Babel Tower Book

Babel Tower is a soaring achievement, an exhilarating evocation of the private and public obsessions of Britain in the 1960s. At its heart are two law cases: a painful divorce suit and the prosecution of an 'obscene' book - in both cases the legal language distorts, denies and re-writes the 'real' narrative. Frederica, the independent young heroine of A.S. Byatt's earlier novels, has startled her friends by marrying a young ship-owner and country squire. While she and her son live enclosed in their moated grange, her brother-in-law Daniel is listening to distressed voices on the phone, in the crypt of a London church. Far away, in Frederica's native Yorkshire, scientist gather snails on the moors, pondering the mysteries of genetic memory, but in city art-schools, poets and painters deny the value of the past, fostering dreams of rebellion which focus on a strange, charismatic figure - the naked, unkempt and smelly Jude Mason, with his flowing grey hair, a hippy before his time. We feel the subterranean unease, the undertones of sex and cruelty. The tension erupts over Babeltower, a novel set in a past revolutionary era, where a band of people retire to a castle to found an ideal community. In this boo, as in the law-courts, the haphazard extra-mural classes or the committee on '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. Around Frederica and her friends whirl clouds of half-formed theories - from Death of God theology and Laingian psychology to the birth of computer languages. This is the decade of the Lady Chatterley case, the Profumo scandal and the first Harold Wilson government. 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 wit a brilliant imaginative sympathy is as comic as it is threatening and bizarre.