- Hardcover: 448 pages
- Publisher: Chatto & Windus (Nov 26 2002)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0701173807
- ISBN-13: 978-0701173807
- Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 16 x 3.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 680 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,526,794 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
With A Whistling Woman, AS Byatt reaches the fourth and final instalment in her popular sequence of novels, after The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life and Babel Tower. It is now the summer of 1968. Newly divorced Frederica is living with Agatha and their children while pursuing a somewhat desultory affair with John Ottakar. But everything changes when John accepts a post at the University of North Yorkshire, while Frederica stumbles into a new career on television … A Whistling Woman is a busy, energetic novel, juggling its various plot strands--experimental scientists, psychiatric patients with nasty secrets, the upper echelons of university life--with the slick skill of a TV soap. Characters, familiar and new, are evoked with Byatt's customary easy vividness, but this time the exuberance is tempered by a noticeable sourness. One gets the distinct sense throughout the novel that by 1968 British society as we know it has started to spiral downhill. For Frederica, whereas "the carpet of the 50s was woven of many colours, in fine threads", the sixties were "like a fishing-net woven horribly loose and slack with only the odd very bright plastic object caught in its meshes, whilst everything else had rushed and flowed through, back into the undifferentiated ocean". Echoing Frederica's disillusion, Byatt's satire is more than usually acerbic towards various targets--in particular in her account of the newly politicised academy (which seems more a parody of 80s political correctness than of 60s activism). But for those dying to know what life brings to Frederica, then A Whistling Woman will be a welcome end to the years of waiting.--Alan Stewart
From Publishers Weekly
Byatt, like George Eliot and Doris Lessing, aims to show in her fiction the exemplary struggle between self-consciousness and the precepts of culture. She produces "novels of ideas"-which is an all too bloodless label for this beautifully realized, smart novel, the final volume of the tetralogy she began with The Virgin in the Garden. It is 1968. To capture the millenarian atmosphere of that year, Byatt situates her action around several different centers: a fashionable TV chat show hosted by Frederica Potter (whose divorce was the center of Babel Tower); an Anti-University going up in the moor near the University of North Yorkshire; a conference on body and mind being planned by the vice-chancellor of UNY; Dun Vale Hall, also in the moors near the university, an alternative therapy site whose titular head, R.D. Laing-like psychoanalyst Elvet Gander, is increasingly under the sway of his patient, the charismatic Joshua Ramsden; and UNY's biology department, where Luk Lysgaard-Peacock and Jacqueline Winwar are working within the relatively recent neo-Darwinian synthesis. As Frederica's producer sets up a documentary around the UNY conference, all the circles begin to overlap. Against the rationality of the novel's scientists is pitted the stubborn truth of their finding: that the brain isn't made for reason, but for the body. In Frederica, Byatt has produced a model proto-feminist: literate, shrewd and knowing, a character who could only be the product of centuries of Enlightenment. The countertheme belongs to the dark, ecstatic Ramsden, whose psychotic episodes begin to bleed into his essential, charismatic goodness. "We are shimmering on the edge of transfiguration," writes Gander. The terror, as Byatt shows, is what lies over that edge.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3.9 out of 5 stars (15 customer reviews)
36 of 36 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Daunting., Dec 21 2002
By Mary Whipple - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: A Whistling Woman (Hardcover)
Byatt offers huge challenges to the reader in this complex intellectual novel set in a university, a hospital for the insane, a religious commune, an Anti-University, and, finally, a London TV studio in the late 1960's. Continuing the lives of characters she has established earlier in Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, and Babel Tower, Byatt spends little time here developing them further or in creating an action-filled plot. Instead, she concentrates primarily on further developing the themes and philosophical questions which have occupied her earlier novels, using the characters and plot in an almost allegorical sense to illustrate these issues.This is not light entertainment or escape reading. In the first hundred pages, Byatt introduces approximately forty characters, their roles, and their interrelationships, all of whom figure in the action in the novel. Frederica Potter, the main character in the previous novels, is the main character here, but other characters also receive close attention. All of these are deeply concerned with some aspect of memory, learning, creativity, or spirituality as it impacts issues of good and evil, reality, nature, love, and language.
Luk Lysgaard-Peacock and Jacqueline Winwar, engaged in pure science, are studying the population genetics of a variety of snail. Sir Gerard Wijnnobel, running the University of North Yorkshire, is planning an important Body-Mind Conference in which Hodder Pinsky, famous for cognitive psycho-linguistics and the use of computers to explore "the deep structure of linguistic competence" will debate Theobald Eichenbaum, a man who differs in his ideas of the learning process and of the growth of societies. Other characters include an institutionalized, charismatic visionary who practices Manichaeism, a sociologist who goes undercover at a secluded commune, several characters whose lives have been touched by violence, and a man working to destroy the traditional university system. Frederica herself, as hostess of a television program, "Through the Looking Glass," believes that the ability to change the world and its politics rests with the language of television, which "might take the place of the hearth in 19th century fiction."
Challenging and thoughtful, the novel is far more compelling in its ideas than its action, much of which is talked-about, rather than recreated. Long sections of academic papers, detailed letters between two researchers, the full agenda for the Mind-Body Conference, and descriptions of places and even furnishings severely limit the dramatic tension, however much they may illustrate the themes. Hugely conceived and richly imagined, this novel never lets up, giving the reader an intellectual workout rare in modern fiction. Mary Whipple
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wow, Mar 3 2003
By Elizabeth Hendry - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: A Whistling Woman (Hardcover)
While reading A Whistling Woman, I kept wishing that more novelists wrote as well, as wonderfully, as A.S. Byatt. A Whistling Woman is a terrific novel, in my opinion almost as good as her phenomenal Possession. The story of Frederica Potter comes to a close (at least for us readers) at the end of the novel, and what a story it is--not for plotting reasons, but for how it is told. A Whistling Woman is an intelligently written, thoughtful and thought provoking novel of ideas focusing on one woman, Frederica, and a number of others who touch her life. Byatt shifts back and forth between plot lines and characters in a manner similar to Iris Murdoch. Like Murdoch, Byatt draws heavily from philisophical learning. All of the characters are highly intelligent and not afraid to show it. This is a wonderful, wonderful novel--one of the best I have read in quite some time. Enjoy!
13 of 14 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Laminations, Feb 10 2003
By Severnbeach "Far from Home" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: A Whistling Woman (Hardcover)
This book is so much bigger than the pages it encompasses. Yes, it has a weak narrative arc compared with more popular fiction but the layers of metaphor and meaning enrich the story while the ending leaves all things possible. One word defines the core of this book. A word I had not heard before and one I looked up in the dictionary - Syzygy. This word means both "opposition" and "conjunction," and this is what this novel is all about. Opposite schools of thought and scholarly disciplines are seen to be in conjunction when discussed on Fredrica's TV show, the anti-university tries to be opposite to the real university but remains in conjunction in a weird way - it cannot survive as an anti-university without a university, the Ottaker Twins are in a strange syzygy dance throughout the novel and end up scarred by the same experience. Apart from this idea of conjunction and opposition, which I guess defined a lot of the sixties, there are many other wonderful literary games in the book. Fredrica's search for the meaning of metaphor plays a small but important part in our understanding of the whole while Bill Potter's epiphany about art is a fascinating place for this curmudgeon character to end up at. Philosophy is pitted against psychology, science against symbolism and love against destruction and everything ends up being linked at the end of the day. This is my favorite of the Fredrica books as I believe that A.S. Byatt has achieved more clarity here than ever before - or maybe I'm just getting it better!
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