Product Description

At the heart of Babel Tower are two law cases, twin strands of the Establishment's web, that shape the story: a painful divorce and custody suit and the prosecution of an "obscene" book. Frederica, the independent young heroine, is involved in both. She startled her intellectual circle of friends by marrying a young country squire, whose violent streak has now been turned against her. Fleeing to London with their young son, she gets a teaching job in an art school, where she is thrown into the thick of the new decade. Poets and painters are denying the value of the past, fostering dreams of rebellion, which focus around a strange, charismatic figure -- the near-naked, unkempt and smelly Jude Mason, with his flowing gray hair, a hippie before his time.

We feel the growing unease, the undertones of sex and cruelty. The tension erupts over his novel Babbletower, set in a past revolutionary era, where a band of people retire to a castle to found an ideal community. In this book, as in the courtrooms, as in the art school's haphazard classes and on the committee set up to study "the teaching of language," people function increasingly in groups. Many are obsessed with protecting the young, but the fashionable notion of children as innocent and free slowly comes to seem wishful, and perilous.

Babel Tower is the third, following The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life, of a planned quartet of novels set in different mid-century time frames. The personal and legal crises of Frederica mirror those of the age. This is the decade of the Beatles, the Death of God, the birth of computer languages. In Byatt's vision, the presiding genius of the 1960s seems to be a blend of the Marquis de Sade and The Hobbit. The resulting confusion, charted with a brilliant imaginative sympathy, is as comic as it is threatening and bizarre.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #187716 in Books
• Published on: 1997-06-24
• Released on: 1997-06-24
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 640 pages

Amazon.com Review
Babel Tower follows The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life in tracing Frederica Potter, a lover of books who reflects the author's life and times. It centers around two lawsuits: in one, Frederica -- a young intellectual who has married outside her social set -- is challenging her wealthy and violent husband for custody of their child; in the other, an unkempt but charismatic rebel is charged with having written an obscene book, a novel-within-a-novel about a small band of revolutionaries who attempt to set up an ideal community. And in the background, rebellion gains a major toehold in the London of the Sixties, and society will never be the same.

From Publishers Weekly
One does not usually associate Byatt, who has often worked on a small-even miniature-scale, with the notion of an epic novel; but that, in terms of scope and ambition, is just what she has created here. It is an invigorating spectacle, as well as a welcome reminder of how a fine novelist can illuminate a whole era in ways not even the most skilled social historian can. Set in England in the mid-1960s, the novel focuses on Frederica, an attractive, highly intelligent and bookish young woman who cut a swath at Cambridge University, then married Nigel Reiver, a well-to-do member of the landed gentry with a country house, two doting sisters and a way of life that soon seems utterly stifling to Frederica. Her small son, Leo, passionately loved by both parents, is soon the only vital element in her existence; and when friends from her former life come calling, and are rudely rebuffed by Nigel, Frederica rebels. When Nigel, ever apologetic, but convinced it is for her own good, starts knocking her about, Frederica flees to London, with Leo clinging to her in desperation. Thereafter, the book is an account of the drawn-out custody battle over Leo, climaxing in a divorce hearing that exquisitely renders the issues of a woman's independence. More impressively, it is a riveting account of changing mores, as England begins to emerge from its ancient certainties into the shifting priorities, freedoms and follies of the "Swinging Sixties." Among the manifestations of such changes is a book written by an eccentric, Nietzschean acquaintance of Frederica's-a fantasy, with sado-erotic overtones, about the pleasures and limits of freedom. This book (a reprise of the book-within-a-book device Byatt employed in Possession) becomes the focus of another court case when its author is prosecuted for obscenity. Through the two cases (which leap from the page much more enthrallingly, convincingly and thought-provokingly than most legal thrillers) Byatt represents a whole society trying to come to terms with new values. The narrative is mesmerisingly readable, except for long excerpts from Babbletower, the prosecuted novel, and Frederica's own rather hermetic attempts at self-expression-though even these are perfectly believable in their own right. In many ways, this is a book about language, and how it is used to conceal and reveal (there is a wonderfuly satirical subplot about a commission examining English educational methods). But it also employs language, brilliantly, to create a large cast of characters whose struggles, anxieties and small triumphs are at once specific to a time and place, and universal. Simultaneous Random AudioBook; author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Against the heady backdrop of the swinging Sixties, Byatt's sprawling new novel contrasts the hopefulness of the era of youth, drugs, and rock'n'roll with the cynicism engendered by the Cuban Missile Crisis, early nuclear warning systems, and the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. At the dawning of the new feminist age, Frederica, a Cambridge-educated intellectual, finds herself in a stifling marriage to Nigel River, confined to his country estate and caring for her small son in the company of a severe housekeeper and hostile sisters-in-law. She finally bolts the oppressive household and her increasingly violent husband for London, where she takes refuge with understanding friends and in writing and teaching. Among her new acquaintances is Jude Mason, a troubled recluse, who is the author of "Babel Tower," the novel within this novel. Both stories portray a group of idealists intent on exploring the notion of freedom in a new world order. For Byatt's many fans who have been waiting for a follow-up novel as rich, intense, and multilayered as the prize-winning Possession (LJ 11/1/90), the wait is over. Highly recommended.?Barbara Love, Kingston P.L., Ontario
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Read it, it's great
When people talk about Byatt, they tend to dwell on her academicism, on her allusions and quotes, on her historicism. But if this were all there were to Byatt, no one would read her. What makes Byatt a wonderful writer is that she has a tremendous sense of how the world works, how situations and relationships that seemed promising slowly unravel, how smart people can do stupid things, and how things and people who at first seem hopeless can wind up being wonderful. She understands process, and she understands complexity.

