Customer Reviews

The Virgin in the Garden

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I read this immediately after 3 consecutive readings of Possession, and having since read all Byatt's other fiction, I regard it as my second favorite. The book conveys all the intoxication with literature that one associates with Byatt, with levels of academic reference that I still haven't completely fathomed after several readings. Yet despite the apparent dryness of its themes, it is also a very funny book. Much of it must be, to an American audience, very English.

The early 50's in Britain described here were the age of post-war austerity, but were also heralded as the beginning of a "new Elizabethan age". Byatt beautifully re-creates the half-hopeful, half-cynical atmosphere of those times. She gives us her characteristic juxtaposition of things cerebral and things visceral, obsession with Spencer, Racine, Ovid and sex.

Her heroine of this and two subsequent novels, Frederica Potter, is portrayed, I think, to be somewhat like Jane Austen's Emma - a character no one will like very much. But as a creature possessing all the human passions in abundance, she's wonderfully attractive. I just love her. She must appeal to anyone who has ever suffered for possessing an excess of intelligence.

The book also provides further exposure to the geography of Byatt, with explorations of the parts of Northern England which she subsequently introduced into Possession. The places, the characters, the culture depicted all give more clues about the contents of the fascinating mind of the author.

Like all her other books, it forcefully argues the point that everything that it is to be human, intrinsic to our species, is contained in the edifice of our culture, and that our culture is entirely built of language. Her work challenges the reader, in every line, to examine and re-examine the richly heaped-up layers of meaning in the simplest of English words, and to recall with awe how Ovid and Chaucer and Spencer and Shakespear and Austen are alive and well and living in our brains every time we frame a sentence. The enthusiasm with which she conveys this philosophy in this book is a pleasure every time I return to track down fascinating quotes or to re-read it.

"The Virgin in the Garden" is a densely written novel that centers around a quirky English family during the time of Queen Elizabeth II's coronation. The book deals with themes found in Byatt's other novels: lives of intellectuals and artists, the occult and spiritual, suffocating atmosphere of an academic village, gender dynamics and familial relationships. Byatt's characters rattle off quotes and allusions in just about every scene, but she rescues them from being mere voices of ideas by exposing their human weakness and imperfection. The portrait of the core family, besieged with problems, is utterly convincing. But she does this slowly, and the first of this three-part novel, filled with considerable background information, plods with lethargy. The ponderous pace is compounded by Byatt's habit of depicting scenes in minute details. Her power of observation is admirable, but the minutiae ultimately obscure the dramatic thread. Something must also be said about the novel's point of view: the change of focus character from chapter to chapter works well, but when this change occurs within a chapter, and often within a same paragraph, the effect can be disorienting.

Despite these flaws, riveting drama awaits those who are patient; the second half of the novel is deeply engrossing. The narrative pulse quickens, tension explodes, and in a few memorable scenes, fine dialogue alone propels the story forward with breathless inevitability--quite rare for Byatt, and quite entertaining for readers.

I have read The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life, its sequal, twice. The first time I was predominantly aware of the lushness of Byatt's language, which is something I notice when I first read all of her books. For me it almost impedes my ability to understand and follow the plot. The second reading for me was much more satisfying. I really like the Potter family, with all of their eccentricity and irrascibility.

The is the beginning of a very satisfying, sometimes very sad, series of books. They are worth the sometimes slow reading required.

This is one of the best literary works I have read. I cannot fathom the bad reviews here. The story of the eccentric Potter family and the quirky works of their minds enthralled me from beginning to end. Frederica Potter is my favorite character in the book. She takes me back to heroines made famous by authors the like of Jane Austen. She is one of the most colorful characters I have ever read. All of the central characters are great. This novel chronicles the life of an eccentric family with subtle magic realism and palpable dark language.

This novel's setting floored me. Fifties Britain is described in such a way that made me feel as though I had been alive during those times. The Elizabethan backdrop is also mesmerizing. And I love the quirkiness and darkness in this book. A.S. Byatt is no doubt one of the best writers of this era. Hers is a voice you cannot help but love. She writes with beautiful prose. I have read her short-story collections and now this book and I cannot wait to read her other works. I cannot recommend The Virgin in the Garden enough.

It seems as if it is impossible for A.S Byatt to write a bad or even a mediocre story. After this novel, she is one of my new absolute favorites and I have vowed to read everything this amazing author has written.

