Really enjoyed, Byatt has a great way of weaving a story on many levels. One of my favorite of hers. ( )

Babel Tower is an immensely pleasurable reading experience. Not because it's a particularly cheery book—god, it's not—but because it demands such intensity, such devotion of the reader and repays it all with interest. The intertextuality of it all is such a delight—books within books, Babbletower hidden within Babel Tower, the stories, the letters, the references to other novels—all giving rise to a level of introspection which feels organic rather than forced. Her characters are all incredibly vivid, even if I don't think I would particularly like to spend much time with any of them—Frederica is a little too much of a woman of her time—and really I do think that A.S. Byatt is one of the most intelligent authors working today. ( )

I do find Frederica rather a frustrating character - a bit limp - or maybe I'm just annoyed by her liking for DH Lawrence (whom I can stand in only very, very small doses); and I find her marriage to Nigel rather hard to take - why someone described by others as feisty and intelligent should be taken in by someone like him without biting back until it's (almost?) too late...If anything I find the internal Babbletower story more interesting - perhaps the ideas seem clearer? Though I'm quite enjoying Daniel's strand of the story.

Two-thirds of the way through "Babel Tower" and I'm finding it hugely satisfying - the intertextuality (when Byatt mentions Justine, we don't know if she means Durrell or Sade, since both writers are namechecked); the texts themselves - "Babbletower", Agatha's story, the letters, the cut-ups, Frederica's reader's reports, her musings on Howard's End and DH Lawrence; the babel of voices - Frederica and her family, friends, and all their various combinations; Jude Mason - who's both loathsome and also, at some level, the foul-smelling, foul-natured cynic who sees things as they are. Like Samson Origen in his own novel. All the symbols and clues - Blake, snails, memory, the punning names (which in themselves could be irritating if it weren't for the fact that everything in this novel seems to connect - seems to thus far, but I'm wary of the feeling of connectedness as Frederica is...).

It's just such a massive book in terms of what it's trying to do, but at the same time it doesn't come across as a dry intellectual exercise - it is very intellectual, but there's a playfulness at work, too, and despite the tight plotting it also feels organically right, it doesn't feel contrived (or rather, if it is contrived, it's explicitly so). Tigers, the twins...And even its deficiencies I'm tending to come to see as deliberately so - i.e. Frederica, a bit feeble at time, but a product of her times? Nigel, black villain, but he is he meant to be that? The "romantic hero" figure who's not actually any good for any real woman?
[Dec 2002] ( )

An amazing "book within a book" type book. After Possession I wondered where Byatt could go. Here she picks up the thread from Unicorn in the Garden and other earlier works, but brings them to fruitation. ( )

It is a novel of ideas. It was a pleasure to read, and I could go back to the beginning right away, start reading again and still find interesting issues to think about. It reflects and discusses issues which were topical in the 60s, like women's rights, new trends in education, changes in what was designated obscene and sexual revolution. It is also paradise for those who like literary analysis, and discussions in philosophy and ethics. It is dense with ideas on and from Nietzsche, Blake, Fourier, D. H. Lawrence, Kafka, Forster and the Marquis de Sade. Blake is quoted and referred to most extensively, and I find it not accidental. The book itself is an extended Song of Innocence into Song of Experience on many levels.
It's about the "innocence and experience" of Frederica, the main character, who finds out what is important in her life, and of a group of people who isolate themselves to practice sexual and social freedom. The idea of the society of `freedom' is tackled by a book within the book: _Babbletower_- a utopian/dystopian tale in which a group of nobles are trying to build a utopian society based on the premise that everyone should do what brings him pleasure. But, what if somebody finds cruelty bringing him pleasure?

The author of the book within the book is put on trial for obscenity. At the same time the main character of the novel, Frederica, finds herself in divorce and custody proceedings. Both trials borrow extensively from the real trials that took place in England at the time. ( )