Customer Reviews

Babel Tower

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

When people talk about Byatt, they tend to dwell on her academicism, on her allusions and quotes, on her historicism. But if this were all there were to Byatt, no one would read her. What makes Byatt a wonderful writer is that she has a tremendous sense of how the world works, how situations and relationships that seemed promising slowly unravel, how smart people can do stupid things, and how things and people who at first seem hopeless can wind up being wonderful. She understands process, and she understands complexity.

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.

This novel focuses on Frederica Potter's attempt to regain her autonomy after a stifling marriage and Jude Mason's "pornographic" novel and the trial against it. The relationship between these two stories is strained, and neither is especially compelling.

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.

Psyched Fugitive
Reflections on Byatt A.S's work ---Babel Tower

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

As with all of A. S. Byatt's books, this is a tour de force, provoking strong reactions and emotions from most readers. There are very moving parts of this book, mostly addressing Frederica's relationship with her young son, and some dealing with her ambivalence to her abusive husband. I also think this is a very strong reflection of English society in the early 60s, with all of its complexity and contradictions.

However, I did not have the overall strong personal reaction to Frederica here that I do to other Byatt heroines. I guess I have always found Frederica difficult, through all three of the books centering on her, and this doesn't help me resolve my ambivalence. (I also suspect that we are supposed to be somewhat ambivalent towayr her as a character, so this is probably very successful on Byatt's part!)

Compared with her Potter siblings Stephanie and Marcus, Frederica as the academically ambitious, sexually liberated egoist of A.S. Byatt's earlier The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life seemed to be cruising with aesthetic success through life's trials and errors, slowed only by the occasional adolescent speed bump. In Babel Tower she finally comes in for her own dark night of the soul, ablaze with the tracer bullets of a critical and unrelenting crossfire of personal conflicts. Byatt keeps Frederica the sensuous intellectual in a state of disequilibrium while providing Frederica the self-reflective observer with fresh clues and views toward solving the multidimensional puzzle of modern life. How will Frederica Potter, that scrappy perverse redhead who is suddenly looking a lot like Everywoman, find her way in a world where all the compass needles are spinning? Interweaving Frederica's experiences with the novel-within-a-novel Babbletower in a narrative structure which owes more to Possession than to the earlier Potter family sagas, Byatt considers the paradoxical failure of the permissive society to facilitate authentic self-expression. Familiar characters from the Yorkshire and Cambridge years join more exotic new acquaintances in 60's London for a thematically linked "happening" featuring an array of public and social institutions - education, law, religion, family, literature, art, mass culture - each of which, through its structures, vocabularies and rituals, influences the individual's efforts to author his/her own story. In the A. S. Byatt tradition, this enjoyable narrative slice of the life of the mind is formed with vivid description and studded with gems from literary greats.

It was fun to read but around the last hundred pages it just got a bit dense, especially the obscenity trial with the flow of experts. The ideas came too fast, too briefly, too *much*, though this may be an intentional effect, considering the title of the book. I loved the way the disparate ideas all connected to language... the entire book is one huge musing and exploration on language. My favorite fragment is the paraphrase from Nietzche, where language is not simply an expression or a container of thought but thought itself. All this, and a cool plot, too. Byatt is a reader's writer.

This book is huge. Not in page numbers, although its not exactly an overnighter, but in everything else. The story, or rather, the two stories, encompass a huge swathe of humanity. Byatt's penchant for the 'story-within-a-story' is also apparent in some of her other works, and she carries it off with aplomb. Catching the links between the modern tale and her fable of Babel Tower adds such a lot to the story. Her characters are all endearing and wonderful, understandably grey and mysterious, or despicable. Read it.

Byatt indulges her readers' fascination with literature in this novel about a woman on trial for her intellectualism and a talented (although repulsive) author whose novel is on trial for obscenity. If you love book reading, book education, book banning, book burning, and books-within-books, then this is the novel for you. Of course, this is no easy read, with literary allusions disperseded throughout and in-depth analyses of "Lady Chatterly's Lover" and "Women in Love" that seem for all the world taken from the author's doctoral thesis and fail to add much to the storyline. Nevertheless, this is an enjoyable work which ultimately centers on the love of a mother for her child and our appreciation of great writing.

Byatt indulges her readers' fascination with literature in this novel about a woman on trial for her intellectualism and a talented (although repulsive) author whose novel is on trial for obscenity. If you love book reading, book education, book banning, book burning, and books-within-books, then this is the novel for you. Of course, this is no easy read, with literary allusions disperseded throughout and in-depth analyses of "Lady Chatterly's Lover" and "Women in Love" that seem for all the world taken from the author's doctoral thesis and fail to add much to the storyline. Nevertheless, this is an enjoyable work which ultimately centers on the love of a mother for her child and our appreciation of great writing.

Boy, if there was ever a book to expose my lack of classical education, it's this. Clearly Byatt is incorporating the Persephone myth and the Tower of Babel into her tale of one woman in England's '60s, but lack of familiarity with the original myths may impede the reader's direct enjoyment. Not to say the book isn't enjoyable from beginning to end, but it was rather humbling for me! The story mostly follows Fredrica, a shining star at Cambridge who left everything behind to marry a man she is unsuited for. The main tension is supplied by her leaving after he throws an axe(!) at her, taking her son to live in London. A long struggle follows, but that's just a very small piece of the pie. It's difficult to pinpoint what the book is about, as it is so massive in scope and size, however the themes of lost loves and disappointment run rampant. An English review wrote: "...a book which deals with great and important subjects..." I'm not so sure that people of my age (28) and position will agree with this, for, despite the fine writing, its not really for us.