BOOK REVIEW: A Whistling Woman

AS Byatt

Chatto & Windus, 16.99

A Whistling Woman marks the culmination of a quartet of AS Byatt novels charting English life from the Fifties to 1970. It’s the summer of 1968 and Frederica, the central protagonist of the previous three novels - The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life and Babel Tower - has given up her teaching position and landed a job as a TV talk show host on the high-brow programme Through the Looking Glass.

Meanwhile, her lover John has taken up a post at the North Yorkshire University where a student revolt has led to the creation of an anti-university. Sixties mayhem abounds everywhere, not least on the nearby moor where a quiet therapeutic community is being taken over by darker forces intent on establishing some devilish cult.

Punctuated by a series of letters between academics and those entrapped in the therapy group, the narrative spirals towards an impending conference which is due to be addressed by two academics with dubious histories. One is a suspected National Socialist sympathiser with a dodgy line on eugenics, the other is left-leaning and radical, but with possible CIA connections. It’s enough to raise the hackles of the most liberal of students, never mind the rent-a-mob loony lefties.

Here the students are enthralled in a campaign against the ideological state apparatus, opting to spend valuable time on 36-hour-long television-watching orgies against passive consumerism, culminating in televisions being smashed to pieces with hammers.

Sixties’ students are the target of some easy humour. Byatt writes with unbridled animosity towards them, yet scarcely criticises the anachronistic, conservative institutions that housed the revolt.

Moreover, she refuses to mention the world outside of the university that created such turmoil. What happened to the general strike in France or the war in Vietnam? She merely succeeds in reducing the events of 1968 to an upper-class, ivory-tower revolt by little rich kids with too much spare time.

A former academic herself, Byatt uses the university settings to again reveal the range of her knowledge, and takes great delight in informing the reader of the origins of words.

She also takes time to pass comment on, among other areas, Chomsky and linguistics, Freud and psychoanalysis, the merits of cognitive psychology, Wittgenstein and mathematics, before making observations on the reproductions of Guevara and Warhol and speculating on the politics of representation.

There are also countless literary references weaved into the text, from Milton to F Scott Fitzgerald.

The broad sweep of Byatt’s literary and intellectual enquiry is undoubtedly impressive. There’s a section where Frederica refers to her own previous books which had been described by reviewers as "irritatingly clever". It’s clearly a reference to some of Byatt’s previous books that have received similar criticism.

But the problem is not that A Whistling Woman is clever - the more clever writers the better. The problem is that her subject matter and her ‘cleverness’ are not always integrated into the narrative. Thus, although the novel comes in at over 400 pages, its narrative could be contained in considerably less.