Babel Tower [Abridged, Audiobook] [Audio Cassette]

A.S. Byatt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 23, 1996

4 cassettes / 4 hours
Read by Eileen Atkins

At the heart of Babel Tower are two law cases, twin strands of the Establishment's 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 Babble Tower, 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 school's 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.

Babel Tower is the third, following The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life, of a planned quartet of novels set in different mid-century time frames. The personal and legal crises of Frederica mirror those of the age. This is the decade of the Beatles, the Death of God, the birth of computer languages. In Byatt's vision, the presiding genius of the 1960s seems to be a blend of the Marquis de Sade and The Hobbit. The resulting confusion, charted with a brilliant imaginative sympathy, is as comic as it is threatening and bizarre.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Babel Tower follows The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life in tracing Frederica Potter, a lover of books who reflects the author's life and times. It centers around two lawsuits: in one, Frederica -- a young intellectual who has married outside her social set -- is challenging her wealthy and violent husband for custody of their child; in the other, an unkempt but charismatic rebel is charged with having written an obscene book, a novel-within-a-novel about a small band of revolutionaries who attempt to set up an ideal community. And in the background, rebellion gains a major toehold in the London of the Sixties, and society will never be the same. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

One does not usually associate Byatt, who has often worked on a small-even miniature-scale, with the notion of an epic novel; but that, in terms of scope and ambition, is just what she has created here. It is an invigorating spectacle, as well as a welcome reminder of how a fine novelist can illuminate a whole era in ways not even the most skilled social historian can. Set in England in the mid-1960s, the novel focuses on Frederica, an attractive, highly intelligent and bookish young woman who cut a swath at Cambridge University, then married Nigel Reiver, a well-to-do member of the landed gentry with a country house, two doting sisters and a way of life that soon seems utterly stifling to Frederica. Her small son, Leo, passionately loved by both parents, is soon the only vital element in her existence; and when friends from her former life come calling, and are rudely rebuffed by Nigel, Frederica rebels. When Nigel, ever apologetic, but convinced it is for her own good, starts knocking her about, Frederica flees to London, with Leo clinging to her in desperation. Thereafter, the book is an account of the drawn-out custody battle over Leo, climaxing in a divorce hearing that exquisitely renders the issues of a woman's independence. More impressively, it is a riveting account of changing mores, as England begins to emerge from its ancient certainties into the shifting priorities, freedoms and follies of the "Swinging Sixties." Among the manifestations of such changes is a book written by an eccentric, Nietzschean acquaintance of Frederica's-a fantasy, with sado-erotic overtones, about the pleasures and limits of freedom. This book (a reprise of the book-within-a-book device Byatt employed in Possession) becomes the focus of another court case when its author is prosecuted for obscenity. Through the two cases (which leap from the page much more enthrallingly, convincingly and thought-provokingly than most legal thrillers) Byatt represents a whole society trying to come to terms with new values. The narrative is mesmerisingly readable, except for long excerpts from Babbletower, the prosecuted novel, and Frederica's own rather hermetic attempts at self-expression-though even these are perfectly believable in their own right. In many ways, this is a book about language, and how it is used to conceal and reveal (there is a wonderfuly satirical subplot about a commission examining English educational methods). But it also employs language, brilliantly, to create a large cast of characters whose struggles, anxieties and small triumphs are at once specific to a time and place, and universal. Simultaneous Random AudioBook; author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Audio Cassette
• Publisher: Random House Audio; Abridged edition (April 23, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679451676
• ISBN-13: 978-0679451679
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 4.9 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,636,537 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #5 in Books > Books on Cassette > Authors, A-Z > ( B ) > Byatt, A. S.

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A woman and literature, both on trial, October 2, 2003

By 

D. Cloyce Smith (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Babel Tower (Paperback)

Even though "The Babel Tower" is the third volume in a tetralogy, one need not have read the first two books to enjoy it. (I hadn't read any other novels by Byatt, and I dove right into this one.) This entry has been described as a novel of the Sixties, but such a characterization is misleading. Byatt never really leaves the ivory tower: the turbulence of the streets, the counterculture, the mod scene, the social upheavals all remain on the periphery throughout. The novel depicts more calm than storm, exploring instead the far narrower (but still interesting) milieu of the literati.

