A review by nohoperadio
The Biographer's Tale by A.S. Byatt

4.75

Haha hell yes. So fictional texts-within-the-text are a well-known Byatt thing, her two big commercial successes Possession and The Children’s Book use that pretty heavily, but this is her seeing how much fun she can have pushing it to the limit and it’s glorious. The narrator is trying to write a biography of a fictional biographer of a fictional Victorian explorer/scientist/novelist/etc., discovers a pile of notes by said biographer that seem to be towards an unwritten work covering the lives of three non-fictional European intellectuals of no obvious connection, tries to glean biographical insight from these notes even though most of them seem to be just verbatim quotations from other people’s biographical works of which I frankly don’t know which are fictional and which not. 

This is a slim novel compared to the other two I mentioned but boasts much higher quantities of metatextual fuckery than either. I’m pretty sure more than half the wordcount here is at least one meta-level deep. If that sounds boring and frustrating, it is, but only just enough for it to be very very funny. And somehow she still fits a whole entomology subplot in there towards the end that’s like barely related to the biography stuff but still narratively satisfying! One could argue that Possession is the better A S Byatt novel, but The Biographer’s Tale is without question the A S Byattest A S Byatt novel. That’s very much a compliment.