A S Byatt’s A Whistling Woman is a strange book. At one level it’s a straightforward account of university life, with its politics, affairs and academic pursuit. But then there’s the suspicion that none of this is ever satisfying for those involved. They yearn for something bigger, whilst at the same time trying to deny its significance in their lives. Another strand is the career of Federica, one of the book’s principal characters. Almost by default, she finds herself host of a BBC2-style arts review or in-depth discussion. She is forced via the subject matter of her programmes to re-examine a whole host of assumptions. So while the scientists try to identify a mechanism by which memory is both stimulated and fixed by means of electrical stimulation, Federica, via her television shows, offers apparently ever more arcane subject matter, leaving us confused as to what we think we might believe – or even remember.And these are just some of the strands of plot and characterisation in A Whistling Woman, certainly one of the more complex novels I have read in many years. I have not read the previous three works in the series. This may have been why I found a number of loose ends that seemed to have strayed and frayed from elsewhere.And then there’s the alternative university that establishes itself near to the conventional campus of the University of North Yorkshire, whose acronym, obviously, is UNY, implying generality. The alternative people adopt true nineteen sixties postures, preferring question to answer, experience to knowledge, heuristics to instruction. When we recall this hippy, flower power, professedly liberated, free thinking era, it is wise to bear in mind that this is also the generation that elected Ronald Reagan, tolerated support for death squads in central America and fuelled the consumer boom of the later eighties. But at the time, these revolutionaries sought something transcendent in their anti-university and found it in a self-destructing religious sect.But no matter what people profess, no matter what they research, they still sleep with one another, still get pregnant, still need mutual support. The 1960s complicated all of these things with a superimposed need for personal, transcendental fulfilment and expression, whilst, at the same time, destroying perhaps permanently any possible recourse to established religion. In A Whistling Woman, A S Byatt captures this confusion and dissects it, but she offers us no neat packages of analysis, no simple results by which we might identify its elements.
The first time I read this book, I found it a fairly unsatisfactory ending to the Frederica Quartet. I will admit that I started the series in medias res with Babel Tower, the third book of the series. It was a boring summer and I had finally found a library with the Frederica Quartet - or part of it, at least. However, I re-read the series about a year and a half ago, in the proper order this time, and I was overwhelmed.The second time I read this series - perhaps because I started at the beginning - I appreciated the series much more as a whole, rather than four fragmented novels that happen to have overlapping characters.This novel is unsettling in many ways - Frederica, as with all the characters, are all in shifting states of being - in their roles, their identities. The introduction of a "saviour", Joshua Lamb, certainly shifts the focus to several secondary characters of other books. However, Byatt handles this shift to perfection, and I found myself as interested in the secondary characters as I was in Frederica's struggles and successes. Despite the shift from Frederica and her family to more secondary characters, I found the novel an incredibly compelling work and one that has drawn me back again and again.
What do You think about A Whistling Woman (2004)?
Gave up in the middle.This was just not what I want to read right now. As a book of a very particular history of late 60's thinking and society it is thought-provoking and insightful, perhaps. I wanted to read because it would give some insight into the time, the time I was conceived and know relatively little about. I found Byatt's writing less than appealing though, she does not write cleanly and as precisely as I like an author to do (when it comes to prose I am a short story reader at heart, to be fair). There are many interesting and provocative passages but I was grappling about to understand where the book was going and why I was dealing with blocks of different narrative that seemed like shuffled index cards elaborated upon in great detail. This is not to say I am not a fan of Byatt, I have enjoyed some of her other novels. Having not read the previous books of this quartet I felt at a disadvantage. Will let this one go back to the library for someone else to read.
—Cathy
I really loved Virgin in the Garden and Still Life, tolerated Babel Tower, and skimmed huge swaths of A Whistling Woman. Face it, readers only really care about Frederica, not biology and religious cults. Increasingly, showing off her esoteric knowledge of many things seems more important than plot to Byatt. The rumored feud between Byatt and her younger sister Margaret Drabble may or may not be true, but I remember finding it telling that Byatt killed off the sister in Still Life. That her death reverberates in a real and lovely way is one of the good points of this new novel.
—Paddy
A Whistling Woman is the fourth book in the 'Frederica Quartet'. It is billed as a stand-alone novel but there are characters and storylines that appear here that have their genesis in earlier volumes. Perhaps it would be best to start from the beginning. While there is much to admire Byatt's writing I don't think I have ever come across a novelist as keen to show off their research - not an ounce of wasted effort as everything from snails, zygotes and psychiatry gets more than a mention while adding little to the plot or the pace. I'm sure there's a good story in here but, for my taste, it is still to be whittled out of the wordy book I read.
—David Llewellyn
