower", the unlikely work of one of Frederica's acquaintances which becomes the subject of an obscenity trial when it is accepted for publication. It is a thoroughly nasty, "Lord of the Flies"-ish tale of the disintegration of a Utopian community, founded with high ideals of total personal freedom, into bullying and sexual sadism. The book's obscenity prosecution is intercut with Frederica's ongoing divorce proceedings, allowing Byatt to draw unexpected parallels.

Both "Babbletower" and "Babel Tower" itself can be viewed as dark parables of Sixties anything-goes liberalism. Like George Eliot before her (she has named "Middlemarch" as her favourite Victorian novel), Byatt is a (small "c") conservative revolutionary, and clearly views liberalism as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the establishment is patriarchical and often repressive; on the other hand, chuck-it-all-out-and-start-again rebelliousness is seen as a darkly destructive force. Freedom must not mean freedom to hurt other people.

This barely scratches the surface: this is a big, complex, intellectually exhilarating novel of ideas, as well as an emotionally involving personal drama. If there was a 6-star rating, I'd be giving it.

This is the third book in a trilogy (the others being 'The Virgin in the Garden' and 'Still Life'. It is definitely the best of the three. It entwines two themes rooted in the 1960s (the emancipation of the heroine, Frederica and an inquiry into the teaching of English) with a fantasy story - the subject of a blasphemy trial in Frederica's world. It is perhaps a bit self-indulgent in places (such as where Frederica experiments with cutting up and rearranging texts) but is a fascinating insight into the 1960s for this reviewer who was born to late to experience them.

In this expository and intellectually demanding novel, A S Byatt has created something of a monster, theory-rich and deeply involved with the life of the mind. There are two stories alternating with one another. One is the story of Frederica, a clever Cambridge graduate who has succumbed to marriage with a businessman, Nigel, who caters for her sexually but otherwise expects her to become a shire wife in his sumptuous mansion, living with their small child Leo and his two much older sisters, plus live-in nanny. As the novel opens Frederica is beginning to realise she has made a terrible mistake. She always meant to do more with her restless and highly evolved intellect, but husband Nigel is determined to control her life. There is a large cast of characters, including lecturers, clergymen, educationalists and artists in these sections of the book.

The second story is a medieval tale of Culvert and the Lady Roseace who have gathered together a band of motley adherents and travelled deep into the countryside to found a new society which will be free from all inhibitions and the demands of the old order. It gradually emerges that this story is actually sections from a novel written by one of the characters of Frederica's story and when it is declared obscene we get chapter and verse of the trial.

We are at the beginning of the 60s, pre-feminism, but at a time when the old order was breaking down. The shock of the Christine Keeler affair has just rocked the political foundations of the country and England is about to swing towards the freedoms from class and privilege which seem to be available.

This is a highly enjoyable novel which is so securely sited in its time and place that, for people who lived through those years, the pleasure in recognition is one of its chief virtues. The echoes of the Lady Chatterley trial in the prosecution of the book is black humour incarnate - the trial is given a central place, while, at the same time, the divorce case of Frederica and Nigel occupies a similarly detailed exposition. Byatt leaves nothing out. Acrimony and anxiety as well as dark, almost bitter wit, flavour these pages to delicious effect. I particularly enjoyed the sections dealing with the investigative committee looking into different kinds of education. Byatt's sharp ear for the theoretically outlandish is put to wickedly enjoyable use.

This is not for the faint-hearted, being 622 pages and sometimes (in the novel within the novel) delving into sado-masochism. Chiefly, though, this book is about us and is deeply English in its outlook and sensibility. What we have become, what we might have done with our lives, what we want, which is not necessarily what we think we want, and how we got to where we are now. It is absolutely marvellous.