Babel Tower [Paperback]

Babel Tower is about how people devoted to the life of the mind can survive in a society which is hostile to that life. Much of the book is taken up with trials, because a major character in this book is "society", which may be personified by juries, by expert witnesses, by journalists. Her character, Frederica, escapes from a marriage which first stultifies her mind, and then threatens to kill her. On a meagre living, she constructs a life and a support system that will give her young son what he needs, mentally and physically. But her husband is wealthy, and what he offers the boy seems superficially more wholesome, so in the trials for divorce and custody, Frederica is judged essentially for her surface, for what her life looks like from the outside.

In a parallel subplot, the writer Jude Mason has written a book that is judged for obscenity. But Mason wrote it as a moral book which tells the lessons he has learned in life. He is a vagrant. He was sexually abused in childhood. He understands how people torture those they love. In the book's obscenity trial, Mason, his neuroses, his appearance, and his intentions are judged and condemned; when his book is banned, he himself is banned.

And in the early part of the book, we have a debate about how children should be educated, and what they should learn. The proponents of throwing out classical and grammatical training win, and it is a blow for the life of the mind. In the end of the book we see the results.

Babel Tower has several interesting themes: 1) the way society reduces and [clouds] a person's identity, and the effect it has on them; 2) depravity and sadism as an integral part of human nature, where cruelty is the backside to love; 3) gender and class double-standards; 4) the debate of what constitutes a good education; 5) the impossibility of creating coherency between the disparate elements of your life, and what this does to you.

Byatt is a wise, courageous thinker who can turn a battle of ideas into an enthralling page-turner. But her understanding of life is what makes her work great.

Babel Tower was a great book. But you should read its prequel first, Still Life.

Frederica's position in life is one that many readers can, and want to identify with. In many ways, however, Byatt is not successful in making Frederica an appealing character. She is smart, but not emotional, and her rebellion lacks self-awareness. She seems to neither know nor care how her various relationships with men will be viewed by the outside world. Her love for her son Leo does appear to be genuine, but overall, she comes across as selfish rather than heroic or brave.

Jude Mason's story of an utopia gone wrong is not particularity original and the flowery language keeps the reader at distance. The connection between Mason and Frederica does not become apparent until over half way through the book, but which point the reader has either missed important information or has decided she/he doesn't care. Mason's character is not fully explored, such as his relationship to Daniel and the phone center, further weakening this section of the novel.

Overall, this is not Byatt's strongest work. It is not a unique story and is not particularly well told.

The huge book with the cover of 'Sade' cluttered with a motely of trans-human figures opens eerily, as one traverses through the translyvanian pages.

The opening isn't daunting anymore; the lamb bleats in the silence of an ordinary setting that starts of the story.

The thread idylic in discourse is a beginning so mellow and placid- the threads, rummage, pilferand plunder themselves to a scavenging in a myriad of narratives, arched in differences but seemingly in themselves to a oneness that wants to be called source.

The sheer beauty of each word in prose and poetry, lulls the reader to stay captivated and confused, trying hard to pierce the damoclian tips gorging itself in moments but does not, as the looking seems to be glasses many in oblivion.

The vison of cambridge hangs heavily on Fredirica, knitting the fabric of a cloak that is replusive to commerce, subversive in its attachment to the stratified part of the status called culture. The boorish Nigel and the intelllectual Fredrica are chaotically brought to a oneness of the body flowing in a wave of juices. The drying out is constant in wearying out of the body with the intellect in personas unreconciled. The minds and bodies weren't forced to attraction but attracted as unlike forces repeling like ones.

Semiotic underpinning of Nietzsche's theology -'Death Of God' is an excorsist translated into the existential of "Birth Of the Body"; The "Birth Of the Body" weaves through the penelopian folds of the labile, circumambulating into Sade's garden of mid-wifery. Sade and Nietzsche combine into 'ero-theistic' syncretism furling and unfurling the narrative in to the diffident and conservative anglicanism and the anomie-morphic renegades seeking else where to live in the confinement of eudaemonism. Though God couldn't be killed in grammer, the exercise of the same in imagination becomes palsy in retrospective gnome-gammonics.

The phalanstry of being broken away from the came-bridgian and the by chance meetimg of a lost poet in the wilderness of contraption, poses the dilemma of being fallible to the choices of being there as a being , being there as being for non being as being, as a being as Steins 'laughterIstic in the writorick.

Beauty to Fredricka is intellect in the momenteriness of being bodies and the eclipse of response in Nigel shadows the male triggered puerility of the possessor with the possessed.

Trajectory of being displaced of displacement dissloves Fredricka into the vagabond tramp whose independence is etched as the pleasure in making the ends meet. Individual dynamism of the societal in independence is the solitude of the gender longing in a bliss evolving evolution.

Social and political life is microscopically drifted on the canoe of the individual, struggling to be the mode

to be continued