A Whistling Woman [Paperback]

A.S. Byatt (Author)

Book Description

Release date: April 13, 2004

A Whistling Woman portrays the antic, thrilling, and dangerous period of the late ‘60s as seen through the eyes of a woman whose life is forever changed by her times.

Frederica Potter, a smart, spirited 33-year-old single mother, lucks into a job hosting a groundbreaking television talk show based in London. Meanwhile, in her native Yorkshire where her lover is involved in academic research, the university is planning a prestigious conference on body and mind, and a group of students and agitators is establishing an “anti-university.” And nearby a therapeutic community is beginning to take the shape of a religious cult under the influence of its charismatic religious leader.

A Whistling Woman is a brilliant and thought-provoking meditation on psychology, science, religion, ethics, and radicalism, and their effects on ordinary lives.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Anyone who has followed the adventures of Frederica and her friends from The Virgin in the Garden through Still Life and Babel Tower will find it impossible to resist A Whistling Woman, the conclusion of A.S. Byatt's masterful quartet on postwar English life and manners. The first book in the series was set in the early 1950s, and A Whistling Woman carries the story through the end of the 1960s. While it lives up to the sweep and gravitas of the earlier volumes, it is slow going at the start, crowded with characters and ideas, not all of which are equally compelling. University politics, feminism, television, psychology, the advent of mass culture, and the emerging science of neurobiology each figure large, although Byatt's emphasis is on the old trio of love, madness, and religion. These novels cover much of the same ground as her sister Margaret Drabble did in The Radiant Way and elsewhere, but have more in common with the work of Iris Murdoch, whose novels showed a similar sympathy for--and fascination with--unreasoned acts of passion. A Whistling Woman is a brilliant evocation of the intellectual and social life of 1960s Britain, with allowance for the occasional grisly murder. --Regina Marler --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Byatt, like George Eliot and Doris Lessing, aims to show in her fiction the exemplary struggle between self-consciousness and the precepts of culture. She produces "novels of ideas"-which is an all too bloodless label for this beautifully realized, smart novel, the final volume of the tetralogy she began with The Virgin in the Garden. It is 1968. To capture the millenarian atmosphere of that year, Byatt situates her action around several different centers: a fashionable TV chat show hosted by Frederica Potter (whose divorce was the center of Babel Tower); an Anti-University going up in the moor near the University of North Yorkshire; a conference on body and mind being planned by the vice-chancellor of UNY; Dun Vale Hall, also in the moors near the university, an alternative therapy site whose titular head, R.D. Laing-like psychoanalyst Elvet Gander, is increasingly under the sway of his patient, the charismatic Joshua Ramsden; and UNY's biology department, where Luk Lysgaard-Peacock and Jacqueline Winwar are working within the relatively recent neo-Darwinian synthesis. As Frederica's producer sets up a documentary around the UNY conference, all the circles begin to overlap. Against the rationality of the novel's scientists is pitted the stubborn truth of their finding: that the brain isn't made for reason, but for the body. In Frederica, Byatt has produced a model proto-feminist: literate, shrewd and knowing, a character who could only be the product of centuries of Enlightenment. The countertheme belongs to the dark, ecstatic Ramsden, whose psychotic episodes begin to bleed into his essential, charismatic goodness. "We are shimmering on the edge of transfiguration," writes Gander. The terror, as Byatt shows, is what lies over that edge.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 448 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; First Vintage International Edition edition (April 13, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679776907
• ISBN-13: 978-0679776901
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.9 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #734,392 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 40 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Daunting. December 21, 2002

By Mary Whipple HALL OF FAMETOP 100 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

Byatt offers huge challenges to the reader in this complex intellectual novel set in a university, a hospital for the insane, a religious commune, an Anti-University, and, finally, a London TV studio in the late 1960's. Continuing the lives of characters she has established earlier in Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, and Babel Tower, Byatt spends little time here developing them further or in creating an action-filled plot. Instead, she concentrates primarily on further developing the themes and philosophical questions which have occupied her earlier novels, using the characters and plot in an almost allegorical sense to illustrate these issues.

