Babel Tower by A.S. Byatt (English) Paperback Book

Description: Babel Tower by A.S. Byatt In her first full-length work of fiction since "Possession"--for which she won the Booker Prize--A.S. Byatt interweaves the private passions of a large number of characters with the chaotic drama of 1960s England. "An overwhelming literary experience . . . rich and often exhilarating".--"Washington Post Book World". FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description The Booker Prize-winning author of Possession presents an extraordinary story set against the backdrop of the 1960s—a turbulent decade of clashing politics, passionate ideals, and shifting sexual roles. At the heart of Babel Tower are two law cases, twin strands of the Establishments 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 schools 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.In Byatts vision, the presiding genius of the day seems to be a blend of the Marquis de Sade and The Hobbit. Peopled with weird and colorful characters, charted with brilliant, imaginative sympathy, Babel Tower is as comic as it is threatening and bizarre. Author Biography A. S. Byatt was the author of numerous novels, including The Childrens Book, The Biographers Tale, and Possession, which was awarded the Booker Prize. She also wrote two novellas, published together as Angels & Insects, five collections of short stories, and several works of nonfiction. A distinguished critic and author, and the recipient of the 2016 Erasmus Prize for her "inspiring contribution to life writing," she died in 2023. Description for Reading Group Guide The questions, discussion topics, author biography, and suggestions for further reading that follow are designed to enhance your groups reading of A. S. Byatts Babel Tower , a thought-provoking, deeply intelligent novel of ideas. Discussion Question for Reading Group Guide 1. Fredericas sister, Stephanie, died in a freak accident not long before the beginning of the novels action. What effect has Stephanies death had upon Frederica and the life decisions she makes? Why is Daniels reaction to his wifes death so extreme? How have Stephanies parents, and her children, been changed by her death? 2. In the first chapter, Daniel, a clergyman, speaks on the church hotline with a woman who has abandoned her children. What other images of abandoned children can you find in the novel? If Leo had not followed Frederica away from Bran House, do you think she would have left him behind for good, and if so, would it have counted as abandonment? What about the mothers at La Tour Bruyarde: in allowing their childrens welfare to be decided by Culvert, did they fail in their duty as parents? 3. Do you find that Frederica places too much blame for the state of her marriage upon herself? In your opinion, does she behave passively when dealing with Nigel? If so, do you think that such behavior is a product of her time and generation? Might a modern, more "liberated" woman behave differently? 4. Do you feel any sympathy at all for Nigel, or is he presented as an absolute villain? What attractive characteristics drew Frederica to him in the first place? Do you see Nigel as a comment on the "type" of the Romantic hero--Heathcliff or Byron? If you do, what point do you think Byatt is making about such heroes? 5. Why has Byatt chosen the 1960s as the setting for this novel? Rupert Parrott describes the climate of that time as "a period of moral ferment, moral realignment, fruitful chaos" [p. 149]. What particular events of the 1960s contributed to this sense of moral ferment? In what ways do the times described in the novel resemble, or differ from, the 1990s? 6. Babel Tower makes extensive comments upon Romanticism and the romantic outlook on life. Can you infer Byatts own views? What flaws does she find in the romantic ethos? Why are there so many references, both overt and obscure, to William Blake? Do you feel that Byatt deals with Blake in a positive, hostile, or satiric manner? 7. In what ways do the attitudes prevalent at the Tour Bruyarde parallel those of London in the sixties? "The social structures of the Society [the French utopians] had fled...were structures of authority, of persecution, of narrow loyalties, of hierarchy, of exclusive and narrow affections and privileges, all of which led to oppression, irrationality and the sense of private property and personal greed" [p. 204]. Is this point of view comparable to "progressive" thinking in the 1960s? 8. While living and teaching in London, Frederica becomes deeply wrapped up in the novels of E. M. Forster and D. H. Lawrence. If you are familiar with these authors work, particularly Lawrences Women in Love and Forsters Howards End , can you explain why Frederica found these authors concerns so germane to her own life? If you are familiar with Thomas Hardy, can you understand why Jude Mason has named himself after the hero of Hardys Jude the Obscure ? 