Babel Tower is about how people devoted to the life of the mind can survive in a society which is hostile to that life. Much of the book is taken up with trials, because a major character in this book is "society", which may be personified by juries, by expert witnesses, by journalists. Her character, Frederica, escapes from a marriage which first stultifies her mind, and then threatens to kill her. On a meagre living, she constructs a life and a support system that will give her young son what he needs, mentally and physically. But her husband is wealthy, and what he offers the boy seems superficially more wholesome, so in the trials for divorce and custody, Frederica is judged essentially for her surface, for what her life looks like from the outside.

In a parallel subplot, the writer Jude Mason has written a book that is judged for obscenity. But Mason wrote it as a moral book which tells the lessons he has learned in life. He is a vagrant. He was sexually abused in childhood. He understands how people torture those they love. In the book's obscenity trial, Mason, his neuroses, his appearance, and his intentions are judged and condemned; when his book is banned, he himself is banned.

And in the early part of the book, we have a debate about how children should be educated, and what they should learn. The proponents of throwing out classical and grammatical training win, and it is a blow for the life of the mind. In the end of the book we see the results.

Babel Tower has several interesting themes: 1) the way society reduces and [clouds] a person's identity, and the effect it has on them; 2) depravity and sadism as an integral part of human nature, where cruelty is the backside to love; 3) gender and class double-standards; 4) the debate of what constitutes a good education; 5) the impossibility of creating coherency between the disparate elements of your life, and what this does to you.

Byatt is a wise, courageous thinker who can turn a battle of ideas into an enthralling page-turner. But her understanding of life is what makes her work great.

Babel Tower was a great book. But you should read its prequel first, Still Life.

A woman and literature, both on trial
Even though "The Babel Tower" is the third volume in a tetralogy, one need not have read the first two books to enjoy it. (I hadn't read any other novels by Byatt, and I dove right into this one.) This entry has been described as a novel of the Sixties, but such a characterization is misleading. Byatt never really leaves the ivory tower: the turbulence of the streets, the counterculture, the mod scene, the social upheavals all remain on the periphery throughout. The novel depicts more calm than storm, exploring instead the far narrower (but still interesting) milieu of the literati.

Byatt presents two parallel plots. After the death of her sister, Frederica (the subject of all four novels) is trapped in a marriage that quickly seems unsuitable, eventually becomes oppressive, and finally turns violent. Since it's 1964, a divorce is not simply for the asking; after escaping with her son, she finds her suitability as a mother on trial (both literally and figuratively). The scenes describing the spousal abuse are among the most harrowing I've read, even though, compared with similar episodes in other works, the horror is more psychologically distressing than physically violent. Byatt explicitly links Frederica's subsequent emotional and legal ordeal with Lady Chatterley's trial (both of the book and of the character); Frederica represents a late-twentieth-century woman judged by lingering puritanical nineteenth-century standards.

The second story concerns a thematically similar trial: the ban of "Babbeltower," a book recommended to a publisher by Frederica that is subsequently deemed pornographic by the British government. Tame by today's standards (and even when compared to "Last Exit to Brooklyn," which served as Byatt's model), this fable portrays a sexually uninhibited utopia that evolves into a masochistic and totalitarian dystopia. The recently concluded obscenity trial of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" lingers in the background, although the prosecution asserts that "it was Lady Chatterley herself who was on trial, for the fact of her sexuality. In the case of 'Babbeltower' it is the prisoner in the dock who is on trial, his imagination, the world he created, the tendency of the messages he offers."

While "Babel Tower" is often riveting and stimulating, if Byatt herself were on trial, she might be found guilty of excess. Byatt's most obvious mentor is Iris Murdoch, whose influence she confirms in both the text and the acknowledgments. Murdoch, however, doesn't always spell out her many cultural, philosophical, and literary references; she leaves it for the reader to discover or disregard. Byatt, in contrast, seems to believe that her audience is not well-read; she assumes the role of literary critic for her own work. Her characters quote a dizzying parade of passages to each other, to themselves, or to the reader. Sometimes this approach works, but the technique reaches its nadir when she reprints Frederica's scrapbook, a collage of excerpts and scrambled texts(which Frederica herself correctly disparages as unsatisfying and incoherent). There's also a bizarre and not entirely satisfying subplot which evokes Cronenberg's "Dead Ringers" but can't match its creepiness; it involves identical twins, one of whom courts Frederica, while the other is a jealous psychopath.

Despite these excesses, Byatt still succeeds with her portrait of the young woman artist whose confusion is aggravated by clashes between desires and expectations, nonconformity and morality, literature and society.

Fascinating
Byatt has again challenged her readers. This text is a textured, involving story, picking up where the (I believe) slightly sophomoric "Virgin in the Garden" and "Still Life" left off. While the previous 2 books in the series were entertaining, they did not take the chances that "Babel Tower" did. In "Babel Tower," one gets a sense that Byatt is expanding herself -- her writing and her characterization -- in a similar way that "Posession" did. While "Babel Tower" is certainly not as fine as "Posession," one does get that same feeling of excitement and discovery by reading it. I might caution against the S&M tones of the novel's counterpoint (like "Posession," this text has an accompanying fictional text which drive sthe plot) -- not that it is particularly shocking, but rather that it sort of drifts out at times, not serving the main story as strongly as it might. It needed some further development to be an effective counterpoint, but it does serve adequately. All in all, a great read: it's involving, interesting, and has many layers, each with Byatt's usual attention to gorgeous detail.