Byatt presents two parallel plots. After the death of her sister, Frederica (the subject of all four novels) is trapped in a marriage that quickly seems unsuitable, eventually becomes oppressive, and finally turns violent. Since it's 1964, a divorce is not simply for the asking; after escaping with her son, she finds her suitability as a mother on trial (both literally and figuratively). The scenes describing the spousal abuse are among the most harrowing I've read, even though, compared with similar episodes in other works, the horror is more psychologically distressing than physically violent. Byatt explicitly links Frederica's subsequent emotional and legal ordeal with Lady Chatterley's trial (both of the book and of the character); Frederica represents a late-twentieth-century woman judged by lingering puritanical nineteenth-century standards.

The second story concerns a thematically similar trial: the ban of "Babbeltower," a book recommended to a publisher by Frederica that is subsequently deemed pornographic by the British government. Tame by today's standards (and even when compared to "Last Exit to Brooklyn," which served as Byatt's model), this fable portrays a sexually uninhibited utopia that evolves into a masochistic and totalitarian dystopia. The recently concluded obscenity trial of "Lady Chatterley's Lover" lingers in the background, although the prosecution asserts that "it was Lady Chatterley herself who was on trial, for the fact of her sexuality. In the case of 'Babbeltower' it is the prisoner in the dock who is on trial, his imagination, the world he created, the tendency of the messages he offers."

While "Babel Tower" is often riveting and stimulating, if Byatt herself were on trial, she might be found guilty of excess. Byatt's most obvious mentor is Iris Murdoch, whose influence she confirms in both the text and the acknowledgments. Murdoch, however, doesn't always spell out her many cultural, philosophical, and literary references; she leaves it for the reader to discover or disregard. Byatt, in contrast, seems to believe that her audience is not well-read; she assumes the role of literary critic for her own work. Her characters quote a dizzying parade of passages to each other, to themselves, or to the reader. Sometimes this approach works, but the technique reaches its nadir when she reprints Frederica's scrapbook, a collage of excerpts and scrambled texts(which Frederica herself correctly disparages as unsatisfying and incoherent). There's also a bizarre and not entirely satisfying subplot which evokes Cronenberg's "Dead Ringers" but can't match its creepiness; it involves identical twins, one of whom courts Frederica, while the other is a jealous psychopath.

Despite these excesses, Byatt still succeeds with her portrait of the young woman artist whose confusion is aggravated by clashes between desires and expectations, nonconformity and morality, literature and society.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating, November 29, 1999

By 

"sarah_elizabeth" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Babel Tower (Paperback)

Byatt has again challenged her readers. This text is a textured, involving story, picking up where the (I believe) slightly sophomoric "Virgin in the Garden" and "Still Life" left off. While the previous 2 books in the series were entertaining, they did not take the chances that "Babel Tower" did. In "Babel Tower," one gets a sense that Byatt is expanding herself -- her writing and her characterization -- in a similar way that "Posession" did. While "Babel Tower" is certainly not as fine as "Posession," one does get that same feeling of excitement and discovery by reading it. I might caution against the S&M tones of the novel's counterpoint (like "Posession," this text has an accompanying fictional text which drive sthe plot) -- not that it is particularly shocking, but rather that it sort of drifts out at times, not serving the main story as strongly as it might. It needed some further development to be an effective counterpoint, but it does serve adequately. All in all, a great read: it's involving, interesting, and has many layers, each with Byatt's usual attention to gorgeous detail.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It gets better every time!, January 17, 2005

By 

CoffeeGurl - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Babel Tower (Paperback)

I read and loved The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life and I couldn't wait to read more of Frederica Potter and her eccentric, intellectual family. Babel Tower centers on Frederica's struggles to free herself from her rich, abusive husband. She is now in a custody battle that could well end in disaster. As she regains her independence and begins to work as a teacher in London, Frederica ponders on the reasons she married someone with a different social and intellectual background. There is another legal fight in the story. Jude Mason, a rebellious man who is described as a hippie before his time, is sued for writing an "obscene book." What transpires is a story centered on the laws and prejudices in sixties London.

Babel Tower is my favorite part of this literary series. A.S. Byatt focuses on Frederica and her plights here more than on the previous novels. And the references to art and literature in this offering are especially engaging and insightful. I did miss the other members of the Potter family, but I loved reading about Frederica one more time. This is one beautiful novel and I so look forward to reading The Whistling Woman with utmost anticipation.