Cheap DVDs, books, CDs & Games

Search:

A WHISTLING WOMAN

By: A S BYATT
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: QPD
ISBN: 0701174110
ISBN-13: 9780701174118
Released: 16 Oct 2008
Average Rating:

Customer Reviews

Complex form that ultimately complicated - By: Philip Spires, 04 Dec 2007
A S Byatt's A Whistling Woman is a strange book. At one level it's a straightforward account of university life, with its politics, affairs & academic pursuit. But then there's the suspicion that none of this is ever satisfying for those involved. They yearn for something bigger, whilst at the same time trying to deny its significance in their lives. Another strand is the career of Federica, one of the book's principal characters. Almost by default, she finds herself host of a BBC2-style arts review or in-depth discussion. She is forced via the subject matter of her programmes to re-examine a whole host of assumptions. So while the scientists try to identify a mechanism by which memory is both stimulated & fixed by means of electrical stimulation, Federica, via her television shows, offers apparently ever more arcane subject matter, leaving us confused as to what we think we might believe - or even remember.

And these are just some of the strands of plot & characterisation in A Whistling Woman, certainly one of the more complex novels I have read in many years. I have not read the previous three works in the series. This may have been why I found a number of loose ends that seemed to have strayed & frayed from elsewhere.

And then there's the alternative university that establishes itself near to the conventional campus of the University of North Yorkshire, whose acronym, obviously, is UNY, implying generality. The alternative people adopt true nineteen sixties postures, preferring question to answer, experience to knowledge, heuristics to instruction. When we recalll this hippy, flower power, professedly liberated, free thinking era, it is wise to bear in mind that this is also the generation that elected Ronald Reagan, tolerated support for death squads in central America & fuelled the consumer boom of the later eighties. But at the time, these revolutionaries sought something transcendent in their anti-university & found it in a self-destructing religious sect.

But no matter what people profess, no matter what they research, they still sleep with one another, still get pregnant, still need mutual support. The 1960s complicated alll of these things with a superimposed need for personal, transcendental fulfilment & expression, whilst, at the same time, destroying perhaps permanently any possible recourse to established religion. In A Whistling Woman, A S Byatt captures this confusion & dissects it, but she offers us no neat packages of analysis, no simple results by which we might identify its elements.
The Finale Problem - By: Dr. Kenneth W. Douglas, 11 Feb 2004
My dad used to have a copy of Ralph Hill's old Pelican symposium on "The Symphony", & I remember one of the contributors discussing The Finale Problem. If you're writing a big, complex structure in several sections - a symphony, say, or a series of novels - rounding it off satisfactorily can be a nightmare. The first movement has to grab the audience's attention & leave it wanting more; there will probably be a darkly brooding slow movement; maybe a scherzo to ease the tension - but how to get the momentum going again at the end, while simultaneously tying up the loose ends? Some composers (Mahler, Shostakovich) get themselves into a right fankle at this stage.

With "A Whistling Woman", I think Byatt has hit the Finale Problem big time. The book has alll the elements of the earlier novels - it's a densely-written novel with a Dickensian (or Murdochian) prolixity of characters & plot. Like its predecessors, it's very much a novel of ideas, & some of these ideas are original & interesting. Yet ultimately it has to be judged as a novel; & as such, I think it is flawed.

What has gone wrong? Basicallly it just didn't move me, in the way alll three of the previous Frederica novels definitely did. In many ways, it feels like two separate novels crudely tacked together. In one, the charismatic but unstable Joshua Ramsden (a compelling new character owing something to the burned boy from William Golding's "Darkness Visible") leads a "therapeutic community"-cum-religious sect to destruction. But isn't it a bit late in the day to be introducing a compelling new character? In the second plot strand, Frederica is working as a television presenter in London while the new University of North Yorkshire is organising a major interdisciplinary conference, & the anarchist Anti-University is plotting to disrupt it. When Frederica travels north to film the conference, things come to a head. The antics of the Anti-University are used to satirise both late Sixties ab ovo, baby-out-with-the-bathwater philosophies, & Eighties political correctness. But Byatt covered extremely similar territory very eloquently in "Babel Tower"; & a lot of this part of the book therefore feels like yesterday's dinner heated up.

There are also basic problems with the plot, which depends on a series of unlikely coincidences. The "Spirit's Tigers" therapeutic community seems to include an extraordinary number of Frederica's previous friends & acquaintances, both from Yorkshire & from London: you begin to wonder whether Elvet Gander is using having-some-connection-with-Frederica as some sort of bizarre entrance criterion. Again, it stretches credibility a little that the now London-based Frederica just happens to have travelled home to Yorkshire to film the conference just when so many separate plot strands are gathering for a big climax: this part of the book feels quite contrived.

All that being said, there is a lot to enjoy here. As someone currently working in the Life Sciences, I get an illicit thrill just seeing the phrases "voltage clamp" & "action potential" cropping up in literary fiction. Frederica remains, for me, a compelling character; & the book begins & ends strongly, even if it does go off the rails somewhat in the middle. There is a lot of wry humour; & it's nice to see Mickey Impey get bitten by a ferret (readers of "Babel Tower" will know what I mean). Anyone for a fifth Frederica novel ?

