She has never been afraid of a symbol, and the bewilderment which the book's ideas induce isn't helped by the tropes which proliferate throughout. Every major idea in the years Byatt is depicting needs a mention before the book can be ended. 'Bursting' catches it nicely, because there are simply too many ideas. The hostility between these motley elements and the university leads eventually to the conflagration with which the book, and the quartet, more or less concludes.Ī Whistling Woman is a novel which, as the blurb says, is 'bursting with ideas'.

The moors are also home to a variety of maniacs, dissenters and delusionists, many of whom harbour an animus towards the university, and who are designed to represent various aspects of the late-60s counter-culture. When not in London, the novel spends much of its time on the Yorkshire moors, where Frederica's intermittent lover, John Ottakar, has taken up a post in a 'university'. The plot is too rangy to be usefully summarised, but Frederica Potter at least makes a financial success of herself in this one: forging a career as a TV presenter on a cultural discussion programme. For A Whistling Woman, which covers the period from 1968 to 1970, suffers from the same sins which beset its forerunners - the excessive use of symbols (spiders, spirals, fire, webs, mirrors), a narrative gnarliness, an overbearing sense of allegory - but it suffers from them even more acutely. Nearly a quarter of a century on, Byatt's ambition is unmistakable but the success of her project is increasingly less clear. Looking back, we can see that the publication of the first novel in the quartet, The Virgin in the Garden (1978), was the beginning of a gigantic effort of historiography. More than this, by using her skills as a pasticheur and letting her prose take on the texture of whichever idea, person, or writer she is describing at a given moment, Byatt has attempted to bring her readers to feel the past, rather than simply telling them about it. Byatt, by contrast, has tried to write history as seen from ground level, by creating a central character - the sparky, spiky Frederica Potter - and pushing her forwards through two decades of English life. A more modestly inclined writer, confronted with such a massive historical terrain, might have settled upon a technique of high-altitude mapping noting familiar landmarks and large-scale cultural contours.

The virgin in the garden by as byatt