A.S. Byatt does it once again!: This is one of the best literary works I have read. I cannot fathom the bad reviews here. The story of the eccentric Potter family and the quirky works of their minds enthralled me from beginning to end. Frederica Potter is my favorite character in the book. She takes me back to heroines made famous by authors the like of Jane Austen. She is one of the most colorful characters I have ever read. All of the central characters are great. This novel chronicles the life of an eccentric family with subtle magic realism and palpable dark language.

This novel's setting floored me. Fifties Britain is described in such a way that made me feel as though I had been alive during those times. The Elizabethan backdrop is also mesmerizing. And I love the quirkiness and darkness in this book. A.S. Byatt is no doubt one of the best writers of this era. Hers is a voice you cannot help but love. She writes with beautiful prose. I have read her short-story collections and now this book and I cannot wait to read her other works. I cannot recommend The Virgin in the Garden enough.

Let's be up front with my complaints: while I probably didn't need to know all the classical allusions, I would have been happier if I had done so. (I am a completist, and like knowing everything. Okay, I am perpetually worried that if people realise I don't know something that they'll think I'm some sort of idiot. Which is silly, no one can know everything. Except maybe AS Byatt, who has a scary amount of knowledge.) I read sections of this on the bus with my phone on mobile internet, checking out names on Wikipedia.

I definitely need to know more about Elizabethan history (many lookups on Wikipedia again). Hell, I need to know more about English history!

And I found the bits with Marcus and Lucas dragged somewhat. I'm really just not interested in pseudo-science, and this was pseudo-science mixed with theology (which I am more interested in, but it's pretty low on the list, just above economics and cricket).

I don't mind a bit of extra education in my novels (hell, isn't that why we read? to learn stuff?), but I do prefer it if the author can work in explanations, a la Robertson Davies, Salman Rushdie, or even Neil Gaiman. This one left me swimming out of my depth a bit too often.

I do have to say I loved Possession and this one had a lot of the same hallmarks. But I obviously know far more about Victorian novelists than I do about 1950s playwrights. (I can "blame" my mum for that, she's fascinated by all the Victorian authors.) Made that book a fascinating and effortless read (but not easy).

BUT I thought Alexander was a fascinating literary creation, and adored the two sisters (Stephanie and Fredrica), and couldn't shut up about their family life (fascinating, the learned yelling that went on in that house), although I could have quite happily strangled Bill and I believe the world would have been a better place if I had done so.

Fredrica's shock at Stephanie's rejection of intellectual life for love was amazing, completely spot-on. (Can you tell I had an older sister who went for marriage and children, while I went for career? Although we're both doing the Supermum thing now, so everything evened out in the end.)

Mrs Thone was chilling, a reminder that life and love are precious. Such a perfect character, and yet one of the minor ones in this book, I think she only appears maybe three times. At her final appearance:

Mrs Thone stood and watched Winifred chilly. Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not enoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame. Winifred, to Mrs Thone, was simply a woman who had a son, and could, or would, do nothing for that son's trouble. Mrs Thone's son had died on a summer day, and in the winter Mrs Thone felt kinder to mothers of living sons who were less than wise and perfect. Today she watched bleak patches of sunlight and cloud-shadow on the school-lawn, rested a hand lightly on Pallas Athene's unnecessarily ample hips, and sipped tea, unbending.

And Anthea's final remarks are quite fascinating too, they reveal far more of the character than before, and it's as she's leaving!

And I recommend re-reading the prologue (I just did!) to see how it all fits back together again.

Once I relaxed about my lack of knowledge of details and got into the flow of the novel, it was also terribly amusing at times. I laughed tea out of my nose at this particular bit of dialogue between two impassioned lovers:

"'... What was I saying? Oh yes, if we were in a novel it would be most suspect and doomed to sit here drily discussing metre.'
'If we were in a novel they'd cut this dialogue because of artifice. You can have sex, in a novel, but not Racine's metre, however impassioned you may be about it.'"

I bet Byatt had great fun writing that bit of dialogue too. ( )

http://bookcrossing.com/journal/51904... ( )

I love revisiting Byatt's style, whether re-reading or reading new works for the first time, and The Virgin in the Garden doesn't disappoint. Her work is never light reading, but it is beautifully layered and textured, erudite without being overpowering, funny but never really light-hearted; it's language to lose yourself in.

Frederica is the character who goes on to become central in the later books - hence why this forms the first part of the Frederica quartet - but here she's much more part of an ensemble piece. She's still a great character to read about. Like Snape in the Harry Potter books, or Jane Austen's Emma, she's not someone whom you would particularly like were you ever to meet, but she's still fascinating to explore. Most of the characters were similarly finely drawn; fallible and curiously, eccentrically flawed without ever descending to the level of becoming mere grotesques.

The only part of the novel which didn't really work for me were the long digressions involving Marcus and Simmonds. The mystical aspects which they were interested in are not something which hold much attraction for me; it also seemed curiously at odds with the rest of the book, where Byatt, for all her layers of literary erudition and allusions, is very down to earth. Still a wonderful, wonderful novel, and I look forward to hunting down the rest of the quartet. ( )

http://kdegelau.blogspot.com/2006/06/... ( )