‘A whistling woman…,’ A.S. Byatt said, smiling at the Coolidge Corner Theatre crowd that had come to watch her read from her latest novel last Saturday afternoon, ‘…and a crowing hen is neither good for God nor men.’
The old saying, Byatt explained, is one her grandmother was fond of repeating to her as a little girl growing up in England. Now, years later, it’s the title of the Booker Prize-winning author’s ambitious new novel. A Whistling Woman is the last book in a series of four that began with The Virgin in the Garden and revolves around the life of Frederica Potter, a woman living in England from the early 1950s to 1970.
A former senior lecturer of English at the University College London, Byatt has published numerous works of fiction and non-fiction over the years. This past summer, her 1990 novel Possession was made into a film starring Gwyneth Paltrow.
A Whistling Woman is set in London in the late 1960s and follows the life of Frederica Potter as she rejects a life of academia in favor of hosting her own television talk show in which strange interviews are conducted on topics that range from eliminating science altogether to what constitutes appropriate Tupperware. She leaves her hometown of Yorkshire, where a cult has taken over a therapeutic center, and moves to London. Here, a secondary story develops about a young scientist named Jacqueline who studies snails at a university and has problems forming relationships. Near the university, an ‘Anti-University’ is being established whose goal is to challenge traditional academia with an experimental curriculum that allows anyone to study any topic they desire.
Needless to say, the novel is placed in the 1960s for a reasonthere’s a lot that Byatt wants to tell us about this time period. However, Byatt said on Saturday that despite what many of her critics have concluded, A Whistling Woman was anything but planned when she began the series so many years ago. ‘This is the culmination of a novel that started in 1963. It is an exploratory booknot just an historical one,’ she said.
Indeed, A Whistling Woman is not a novel that shies away from confronting the issues. The book jacket even seems to come up short by limiting the book to an exploration of ‘ideas, contradictions, scientific discoveries, ethical conflicts, sly humor, and wonderful humanity.’ I would argue that religious discovery, literary critique and the age-old nature vs. nurture debate also factor in pretty heavily. If anything, Byatt focuses on too many issues.
A self-diagnosed feminist, Byatt fits snugly into the 1960s as she details Frederica’s adventurous television talk show exploits and struggles for independence. After one particularly racy conversation, Byatt paints a vivid picture of cautious celebration amongst the women after their feelings have been exposed and they are unsure how to proceed:
The programme ended with the three, faintly baffled, faintly ribald faces, and a nervous gust of laughter. Frederica thought, seeing them later, that they were all girl-women. It was in the air, at the time. Penny Komuves had a small, square, slightly puppy-like face, with large dark eyes under a Quant schoolgirl fringe and bob. Julia Corbett, a generation older, had delicate crowsfeet at the corners of her luminous eyes … she wore a large number of pretty silver rings and bracelets, and a necklace of silver and enamel hearts and flowers … The carefully made-up faces appeared to hide, not reveal, the thoughts behind them.
A Whistling Woman is rich with odd details even when the subject matter borders the surreal, similar to the writing of Annie Proloux, but Byatt also utilizes a reserved formality that never fails to slap the reader back to reality. It seems especially fitting that the novel begins with a fantastically descriptive fairy tale written by a woman named Agatha. Just when the reader is getting caught up in this strange narrative, Byatt ends the story and abruptly puts the reader back into reality:
‘And that,’ said Agatha to the assembeled listeners, ‘ is the end of the story.’ There was an appalled silence.
Leo said ‘The end?’
The end,’ said Agatha.
It was the summer of 1968. The telling of the story had begun two years ago, and had continued, almost every Sunday, until that day.
Though Byatt is undoubtedly a skilled writer, a sense of intellectual and academic restlessness pervades her writing. Almost all her characters are deeply philosophicalconscious of the world they live in on a scale that seems inconsistent with the ordinary person. Furthermore, because Byatt is a scholar of English literature, she is not afraid to mention Kirkegaard and Pavlov in the same sentence as a reference to Alice in Wonderland, a style that may dissuade readers from A Whistling Woman. But even if she’s not the kind of mainstream, accessible writer that one would see on ‘Oprah,’ Byatt is an author worth readingif only for the fact that, in the end, she’s always willing to poke fun at her own profession.
When Byatt was asked last Saturday what she thought about the fact that after years of writing essays and books on the criticism of others, now critics are writing about her novels, she could only shake her head. ‘I won’t read anything they write, but I’ll tell you one thing,’ Byatt said. ‘I will look at them with a tremendous amount of respect.’