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A review by paulcowdell
Babel Tower by A.S. Byatt
1.0
It came as a genuine surprise to me that an author so self-consciously working on Big Ideas, including (and contained within) The Big Novel, should have laboured at such great length to produce such a staggeringly trivial and inconsequential book.
Part of the problem is that the book is endlessly about writers writing about writing. (It's noticeable that all of the authors she cites/invokes throughout the book's parading of its own intellectual weight contrived to deal with problems of writing in the process of writing about something else). I differ with fans of Literary Fiction over whether this has any merit in and of itself, but Byatt's interminable Serious Ruminations are simultaneously wholly orthodox and staid, banal, and vapidly unresolved. She piles up the evidence, but the higher the pile the less she obviously has to say.
Perhaps the most revealing aspect of its abject failure on its own terms is its character as an extremely dull Historical Novel (a genre capable of even greater dullness than Literary Fiction, especially when performed as tediously and perfunctorily as the penultimate chapter here). I think we are supposed to view Frederica's course through the changing thought patterns of the 1960s as revelatory, but Byatt fails because she is never unflinching about the challenges to the previous orthodoxy. When portraying the artistic and moralistic provocateurs of the period (many of whom genuinely were silly and vacuous and legitimately deserving of ridicule) she's all too quick to resort to caricatures even lazier than the figures she's parodying. But before you suggest it, the thinking is so slovenly that these don't constitute acute satires.
More importantly, she does this because she is stacking the deck against these intellectual challenges in a quite transparent way. I was suckered into reading this by a thumbnail portrait of the Marquis de Sade on the dustjacket to the hardback (well, more fool me, so I have to accept total responsibility for the time I have wasted reading it), but the fictional novel that is prosecuted for obscenity in the book - Jude Mason's Babbletower - is entirely fraudulent as any kind of representation of Sade's gauntlet in the face of civilisation. Like every other bit of represented writing here, including Frederica's reluctant and unconvincing experimentation with Burroughs's cut-ups, Babbletower is striving to articulate only the most tiresomely hidebound moralising. Byatt's flirtation with the Moors Murders trial is peripheral and unengaged, as if she wants to make some cheap hostile comment but not really get at its core. So, in a prep-school matronly style, we are told that Brady read Sade, and Babbletower is compared with Sade in court, and that should be enough for anyone, so let's just go back to the storyline of Frederica's divorce, shall we?
Byatt can write, that is clear enough, but why? About 290 pages in I was wondering why I'd bothered. Another dozen pages and I was past halfway, so thought I might as well persist, but there is no fundamental unfolding of thought or argument beyond that point either. At some points, Byatt just gives up and throws 'evidence' together randomly: the trouble is that the reader can thus see how little is actually going on. I was only (!) 15o pages from the end when I learned that this dull rambling comprised only one-quarter of a tetralogy, raising the prospect of another 1800 pages of such self-indulgent and unaware reflection.
At one point Byatt inadvertently sums up the entire project. 'Frederica thinks: there is not enough point to all this, or else I am missing something. It is a thought she is often to have, in those years'. Then having recognised this, why the other 617 pages? Even if they were necessary for Byatt's own satisfaction (although not apparently her clarification), it by no means requires the rest of us to have to wade through them with her.
Part of the problem is that the book is endlessly about writers writing about writing. (It's noticeable that all of the authors she cites/invokes throughout the book's parading of its own intellectual weight contrived to deal with problems of writing in the process of writing about something else). I differ with fans of Literary Fiction over whether this has any merit in and of itself, but Byatt's interminable Serious Ruminations are simultaneously wholly orthodox and staid, banal, and vapidly unresolved. She piles up the evidence, but the higher the pile the less she obviously has to say.
Perhaps the most revealing aspect of its abject failure on its own terms is its character as an extremely dull Historical Novel (a genre capable of even greater dullness than Literary Fiction, especially when performed as tediously and perfunctorily as the penultimate chapter here). I think we are supposed to view Frederica's course through the changing thought patterns of the 1960s as revelatory, but Byatt fails because she is never unflinching about the challenges to the previous orthodoxy. When portraying the artistic and moralistic provocateurs of the period (many of whom genuinely were silly and vacuous and legitimately deserving of ridicule) she's all too quick to resort to caricatures even lazier than the figures she's parodying. But before you suggest it, the thinking is so slovenly that these don't constitute acute satires.
More importantly, she does this because she is stacking the deck against these intellectual challenges in a quite transparent way. I was suckered into reading this by a thumbnail portrait of the Marquis de Sade on the dustjacket to the hardback (well, more fool me, so I have to accept total responsibility for the time I have wasted reading it), but the fictional novel that is prosecuted for obscenity in the book - Jude Mason's Babbletower - is entirely fraudulent as any kind of representation of Sade's gauntlet in the face of civilisation. Like every other bit of represented writing here, including Frederica's reluctant and unconvincing experimentation with Burroughs's cut-ups, Babbletower is striving to articulate only the most tiresomely hidebound moralising. Byatt's flirtation with the Moors Murders trial is peripheral and unengaged, as if she wants to make some cheap hostile comment but not really get at its core. So, in a prep-school matronly style, we are told that Brady read Sade, and Babbletower is compared with Sade in court, and that should be enough for anyone, so let's just go back to the storyline of Frederica's divorce, shall we?
Byatt can write, that is clear enough, but why? About 290 pages in I was wondering why I'd bothered. Another dozen pages and I was past halfway, so thought I might as well persist, but there is no fundamental unfolding of thought or argument beyond that point either. At some points, Byatt just gives up and throws 'evidence' together randomly: the trouble is that the reader can thus see how little is actually going on. I was only (!) 15o pages from the end when I learned that this dull rambling comprised only one-quarter of a tetralogy, raising the prospect of another 1800 pages of such self-indulgent and unaware reflection.
At one point Byatt inadvertently sums up the entire project. 'Frederica thinks: there is not enough point to all this, or else I am missing something. It is a thought she is often to have, in those years'. Then having recognised this, why the other 617 pages? Even if they were necessary for Byatt's own satisfaction (although not apparently her clarification), it by no means requires the rest of us to have to wade through them with her.