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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Middlemarch" for the Sixties ?, 11 Feb 2004
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.
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