A whistling woman

by A. S. Byatt

Hardcover, 2003

Status

Available

Publication

New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2003.

Description

Amid the effervescence and turbulence of the 1960s, Frederica finds a career in television in London, while events in Yorkshire threaten to turn her life and the lives of the people she loves upside down.

Media reviews

A Whistling Woman is the final book in the Frederica Quartet. It continues the story of Frederica Potter and the rest of the Potter clan, along with a whole host of other interesting characters, including Frederica‟s lover computer programmer John Ottokar and his twin Paul-Zag, the scientists Luk
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Lysgaard-Peacock and Jacqueline Winwar, Vice-Chancellor of the North Yorkshire University Sir Gerard Wijnnobel, lysergic-acid-dropping psychiatrist Elvet Gander, rabble-rouser Jonty Surtrees, and the charismatic Manichean Josh Lamb/Joshua Ramsden, who sees blood dripping from everything. Julia Corbett and Simon Moffitt, from Byatt‟s previous novel The Game, are also mentioned briefly.
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4 more
By far the strongest parts of ''A Whistling Woman'' have to do with the unfolding drama of a Quaker therapeutic community called the Spirit's Tigers, which is gradually taken over and turned into a religious cult by a former mental patient named Joshua Lamb, who, while still a ''plump, pitiable
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boy,'' witnessed his father's murder of his mother and sister. Byatt's writing about Lamb's gradual descent into self-protective madness and the way in which unbearable personal trauma becomes organized into a lunatically meaningful philosophical system is superb, and demonstrates the empathic powers that are available to her every bit as much as her daunting intellectual reach.
''A Whistling Woman'' is defiantly not for everyone, especially since Byatt is less concerned with keeping the reader happy than with keeping her eye on the vast prospect before her, and the larger arc of her vision is hard to keep in sight even if you're familiar with the three earlier novels.
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The broad sweep of Byatt’s literary and intellectual enquiry is undoubtedly impressive. There’s a section where Frederica refers to her own previous books which had been described by reviewers as "irritatingly clever". It’s clearly a reference to some of Byatt’s previous books that have
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received similar criticism. But the problem is not that A Whistling Woman is clever - the more clever writers the better. The problem is that her subject matter and her ‘cleverness’ are not always integrated into the narrative. Thus, although the novel comes in at over 400 pages, its narrative could be contained in considerably less.
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The Spectator
With A Whistling Woman, A S Byatt concludes one of the grandest and most ambitious fictional projects anyone has undertaken since the war.... Now that it is complete, the cycle seems contained by one unchanging imaginative concept; this volume clarifies the intellectual structure of the whole cycle.
Whatever the eventual failures of A Whistling Woman and of the tetralogy as a whole, its massive ambition can never be called into question. Rejecting sensation and attitude, Byatt has instead explored sense and thought, and the problematic notion of how they can possibly be represented in fiction.
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And like the characters here whose ideas prefigure the search for a Theory of Everything, she has attempted to create a kind of fictional unity that few other writers could even imagine. Watching it break apart, one senses, is just as interesting for her as watching it struggle to cohere. For her readers, this is not always the case, but it's a very close-run thing.
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User reviews

LibraryThing member Niecierpek
It's the fourth book in the family saga, this is one of the things the series is.
In book 1- Virgin inthe Garden, we meet Frederica Potter and then follow her and her family through the years. The first book is solidly rooted in this idea, but by book three, and then definitely in book four, we
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wander into much less structured novel, something that Frederica herself would undoubtedly call "laminations". There are bits and pieces of different writing forms: poems, letters, newspaper articles, novels inside novels, fragments of religious texts, philosophy pieces
all united by the theme of the changing life of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, but much less focused on one main character. It all beautifully comes together though.
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LibraryThing member LadyHax
I first began reading Byatt's Potter quartet almost ten years ago for a final year English seminar for my undergraduate degree. We studied the third of the series, Babel Tower, and having started at the third, with the fourth not yet released, I decided to read the books in reverse order. And so it
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passed that I read Babel Tower, Still Life then Virgin in the Garden before eventually coming to the final instalment, The Whistling Woman.