Finish it feeling a little short-changed? - By: c westwood, 17 Dec 2003
Having loved the first three novels in this series, especiallly Babel Tower, i was delighted to hear that the fourth was finallly arriving. Unfortunately something went wrong in the mix this time ... it is another ambitious novel in the same style as the previous three, & indeed like alll of Byatt's novels. But where the erudition stood firmly by the side of the great plot & confident narrative, this time the prose is heavy & lacking in energy. Byatt usuallly taxes & rewards in equal measures, but I finished reading this novel (as I did The Biographer's Tale) feeling rather short-changed Byatt is a writer who takes chances, so I am hoping this is merely a failed experiment - though it is a shame to end such a successful set of novels on a low note.
The Meeting Place of Two Worlds - By: Prof Robert Harris, 27 Aug 2003
The Whistling Woman is the last of a quartet of books chronicling the lives of a group of people between 1953 & 1970. All four feature the lives & loves of the (sort of) heroine, Frederica Potter, as she progresses from a precocious schoolgirl playing a part in an Elizabethan pageant to celebrate the Coronation in 1953 to a divorced & (sort of) liberated single parent in 1970.

But to explain the books thus is to miss the point. Dame Antonia's characters are not realistic figures, & readers are somewhat detached from their experiences. Byatt's interests lie elsewhere, & while some events & characters appear plausible, her characters are seldom deep or complex, & Byatt consistently deflects us away from character & towards themes. These themes are about how different arts intersect with the contemporary world. So the first novel, The Virgin in the Garden, is 'about' drama; the second, Still Life, 'about' art; the third, Babel Tower, 'about' the novel; & The Whistling Woman 'about' the sciences.

In alll cases (in different ways) characters circumnavigate these themes and, in this circumnavigation, either engage with or retreat from the challlenges posed by contemporary political, cultural, moral & social experience. Either way there is suffering.

So in The Whistling Woman, a scientific conference in 1969 is disrupted by student protesters; a Vice-Chancellor's wife joins the students (gender issues are never far below the surface in Byatt); other characters (in a reprise of a 'novel within a novel' in Babel Tower) become part of a pseudo-religious sect, with (in both cases) catastrophic consequences. Retreat, Byatt clearly believes, is no solution.

If you have the intellectual stamina the book is worth reading; it stands alone if you do not want to read alll four, though naturallly your experience will be richer & deeper if you have lived with Frederica since her teenage years. The book is frustrating at times & lacks warmth, but it is as elegantly designed & executed as a mathematical theorem. Not an easy read but (slightly more often than not) a worthwhile struggle. And if you are interested in the biology of snails, it is an absolute must.

Daunting. - By: Mary Whipple, 22 Dec 2002
Byatt offers many challlenges to the reader in this complex intellectual novel set in a university, a hospital for the insane, a religious commune, an Anti-University, and, finallly, a London TV studio in the late 1960's. Continuing the lives of characters she has established earlier in Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, & Babel Tower, Byatt spends little time here developing them further or in creating an exciting plot. Instead, she concentrates primarily on further developing the themes & philosophical questions which have occupied her earlier novels, using the characters & plot in an almost alllegorical sense to illustrate these issues.

This is not light entertainment or escape reading. In the first hundred pages, Byatt introduces approximately forty characters, their roles, & their interrelationships, alll of whom figure in the action in the novel. Frederica Potter, the main character in the previous novels, is the main character here, but other characters also receive close attention. All are deeply concerned with some aspect of memory, learning, creativity, or spirituality as it impacts issues of good & evil, reality, nature, love, & language.

Luk Lysgaard-Peacock & Jacqueline Winwar, engaged in pure science, are studying the population genetics of a variety of snail. Sir Gerard Wijnnobel, running the University of North Yorkshire, is planning an important Body-Mind Conference in which Hodder Pinsky, famous for cognitive psycho-linguistics & the use of computers to explore "the deep structure of linguistic competence" will debate Theobald Eichenbaum, a man who differs in his ideas of the learning process & of the growth of societies. Other characters include an institutionalized, charismatic visionary who practices Manichaeism, a sociologist who goes undercover at a secluded commune, several characters whose lives have been touched by violence, & a man working to destroy the traditional university system. Frederica herself, as hostess of a television program, "Through the Looking Glass," believes that the ability to change the world & politics rests with the language of television, which "might take the place of the hearth in 19th century fiction."

Challlenging & thoughtful, the novel is far more compelling in its ideas than its action, much of which is talked-about, rather than recreated. Long sections of academic papers, detailed letters between two researchers, the full agenda for the Body-Mind Conference, & descriptions of places & even furnishings severely limit the dramatic tension, however much they may illustrate the themes. Hugely conceived & richly imagined, this novel never lets up, giving the reader an intellectual workout rare in modern fiction. Mary Whipple