9. One of the questions posed by Babel Tower concerns the nature of freedom and of captivity. When are Frederica and the Lady Roseacre the most "free"? What qualities must they possess, and exercise, in order to achieve freedom? In this novel, does freedom seem harder for women to achieve than for men, and if so, why? 10. The Romantic period, like the 1960s, was a time when "natural" behavior, and life, was assumed to be good. The Babbletower narrative takes a dissenting view; Jude demonstrates "that if we are free to follow our passions, who can prevent us from following our desire to hurt others, to kill, to rape, to torture? These are--human passions; they are natural" [p. 545]. How is this theme played out in the modern portion of Babel Tower ? What conclusions, if any, are drawn? 11. Frederica is fearful and suspicious of groups and group life: "I was no good at group life," she says to Agatha. "I hated school." What is it in her nature, or her experience, that has formed this dislike? Does Byatt imply that such feelings are characteristic of intellectuals and artists in general? What points do the two narratives--the 1960s story and Jude Masons Babbletower--make about the nature of group versus individual life? 12. A number of the characters in Babbletower, from Bill Potter to Culvert, and especially the members of the royal commission, have strong feelings about education and the nature of learning. Whose ideas do you find the most convincing? Whose the least so? What type of person might the William Blake Primary School produce? What about the Swineburn School? 13. What relevance do the four readers reports Frederica writes for Rupert Parrotts firm [pp. 151-56] have to Fredericas own life, and to the themes addressed in the novel itself? 14. The latter portion of Babel Tower contains large verbatim quotations from the two trials, Fredericas and Judes. Reflecting on the way the legal experts distorted the truths of their lives, Frederica "sees herself as a caged or netted beast.... The net is made by words which do not describe what she feels is happening" [p. 326]. Is language by its very nature inadequate, or is its inadequacy the fault of people who manipulate it to achieve their own ends? What is the myth of the Tower of Babel, and why has Byatt chosen it as a metaphor--and a title--for her novel? 15. "I feel Im on trial for reading books," Frederica says [p. 502]. Why are so many people in Fredericas world--Nigel, his family, even the lawyers and jury members during her trial--apparently threatened by intellectuals, particularly intellectual women? What separate aspects of British culture and society do the two principal families, the Reivers and the Potters, represent? 16. Frederica finds herself questioning "the Romantic desire for everything to be One--lovers, body and mind, life and work" [p. 361]. Does she conclude that the ideal of oneness is realizable or even desirable? How do the identical twins, John and Paul Ottokar, illustrate the ideas of oneness and separateness? What other images of oneness does Byatt invoke? 17. "The Church has always been about sex," says Canon Holly [p. 26], and later, "The Christian religion is an expression of the perception that what we now call sado-masochism is a central truth of our existence" [p. 555]. What does he mean by these statements? Do you find them credible? Excerpt from Book It might begin: The thrush has his anvil or altar on one fallen stone in a heap, gold and grey, roughly squared and shaped, hot in the sun and mossy in the shade. The massive rubble is in a clearing on a high hill. Below is the canopy of the forest. There is a spring, of course, and a little river flowing from it. The thrush appears to be listening to the earth. In fact he is looking, with his sideways stare, for his secret prey in the grass, in the fallen leaves. He stabs, he pierces, he carries the shell with its soft centre to his stone. He lifts the shell, he cracks it down. He repeats. He repeats. He extracts the bruised flesh, he sips, he juggles, he swallows. His throat ripples. He sings. His song is liquid syllables, short cries, serial trills. His feathers gleam, creamy and brown-spotted. He repeats. He repeats. Characters