THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 9, 1996 TAG: 9606100190
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY AUDREY KNOTH
LENGTH: 84 lines
BABEL TOWER
A.S. BYATT
Random House. 619 pp. $25.95.
Most retrospectives of the 1960s focus on the hair, the dress, the music.
A.S. Byatt's new novel, Babel Tower, examines the use of words. No, not the slang of that era - rather, how thoughts were expressed and how individuals understood one another. With this work, Byatt, always an excellent writer, demonstrates herself to be among the truly brilliant.
The novel opens in England in 1964. In a preface for the book's U.S. edition, Byatt notes a number of events that influenced the ``moral atmosphere'' of the era. They include the prostitution scandal involving Secretary of State for War John Profumo; the Moor Murders, a set of cold-blooded killings by two young people; and the obscenity prosecutions of Lady Chatterley's Lover and Last Exit to Brooklyn.
While none of these incidents figures greatly in the Babel Tower, each helps American readers understand the deep intellectual and emotional jolt the country felt at the time. The novel illustrates a society where thought is becoming fragmented and, as in the story of the biblical Tower of Babel, where words that are meaningful to one individual or group may not be understandable to another.
The novel features a circle of intellectuals who appeared in two of Byatt's previous novels, The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life. At the center is Frederica Reiver. When Babel Tower begins, she has forsaken her Cambridge ambitions for marriage, motherhood and life on a country estate. The marriage has turned violent, however, and she flees to London with her young son.
There, she is plunged into a world where everyone seems to be wrestling with language, its meaning, its origin, its influence on thought.
Daniel, the husband of Frederica's now-dead sister, is coping with his grief by volunteering as a telephone crisis line counselor. He struggles to understand what the callers are really telling him, his ear ``hot with electric words that filter through the black shell he holds to his head.''
Frederica's friend Alexander, a playwright, serves on a government committee that's studying whether the teaching of grammar is still relevant. ``He has talked to the experts in language acquisition and learning psychology on the committee and now knows that small children are miracle-workers of sentence construction ex nihilo, and that once we understood this we need not drill, or force . . . ''
And Frederica takes a job teaching literature to art students. She tries to convey the significance of words to people who are dedicated to the visual. She tells them that a novel ``is made of a long thread of language, like knitting, thicker and thinner in patches. It is made in the head and has to be remade differently by whoever reads it, who will always remake it differently.''
The use of words becomes particularly personal for Frederica in two court trials. One is her divorce hearing, during which she attempts to speak meaningfully of her marriage. The other is the obscenity prosecution of a novel called Babbletower, which Frederica had discovered and recommended for publication.
Byatt laces Babel Tower with ruminations on a widely flung assortment of thinkers, such as linguist Noam Chomsky, poet Friedrich Nietzche, author D.H. Lawrence and philosopher Charles Fourier. It's all thought-provoking and eminently readable. Byatt offers line after line of jewel-like prose, including this passage about one of Frederica's friends taking a solitary walk:
``His thoughts buzz round him like a cloud of insects, of varying colours, sizes and liveliness. He thinks about the poem he is writing, a rich red honeycomb of a poem about a pomegranate. . . . He thinks of the blooded pink jelly of pomegranates, of the word `pomegranate,' round and spicy. He thinks of Persephone and is moved by the automatic power of the myth and is then repelled by caution. The myth is too big, too easy, too much for his pomegranate. He must be oblique.''
It is not necessary to have read Byatt's previous two books about these characters to become absorbed by Babel Tower. Word is that the author, who won the Booker Prize for her novel Possession, plans to craft a quartet from this series. Byatt's challenge will be to exceed the extraordinary accomplishment that is Babel Tower. MEMO: Audrey Knoth is a free-lance writer and executive director of
public relations at Goldman & Associates in Norfolk. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
A.S. Byatt explores the use of language in a fragmented England in
her novel ``Babel Tower.'' by CNB