Byatt is undoubtedly amongst my favourites of contemporary authors. The texture of her books is simply magnificent, the many layers, the references and symbolism that I know I do not even yet understand the full breadth thereof, but will enjoy discovering when reading her books again in the years to come.

In examining the changing times of the 1960s, Byatt succeeds in providing a critical account of the changes wrought to the world by contemporary processes of globalisation; what we are experiencing now, Byatt seems to say, is nothing new. The difficulties in the university were, for this university worker, utterly chilling - although it did make me yearn for the days when students did actually care about, well, anything.

The Whistling Woman was an odd finale to the quartet, both satisfying and unsatisfying. I have never understood, however, why people in the novels dislike Frederica so much. I've always quite liked her and will miss her very much.
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LibraryThing member karl.steel
A great book.

My only real complaint is that Byatt doesn't show what happens when the police break up the demonstration at the variously titled NYU or UNY (North Yorkshire University). She's led us to despise the spiritualist, romantic, medievalist, Tolkienite excesses of the late 60s
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American/European student movement, while, yes, complicating matters somewhat by witnessing to its responsibility for the incipient animal liberation movement and cui bono critiques of reason. But when the students and their comrades assault NYU/UNY, smashing Elizabethan artifacts, vandalizing public sculpture, burning down ancient manors, stupidly demanding an end to the requirement that its students learn, all for their undergraduate degree, another language, math, and the humanities,* when they sing Ent-songs and psychedelic lyrics, give astrology lectures, and basically nauseate thinking people, by which I mean me, it would have been important to complicate all this by showing the police cracking their heads. Some readers would have cheered that on, too, but I suspect most would have felt accused by the sight of the foundations of their liberal world, revealed.

Instead we get some lovemaking.

* see this excellent point, where Frederica attends an interdisciplinary conference on the mind: "Frederica had expected to find these literary papers the most interesting. She had grown up in the narrow British educational system which divides like a branching tree, and predestines all thirteen-year-olds to be either illiterate or innumerate (if not both). She had grown up with the assumption that be literary is to be quick, perceptive and subtle. Whereas scientists were dull, and also--in the nuclear age--quite possibly dangerous and destructive. She thought of F. R. Leavis's Education and the University, which she had studied, and which had said that the English Department was at the centre of any educational endeavour. This suddenly seemed, as she listened to [D.H.:] Lawrence's dangerous nonsense abstracted from Lawrence's lively drama and held up for approval, to be nothing more than a Darwinian jockeying for advantage, a territorial snarl and dash.

What was important, she thought, is to defend reason against unreason."
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LibraryThing member pepe68
excellent, but quite demanding
LibraryThing member bostonbibliophile
In the end a satisfying conclusion to the Frederica Potter series. I feel like 1/3 of the book could have been cut though. There is a big plot that is built up only to end in tragedy and a lot of characters I did not care about. But I guess it paid off in the end.
LibraryThing member thorold
The fourth of the Frederica novels brings us to 1968-1969, and into a whole series of parallel discussions and debates that were going on in biology, psychology, theology, computer science, linguistics, sociology and philosophy (...at least!) about what we mean by concepts like "mind" and
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"consciousness" and human identity. Frederica is at one of the focal points of this, in her new role as host of an Ideas programme on the Box; Vice-Chancellor Wijnnobel and his new University are at another, in a weird pairing with the radicals and hippies who have set up an Anti-University in a nearby field; and a third, most intense focus for all this intellectual energy is formed by a vaguely Manichaean religious cult that has grown out of the harmless Quaker-led forum, the Spirit's Tigers, which we met in the last book.

The irony, as Frederica notes, is that contrary to everything Dr Leavis taught her, the one thing that doesn't seem to be playing any important role at all in all this scientific-philosophical-religious upheaval is English literature. D H Lawrence is out, Freud and Jung and Chomsky are in. Frederica's own book, Laminations, has aroused interest only among literary journalists (who like having the photo of a TV celebrity to put over their columns), whilst Agatha's Tolkienesque fantasy story Flight North has been ignored by reviewers but turns into a phenomenal word-of-mouth success.