I began to read The Virgin in the Garden, and could not put it down. I was enraptured by the beautiful descriptions of the two contrasting "Elizabethian ages" and the characters. Frederica has to be one of the most despicable, and yet intriguing literary characters in years. My breath was also taken away by the story of Marcus Potter--a haunting, amazing character that will stay with you for days.

The way Byatt writes, she transports you to 1950s England and the lives of the Potters. I felt as if I knew these characters like family, and could almost sit down to lunch with them by the end of the book. Her style, timing, and subtle metaphors of passion and life are irresistible and amazing. This is truly a writer who will stand the test of time to become an icon in the likes of the Brontes, Jane Austen, and Kate Chopin.

I cannot wait to share this book with everyone I know. Highly, highly reccomended. Go to the bookstore or your local library, ignore the new glossy bestsellers that try and cheat you out of your money and instead pick up this gorgeous, powerful read that new authors cannot hold a candle to.

I love A.S. Byatt's style- dense, literary, yet down-to-earth in may ways. The Potter family is portrayed carefully, with a look at the quirks and dynamics of a family. I like Frederica, despite realizing she is not very sympathetic. My only issue with the book is that there are some moments of indescribable bordom when reading about the Potter boy. He is troubled and sometimes the scenes of him trying to discover comfort in the world read as hilarious, but often as not they made me want to snooze. However, I still want to learn More about this family, so the author did almost everything else right!

Imagine yourself as an extremely gifted, intellectual girl of seventeen from an extremely intellectual family with an equally precocious sister coming of age in England during the time of Elizabeth II's coronation just past the age of Austerity (As opposed to America's Post-War Economic boom, England went through a period of scarcity so severe that there was food-rationing, more severe than during the actual war.), and you will have a good idea of the milieu in which A.S. Byatt and her sister, Margaret Drabble (as well-known a writer as her sister, in England) grew up. You will also be able to put yourself in either the character Frederica's or in her sister, Stephanie's, shoes. The one you fancy most will depend on your taste, I suppose. All the other reviewers seem to favour Frederica, and, in fairness, the book does become, especially towards the end, her story. Still, I prefer Stephanie's quiet, Wordsworthian depth and empathy to Frederica's stylised Racine-like hardness (A bit of a Manichean simplification here, but I think it will do for the prospective reader. I'm not writing a dissertation.) In any event the choice, I think, is a personal one.

I notice that there is much comparing of Byatt to Jane Austen here. I should be especially wary of this comparison if I were a prospective reader, for a couple of reasons: 1) There is much explicit sex here, so much that, had this book been up for publication in the year it was set, it would have been unanimously turned down because of the Obscenity Laws. D.H. Lawrence (mentioned often herein) is the apt comparison 2.) I just don't see it, aside from Byatt's obsession with detail, but this detail extends to the sexual realm as well. Austen fans beware: Sexual acts are more frequent than tea parties here, and are as intricately described as the former are in Austen.

So what we have here are two very different takes on literate and literary girls coming of age in the heady dawn of a new Elizabethan era. Stephanie dominates the first half and Frederica the second half of the book, approximately. Also, there's the matter of their younger brother Marcus and his relationship with Master Cummings. I don't want to say too much about this because it's rather obscure and involved, and it also reminds me of nothing so much as an Iris Murdoch novel, except (thankfully) Byatt treats it with irony and many of these passages are terribly humourous. In Murdoch, it all would be tragic.

My own feeling? The book affected me deeply. I feel like I know people of my parents' age on a deeper level, particularly women. It blurs the lines between dreams and life, literature and life so effectively that they become part of one dizzying phenomenon, with the unremitting stress on the sexual subtext of all our thoughts and actions ringing truer than true. The narrator, who pops in a few times to give the reader a Proustian perspective on things, puts is thusly, in re Frederica:

"....whilst Alexander was never able to see this high moment of his career as any kind of archetypal golden age, Frederica was easily able to do so. Again this may have been purely a function of age. At seventeen the world was all before her, unspotted, whatever it might become, whatever it was already doomed to be. Disembarrassed, in the sixties, of the awkwardness of being seventeen, a virgin, and snubbed, she was able to fill her memory theatre with a brightly solid scene which she polished and gilded as it receded, burnishing the image of Marina Yeo's genius, after Marina Yeo's slow and painful death from throat cancer, seeing the Bevy, as they developed into housewives, gym mistresses, social workers, boutique assistants, an alcoholic and another dead actress, as having been indeed golden girls, with a golden bloom still on them, seeing the lawns, the avenues, the lanterns in the branches and the light winking on half-obscured singing bottles, in the still eternal light through which we see the infinite unchanging vistas we make, from the height of one year old, out of suburban gardens or municipal parks in summer, endless grassy horizons and alleys which we always hope to revisit, rediscover, inhabit in real life, whatever that is."

