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Product Description
First published in 1964, this is the story of Anna Severell's struggle at the age of 17 to evolve her own personality in the shadow of her father, Henry Severell, a famous English novelist.
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Format:Paperback
A.S Byatt's first novel is the story of an angst-ridden teenage girl, Anna, daughter of a famous novelist, who both longs to emulate him and to break away and form her own life. The first part of the novel takes place in the summer after Anna has been expelled from her school (for running away; seemingly for no reason). While brooding on her future at her parents' lovely country home, Anna becomes entangled with a literary critic, Oliver, who is working on her father's fiction, and who urges her to make her own life and to find satisfaction in work, while at the same time constantly telling her that she herself is not creative. Anna is both attracted and slightly repelled by Oliver, but impressed enough by him to start working. She goes to study at Cambridge, where her depression continues. When a sweet but rather dim young aristocrat begins courting her, she decides that the only option open to her in life may be marriage. But this is not what Anna really wants. When Oliver reappears in her life, even though she knows he is married and even though she is fond of his wife, Anna begins an affair with him. The second part of Byatt's novel deals with this affair and its aftermath, and shows Anna's father (sheltered from life by his protective wife Caroline) finally having to take stock of his responsibilities towards his daughter.
I first read this book at 16 and didn't enjoy it much, finding it very depressing - reading it again 12 years later I was actually very impressed. Byatt may overdo Oliver's nasty qualities, but in many ways this working-class man, saved through education and yet desperately frustrated that he can't be a novelist himself, and trapped in an unhappy marriage, is a very sympathetic and powerful character. Although her descriptions of Henry the novelist's 'visionary' walks tip into the silly at times (where is Henry meant to sleep when he vanishes for days, and is he superhuman and able to exist without food?) she writes well on Henry's shyness, his tendency to 'hide behind' his fiction to compensate for his feelings of inadequacy as a man. Anna's dilemma - not sure who she is or what she's capable of - is powerfully portrayed, though, as with Oliver, she comes across as a little too truculent (and her feeling that if she can't be a novelist she has no other option but marriage dates this novel slightly, reminding us that women have only recently had plenty of options in life). Although some of the characters in the novel are depicted slightly harshly (Caroline only comes to life in brief passages, and her coldness to her daughter makes unpleasant reading, Jeremy, Anna's brother, comes across as a creep and Margaret as plain silly) and although the ending of the novel is rather inconclusive, there is much to enjoy here, and a kind of honest meeting of emotion head-on that Byatt has avoided in her more cleverly-constructed later works. Powerful stuff.
I first read this book at 16 and didn't enjoy it much, finding it very depressing - reading it again 12 years later I was actually very impressed. Byatt may overdo Oliver's nasty qualities, but in many ways this working-class man, saved through education and yet desperately frustrated that he can't be a novelist himself, and trapped in an unhappy marriage, is a very sympathetic and powerful character. Although her descriptions of Henry the novelist's 'visionary' walks tip into the silly at times (where is Henry meant to sleep when he vanishes for days, and is he superhuman and able to exist without food?) she writes well on Henry's shyness, his tendency to 'hide behind' his fiction to compensate for his feelings of inadequacy as a man. Anna's dilemma - not sure who she is or what she's capable of - is powerfully portrayed, though, as with Oliver, she comes across as a little too truculent (and her feeling that if she can't be a novelist she has no other option but marriage dates this novel slightly, reminding us that women have only recently had plenty of options in life). Although some of the characters in the novel are depicted slightly harshly (Caroline only comes to life in brief passages, and her coldness to her daughter makes unpleasant reading, Jeremy, Anna's brother, comes across as a creep and Margaret as plain silly) and although the ending of the novel is rather inconclusive, there is much to enjoy here, and a kind of honest meeting of emotion head-on that Byatt has avoided in her more cleverly-constructed later works. Powerful stuff.
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
After having read several of A.S. Byatt's novels before and feeling at the end of each one as though I'd just scaled Everest, I found The Shadow of the Sun a relative breeze.
It's still every bit as rich and luxuriant in detail and painstaking in character examination as her more recent work, but somehow manages to hurtle towards a wonderfully tense and unsatisfactory conclusion. The characters are almost perversely complex and genuinely intriguing; the reader is left not wanting the story to end. Highly recommended as a starting point for anybody wanting to cut their A.S. Byatt teeth.
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Since I'm an optimist, I'll start with the positive. Well-written as all of Byatt's prose, well-developed, well-thoughtout, etc. A fairly short novel (especially compared to most Byatt novels), I absorbed the intruiges in no time - and it is indeed an interesting story, mostly taking place inside people's heads, but what interesting heads. Also compared to other Byatt novels, it does not contain seemingly endless series of poetry (I regard that mostly as positive...). Generally I enjoyed this debut novel of hers - until (and here I get to the negative) the ending. A major let-down. I can't figure out whether Byatt truly intended for her main character (a young woman living in the shadow of a succesful writer for a father, searching for her own identity) to end up a lifeless being with no will of her own, content with a masochist for a lover - because this is not what change the novel all the way through hinted at. I was completely enraged with this girl, wanting to pull her out of the pages and beat her to senses! That could have been Byatt's intention, of course, showing us what NOT to become, but that was entirely what I got out of it: Anger.
Read her other novels in stead.
Read her other novels in stead.
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