There's a huge amount to take in here, and it's thrown at us so fast that it's easy to get lost. There is still plenty of comedy along the way, but it's offset by our awareness that there are some very bad things going on, and vulnerable people are obviously going to get hurt, especially in the cult and among the student rebels. So it's not as much fun to read as Babel Tower, but still very worthwhile.
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LibraryThing member Charon07
It doesn't hold a candle to Possession or even Babel Tower, but it still was an interesting, intellectual novel, full of ideas. What I'd really like to read is the novel-within-a-novel, The Voyage North, or whatever the title was of Agatha's fantasy novel.
LibraryThing member mykl-s
notes on Reading Byatt’s Frederica Quartet,
The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower, A Whistling Woman

0. Pre-reading notes:
-This is a big undertaking. Four 500-odd page books, a series, historical; all of these examples of what I usually avoid. But written by A S Byatt, who I do not want
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to miss.
-Many reviewers find this quartet high literature. Many others think it is trash, or at least not anything great. So Im on my own as far as evaluating it/them. I read Virgin in the Garden, and Babel Tower, some long years ago, as far as I recall, without remembering any real details about either.
-I want to read the four books, over time, taking notes, and trying to keep track of how I think of the works as I go. (four paperbacks, totaling almost 2000 pages)
-A S Byatt, born 1938, Sheffield, Yorkshire she is two years older than me

1. *The Virgin in the Garden* 1978, 438p
takes place about 1953-
-Much literary, English culture, and other refs. Maybe more than I want to put up with, though the stories carry me along so far, about 60 pages in.
-I don’t yet recall anything from my first reading of virgin, nor do I recall knowing then that virgin and babel were related.
-My original plan to analyze the texts closely may have to be changed as the mere number of pages to read could put me off.
-I remembered almost nothing from my long-ago first reading.
-three main stories, one for each of the Potter children, Fredrica, Stephane, Marcus, with many other characters.
-The writing is very good, dense, detailed. I did skip some paragraphs, ones about plant names, other names, the details of the play, and such. Byatt makes me want to read every passage, and I would if the book wasn’t so long. I did want to get on with the stories, and wished for fewer words.

2. *Still Life* 1985, 385p
-this is only one of the four in the series without a Kindle edition, though I have a fairly clean paper copy, with not so small print; it has no table of contents though.
There is epigraphs, a prologue (1980), & 33 chapters (~12pg/ch) ch 1 1953
-at ~p.160, Fredrica is interesting but not very likable. she’s used to show how life in 50s oxbridge is getting on, while Stephanie’s story shows more of what happens in the country, especially with women
-

3. *Babel Tower* 1996, 633p
-by the time I get to Babel Tower, i know most of the characters and their history, and can pick up the new characters easily
-reading ebooks make for easy access to unfamiliar, mostly British or scholarly, words, and to searches online for places and persons and events
-this is the longest of the series, with its own book-in-book
-I did more skimming here than with the others, since passages did get tedious in places for me, still i avidly followed the stories and read to the point of eyestrain

4. *A Whistling Woman* 2002, 430p
-another ambitious novel, with many new characters and many of those from the previous books showing up too
-maybe the most disturbing of the four, deeply flawed, psychologically harmed people, a cult that could not end well, but with an ending that promised hope for most of them
-definitely about the 60s, 70s, with all the experiments and changes these years brought; the pill, psychotropics, TV, science, computers, cold war, education, liberation and oppression, nature vs nurture; Byatt seems to mention everything that happened, writing three decades later
-I probably skimmed less in this than the other three books, looked up characters more since I had forgotten who was who with new ones and with minor figures who showed up again

5. All in all, the four books are a very good read. It’s about periods I lived through, 1950s-70s, and can relate to and have opinions about and still am happy to read about. It is four works that help me continue put that period into some sort of perspective.
I'll continue to think about these books. There is still much in them that I don't yet have the context to fully understand.
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