True and profound -yet there is a sadness to all this. Everyone seems somehow less substantial as one turns the final pages, and I couldn't help reverting to a thought of the daughters' mother in the early going: "...two people are closer before they have lived together or even slept together or talked for very long." This observation proves to be poignantly true both in the case of Stephanie's husband and of Frederica's lover.

As Yeats says: "All who love are sad."

1. It is a great novel. Well written, engaging characters, and even a plot with a beginning and a middle and an end you want to arrive at, and you do. Things to bear in mind though is that Byatt is British and writing for a British audience. Also she is a high-end literary critic extremely well-versed in British and American literature. Consequently some stuff will go over an American's head because it is a Brit thing. And some stuff is going to go over everyone's head because Byatt expects the reader to know a lot of literary and cultural references and look them up if she doesn't or just grasp the meaning from context or just slide on by. But that's what makes her books all the more challenging and interesting to those with the knowledge already or the desire to learn more .

2. Byatt is extremely meticulous and detailed when it comes to background. Can be a bit of a slog sometimes but for those with the interest and attention span it is well worth it as it brings the period in question to life, along with the charatcers and the story.

And what is really great is that this is but the first book in a quartet so there are three more great novels to look forward to after you finish reading "The Virgin in the Garden"

"Remembered objects clogged her thoughts, floated, vivid spectra, before her closed eyes."

"What was bothering him was spreading fear. More and more things aroused it: things he could no longer do, could no longer bear to see."

"People are always ~showing me things.~"

These quotes, concerned with the three protagonists of The Virgin in the Garden, A. S. Byatt's third novel and the first in a linked quartet, capture both the book's virtues and its frustrations. Three siblings, Stephanie, Frederica, and Marcus, are all besieged in their different ways by the outside world, and by the force of personality of their violently idealistic father. Stephanie has rejected his hope that she will rise in the academic world, and maintains a not entirely satisfactory local teaching job, until she becomes entangled with passionate local curate Daniel Orton. Frederica hopes to become an actress, and to capture the attention of English teacher Alexander Wedderburn, combining these dreams with an audition for Wedderburn's play, an elaborate verse drama about Elizabeth I that's being staged to capitalize on the coronation of Elizabeth II. And Marcus, torn by inexplicable visionary terrors that nonetheless have something of the mathematical about them, seeks to contain them with the help of science teacher Lucas Simmonds, who claims to understand Marcus's visions and to be able to use them to accomplish great things. As these six characters interact, tensions slowly grow, leading to a series of life-altering events.

Unfortunately, the key word there is "slowly." Byatt has described herself as a greedy reader, and one imagines that she, like her characters, is blessed and afflicted with an extraordinary visual memory, one that leads her to offer the lengthy descriptions that regularly break the novel's momentum. As descriptions none of them are objectionable, but they lack the artistry that might have made them compelling. In later books, Byatt's descriptions become less dense and more elegant, but here they are mere lists of things. I'm sure that they function as chains of symbolic association that, when observed, become very powerful, but these chains are evidently so complex that casual reading doesn't even begin to bring them forth, and without that impetus, one is scarcely interested in a scholarly reading that will capture the nuances. Byatt's first two novels, The Shadow of the Sun and The Game, were tentative, interesting in passages but lacking the range of later work like Possession and The Children's Book. The Virgin in the Garden has that range-- in addition to the description, it's laden with characters, many of whom are temporarily invaded by the author's omniscient voice, to varying effect-- but lacks the concise lightness of touch that balances it.

Against these flaws there is the depth of the central characters, whose fears and desires are real, complex, and poignant, and whose thoughts have the touch of reality in them. And there are many wise observations on personalities, historical moments, works of art. These come along just often enough to heighten the flagging pace and causes spurts of rapid reading that make up for the soporific diligence with which earlier passages are muddled through. The final chapter, a series of brief passages that make up the denouement, left me eager read Still Life, the second novel in this quartet dealing with British life of the 1950s and 1960s. Byatt has remarked that, for all their ambitions, she intends most of her books to be readable simply as romantic novels, easily "consumable on the surface" without reference to their elaborate construction. In that respect, The Virgin in the Garden doesn't quite succeed, but it comes close enough, and is well-observed enough, to be worth reading nonetheless.

