A review by ianbanks
Still Life by A.S. Byatt

4.0

The disadvantage to coming to this series having started with the third book is that when you get near the end of the second book you are waiting for an event that heavily influences what happens in the book you started on. Then you become overly attached to particular settings and situations...

The authorial voice is very strong here; there are numerous expositional interruptions. Not the sort we get in the other books, where you get glimpses of a character's future, but full-blown digressions from the good Doctor herself talking about why she chose particular phrases or motifs or even explaining a piece of literature or artwork. It jars at first, but by about halfway through you become used to it, especially when it is explained with as much clarity as Byatt infuses it with. Not having read everything by Byatt (yet!) I don't know if this a particular quirk of hers (I haven't encountered it in any of the other books of hers I've read to date (roughly a third of her corpus) so can't really say with any authority).

Like the first book, this took some time to get going but when it does we see a much more assured and confident voice as well as new depths and dimensions to the cast of characters.

But when it came to the event that I was waiting for, I was still taken by surprise and there is a paragraph - a single paragraph, just three or four lines - in the following chapter that ruined me and caused me to shed manly tears.

Aside from the authorial inserts this is a fantastic book and I'm looking forward to the final volume (I only reread the third a few months back, so shan't be revisiting).