This is not light entertainment or escape reading. In the first hundred pages, Byatt introduces approximately forty characters, their roles, and their interrelationships, all of whom figure in the action in the novel. Frederica Potter, the main character in the previous novels, is the main character here, but other characters also receive close attention. All of these are deeply concerned with some aspect of memory, learning, creativity, or spirituality as it impacts issues of good and evil, reality, nature, love, and language.

Luk Lysgaard-Peacock and Jacqueline Winwar, engaged in pure science, are studying the population genetics of a variety of snail. Sir Gerard Wijnnobel, running the University of North Yorkshire, is planning an important Body-Mind Conference in which Hodder Pinsky, famous for cognitive psycho-linguistics and the use of computers to explore "the deep structure of linguistic competence" will debate Theobald Eichenbaum, a man who differs in his ideas of the learning process and of the growth of societies. Other characters include an institutionalized, charismatic visionary who practices Manichaeism, a sociologist who goes undercover at a secluded commune, several characters whose lives have been touched by violence, and a man working to destroy the traditional university system. Frederica herself, as hostess of a television program, "Through the Looking Glass," believes that the ability to change the world and its politics rests with the language of television, which "might take the place of the hearth in 19th century fiction."

Challenging and thoughtful, the novel is far more compelling in its ideas than its action, much of which is talked-about, rather than recreated. Long sections of academic papers, detailed letters between two researchers, the full agenda for the Mind-Body Conference, and descriptions of places and even furnishings severely limit the dramatic tension, however much they may illustrate the themes. Hugely conceived and richly imagined, this novel never lets up, giving the reader an intellectual workout rare in modern fiction. Mary Whipple

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Wow March 3, 2003

By Elizabeth Hendry VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

While reading A Whistling Woman, I kept wishing that more novelists wrote as well, as wonderfully, as A.S. Byatt. A Whistling Woman is a terrific novel, in my opinion almost as good as her phenomenal Possession. The story of Frederica Potter comes to a close (at least for us readers) at the end of the novel, and what a story it is--not for plotting reasons, but for how it is told. A Whistling Woman is an intelligently written, thoughtful and thought provoking novel of ideas focusing on one woman, Frederica, and a number of others who touch her life. Byatt shifts back and forth between plot lines and characters in a manner similar to Iris Murdoch. Like Murdoch, Byatt draws heavily from philisophical learning. All of the characters are highly intelligent and not afraid to show it. This is a wonderful, wonderful novel--one of the best I have read in quite some time. Enjoy!

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Laminations February 10, 2003

By Severnbeach

Format:Hardcover

This book is so much bigger than the pages it encompasses. Yes, it has a weak narrative arc compared with more popular fiction but the layers of metaphor and meaning enrich the story while the ending leaves all things possible. One word defines the core of this book. A word I had not heard before and one I looked up in the dictionary - Syzygy. This word means both "opposition" and "conjunction," and this is what this novel is all about. Opposite schools of thought and scholarly disciplines are seen to be in conjunction when discussed on Fredrica's TV show, the anti-university tries to be opposite to the real university but remains in conjunction in a weird way - it cannot survive as an anti-university without a university, the Ottaker Twins are in a strange syzygy dance throughout the novel and end up scarred by the same experience. Apart from this idea of conjunction and opposition, which I guess defined a lot of the sixties, there are many other wonderful literary games in the book. Fredrica's search for the meaning of metaphor plays a small but important part in our understanding of the whole while Bill Potter's epiphany about art is a fascinating place for this curmudgeon character to end up at. Philosophy is pitted against psychology, science against symbolism and love against destruction and everything ends up being linked at the end of the day. This is my favorite of the Fredrica books as I believe that A.S. Byatt has achieved more clarity here than ever before - or maybe I'm just getting it better!