If the test of a great novel is that you want to read it again, or pick up the next one (this is the first of a quartet) then this is a good novel. If Still Life--the next title in the quartet--had been right here on the shelf I'd have started it right after I reread the Prologue.

The present time of the novel is 1953, the year of the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and, in the world of the novel, of a verse drama about the first Queen Elizabeth enacted on the grounds of an old and elegant estate in Yorkshire. The story is that of a Yorkshire family: father Bill Potter who's reputed to be a magnetic teacher at Blesford Ride, a public school, but we see him primarily as a dogmatic liberal who terrorizes his family while promoting his ideas on education (he's for it) and religion (he's against it). Winifred, his wife, caters and defers, of necessity becoming exactly the kind of woman he deplores and whose life her daughters (Stephanie and Frederica) seek to escape. Marcus, the youngest and his mother's favorite, is inner-directed, even spiritual, awkward with just about everyone, observant of phenomena of his world--and becomes prey for a disturbed science teacher.

The novel, which in general is slow moving and highly allusive has a surprisingly dramatic closing sequence for a writer who says she didn't think she could tell stories. I had to laugh, though, at the very end: the scene is between Daniel, the fat, unkempt priest who marries the elder Potter daughter against the wishes of her parents, and Frederica in the small flat where the pregnant Stephanie is comforting the very disturbed Marcus.

Here's the last paragraph: "Waiting and patience, of this inactive kind, did not come easily to him. Or to Frederica, he decided, without much sympathy for her. He gave her a cup of tea and the two of them sat together in uncommunicative silence, considering the still and passive pair on the sofa. That was not the end, but since it went on for a considerable time, is as good a place to stop as any."

I loved that ending and asked myself why:

1. It caused me to consider the title of the second book in the quartet, Still Life. Stephanie and Marcus were "still" in their way but that was not true of Frederica and Daniel about whom "stillness" is almost the last word that would occur in any description of their characters.

2. It sent me immediately back to reread the prologue where I rediscovered that Daniel was one of the guests at the celebration in the Portrait Gallery in 1968---long after the New Elizabethan Age furor is over. Alexander Wedderburn, who wrote the 1953 verse play as a budding writer teaching at Blesford Ride, is also there, signaling perhaps that these two, and Frederica who invited them are of most interest in the novel.

3. The implication that there's more to the history of these characters made me want to continue immediately with the next book. And that reminds me that I absolutely loved the way Byatt handled time in the novel, the constant references to what different characters would do or think in the future, often with a date attached, usually in the 1970s. So you know the story goes on beyond the 1968 prologue. That's not an end to the story. AND that Byatt must have had the sequence fairly well planned out.

4. It reminded me that I liked the third person omniscient narrator which since Henry James has been used less frequently in serious fiction. I think Byatt uses it brilliantly and this ending paragraph is an example. SHE knows what happens to them all and will tell you if you're patient. The ostensible third person narrative showcases the author's extraordinary insight into so many different characters. Before the novel is over, we know all the Potters well, and even have some insights into the extraordinarily bad father. And 4 or 5 additional characters as well.

There is a narrator, though, in this novel and one who gradually makes us realize that Frederica is the main character. Some readers see Frederica as the narrator, and that is possible if one assumes a Frederica observing at some point in the future and if one assumes, as I do, that Frederica is capable of considerable detachment. But I prefer to think it's Byatt's re-incarnation of the 19th century 3rd person omniscient narrator who, as the novel goes on, focuses on the awkward, studious 17-year old ready to catapult herself into "real life". In addition, it's this narrator--definitely female--who provides the considerable humor in the novel.

My argument that the narrative is essentially (if not strictly) third person centers around the intimate (and convincing) inside view of so many different characters. What makes this a strong novel it seems to me is that Frederica is NOT Byatt thinly disguised, even though the family does seem quite similar (but then it also seems similar to the Bröntes, a point of view some in the novel espouse). In the "real" family she was the eldest and she even says that killing off Stephanie (which happens in another novel) seems, in retrospect, killing off herself. But she also says that she was shy and uncommunicative as a child, with interests in science--and that Marcus is in many ways a portrait of herself.