are carved on the stones. Maybe runes, maybe cuneiform, maybe ideograms of a birds eye or a creature walking, or pricking spears and hatchets. Here are broken alphabets, a and ?, C and T, A and G. Round the stones are the broken shells, helical whorls like empty ears in which no hammer beats on no anvil. They nestle. Their sound is brittle. Their lips are pure white (Helix hortensis) and shining black (Helix nemoralis). They are striped and coiled, gold, rose, chalk, umber; they rattle together as the quick bird steps among them. In the stones are the coiled remains of their congeners, millions of years old. The thrush sings his limited lovely notes. He stands on the stone, which we call his anvil or altar, and repeats his song. Why does his song give us such pleasure? I Or it might begin with Hugh Pink, walking in Laidley Woods in Herefordshire in the autumn of 1964. The woods are mostly virgin woodland, crowded between mountainsides, but Hugh Pink is walking along an avenue of ancient yews, stretched darkly over hills and across valleys. His thoughts buzz round him like a cloud of insects, of varying colours, sizes and liveliness. He thinks about the poem he is writing, a rich red honeycomb of a poem about a pomegranate, and he thinks about how to make a living. He does not like teaching in schools, but that is how he has recently made some sort of living, and he reconstructs the smells of chalk and ink and boys, the noise of corridors and tumult, amongst the dark trees. The wood floor smells pungent and rotting. He thinks of Rupert Parrott, the publisher, who might pay him to read manuscripts. He does not think he will pay much, but it might be enough. He thinks of the blooded pink jelly of pomegranates, of the word "pomegranate," round and spicy. He thinks of Persephone and is moved by the automatic power of the myth and then repelled by caution. The myth is too big, too easy, too much for his pomegranate. He must be oblique. Why is there this necessity, now, to be oblique? He thinks of Persephone as he used to imagine her when he was a boy, a young white girl in a dark cavern, before a black table, with a gold plate containing a heap of seeds. He had supposed the six seeds she ate were dry seeds, when he was a boy and had never seen a pomegranate. Her head is bowed, her hair is pale gold. She knows she should not eat, and eats. Why? It is not a question you can ask. The story compels her to eat. As he thinks, his eyes take in the woods, brambles and saplings, flaming spindle-berries and gleaming holly leaves. He thinks that he will remember Persephone and holly, and suddenly sees that the soft quadruple rosy seed of the spindle is not unlike the packed seeds of the pomegranate. He thinks about spindles, touches on Sleeping Beauty and her pricked finger, goes back to Persephone, dreaming girls who have eaten forbidden bloody seeds. Not the poem he is writing. His poem is about fruit flesh. His feet make a regular rhythm on fallen needles and the blanket of soft decay. He will remember the trees for the images in his minds eye, and the images for the trees. The brain does all sorts of work, Hugh Pink thinks. Why does it do this sort so well, so luxuriously? At the end of the ride, when he comes to it, is a stile. Beyond the stile are rough fields and hedges. On the other side of the stile are a woman and a child, standing quietly. The woman is wearing country clothes, jodhpurs, boots, a hacking jacket. She has a green headsquare knotted under her chin, in the style of the Queen and her royal sister. She leans on the fence, without putting her weight on it, looking into the wood. The child, partly obscured by the steps of the stile, appears to be clinging to the leg of the woman, both of whose arms are on the top bar of the fence. They do not move as Hugh Pink approaches. He decides to strike off himself, into a shady path on his left. Then she calls his name. "Hugh Pink? Hugh Pink. Hugh-" He does not recognise her. She is in the wrong clothes, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. She is helping the child on to the stile. Her movements are brisk and awkward, and this reminds him. The child stands on the top step, balancing with one hand on her shoulder. "Frederica-" says Hugh Pink. He is about to add her old surname, and stops. He knows she is married. He remembers the buzz of furious gossip and chatter at the time of this marriage. Someone nobody knew, they had said, they had complained, none of her old friends, a stranger, a dark horse. No one was invited to the wedding, none of her university