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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
GET REAL, September 14, 2003
Julia, a writer, and Cassandra, an Oxford professor, are two sisters pushing into their 40s that have been estranged for 20 years ever since a man named Simon Moffit came between them and then disappeared from their lives. One day as they are watching television they learn that Simon has now become a naturalist similar to the Crocodile Hunter who likes to get close to dangerous animals in their native habitat. Simon is also coming back to England after being away filming his documentaries and back into the two sister's lives. Julia has gotten married in the meantime and has a child that looks suspiciously like Simon while Cassandra has tried to distance herself from reality, shying from human interaction, cocooned in her office at Oxford. Simon's return will force both of the sisters to examine the loss of their childhood bond when they played an imaginary game, a la the Bronte sisters, in which they chronicled the exploits of knights and ladies to make the time go by. They will also have to figure out their feelings for Simon after spending half their life pining for what has become a man they know now only through tv images and imagination and memories. This was A.S. Byatt's second novel, published in 1967, the summer of love and all that business. It is a masterful work. Julia runs into trouble when she writes a book about Simon and Cassandra and all the mess they went through. Both sisters begin to question whether their lives have become fiction or whether the fictions they made up as kids have become their lives. It is an interesting question for a writer's second work and one which I've seen taken up by Dostoyevsky. The Game is really about whether other people's perceptions of us is stronger than our own self-image. It illustrates what happens to those who are strong enough to shake that image and those weak enough to have their personalities shaped by those they love. I had always known of Byatt by reputation but this is the first book I have read by her. I am very happy that she did not disappoint and look forward to reading the works of her maturity.
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A foreshadowing of Byatt's work to come, January 6, 1997
By A Customer
This earlier novel deals with many of Byatt's favorite themes: the relationships between sisters, the creative process, literary criticism, the academic world, the struggle of married women to retain their intellectual and personal identity within a circumscribing institution. The game of the title is an Arthurian fantasy devised in childhood by two intense, competitive, and willful sisters, now estranged. To the sisters, the game retains even in adulthood a vibrance and power to which real life cannot compare. To the reader, however, the game is frustratingly vague. In later works, Byatt would have articulated the game as an alternative and interwoven narrative, but here Byatt refuses readers access to the tantalizing imaginative world of her characters. Thus, the characters remain slightly repellent ciphers and the novel seems merely a earlier draft for the richer novels Byatt had not yet written. This books seems to be more closely autobiographical than some later works on the same themes, and perhaps for this reason she feels compelled to keep the reader at arm's length. An unsatisfying exercise interesting only in the context of Byatt's later writings.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An engaging read, October 5, 2001
By A Customer
Although it's some years since I read this excellent book, the reviews thus far in my view, do not do it justice. Many people know of Byatt's writing through her book "Possession" but although this is a fine example of her work, all her writing demonstrates a wonderful story-telling ability, embroidered throughout by her extensive literary and historic knowledge. "The Game" is a very "readable" novel, drawing the reader in as the tale evolves. To over analyze "The Game" is to miss the beauty of the mystery and intrigue; to miss the interplay between the main characters and the complexities of family emotions. "The Game" is a wonderful book for any mystery-loving reader and for anyone who has not already been drawn in by Byatt's writing is an excellent place to begin a reading relationship with her work.
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