lovers or gossips, they had found out purely by chance, she had suddenly vanished, or so they told each other, with variants, with embellishments. It was put about that this man kept her more or less locked up, more or less incommunicado, in a moated grange, would you believe, in the country, in outer darkness. There had been something else, some disaster, a death, a death in the family, more or less at the same time, which was said to have changed Frederica, utterly changed her, they said. She is very changed, everyone was saying, you would hardly know her. Hugh was on his way to Madrid at this time, trying to see if poetry and making a living could be done in that city. He had once been in love with Frederica, and in Madrid had fallen in love with a silent Swedish girl. Also he had liked Frederica, but had lost her, had lost touch, because love always came before and confounded liking, which is regrettable. His memories of Frederica are confused by memories of his own embarrassment and memories of Sigrid, and of that embarrassment. It is true that she is changed. She is dressed for hunting. But she no longer looks like a huntress. "Frederica," says Hugh Pink. "This is Leo," says Frederica. "My son." The boys look, inside his blue hood, is unsmiling. He has Fredericas red hair, two or three shades darker. He has large dark brown eyes, under heavy dark brows. "This is Hugh Pink. One of my old friends." Leo continues to stare at Hugh, at the wood. He does not speak. Or it might begin in the crypt of St. Simeons Church, not far from Kings Cross, at the same time on the same day. Daniel Orton sits on a slowly rotating black chair, constrained by a twisted telephone wire. Round and back. His ear is hot with electric words that filter through the black shell he holds to his head. He listens, frowning. "I say Im completely shut in you know I say I say I say I dont get up off my butt and go out of this room any more I cant seem to get up the force I ought to try its silly really but whats the point I say I say I say I say if I did get out there theyd all stomp on me Id be underfoot in no time it isnt safe I say I say I say are you there are you listening do you give a damn is there anyone at all on the end of this line I say I say." "Yes, theres someone. Tell me where you want to go. Tell me why youre afraid to go out." "I dont need to go nowhere no one needs me theres no need thats why oh whats the point? Are you still there?" "Im here." The crypt is dark and solid. There are three telephones, set round the base of a pillar, in plywood cubicles soundproofed with a honeycomb of egg-boxes. The other two telephones are unmanned. There is a small blue-and-white jug of anemones in Daniels cubicle. Two are open, a white and a dark crimson with a centre full of soft black spikes and black powder. There are unopened blue and red ones, bright inside colours hidden under fur, steel-blue and soft pink-grey above the ruffs of leaves. Over each telephone is a text, done in good amateur calligraphy. Daniels says: So likewise ye, except ye utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, how shall it be known what is spoken? For ye shall speak into the air. There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification. Therefore if I know not the meaning of the voice, I shall be unto him that speaketh a barbarian, and he that speaketh shall be a barbarian unto me. I Corinthians 14:9-11. The second phone rings. Daniel has to decide to disengage from the first caller. Someone else should be there, but even saints can be tardy. "Help me." "If I can." "Help me." "I hope I can." "Ive done wrong." "Tell me, Ill listen." Silence. "Im here simply to listen. You can tell me anything. Thats what Im for." "I cant. I dont think I can. I made a mistake, Im sorry, Ill go." "Dont go. It might help you to tell me." He is a man playing a hooked creature in the dark depths on a long dark line. It Details ISBN0679736808 Author A.S. Byatt Pages 640 Edition Description Vintage Intl Language English ISBN-10 0679736808 ISBN-13 9780679736806 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY FIC Year 1997 Short Title BABEL TOWER Residence London, ENK Birth 1936 DOI 10.1604/9780679736806 Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 1997-06-24 NZ Release Date 1997-06-24 US Release Date 1997-06-24 UK Release Date 1997-06-24 Publisher Random House USA Inc Series Vintage International Publication Date 1997-06-24 Imprint Random House Inc Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. 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