A Whistling Woman
A. S. Byatt
<p>A Whistling Woman<em> </em>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.<br /></p><p>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.<br /></p><p>A Whistling Woman is a brilliant and thought-provoking meditation on psychology, science, religion, ethics, and radicalism, and their effects on ordinary lives.</p>Amazon.com Review<p>Anyone who has followed the adventures of Frederica and her friends from <em>The Virgin in the Garden</em> through <em>Still Life</em> and <em>Babel Tower</em> will find it impossible to resist <em>A Whistling Woman</em>, 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 <em>A Whistling Woman</em> 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 <em>The Radiant Way</em> 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. <em>A Whistling Woman</em> is a brilliant evocation of the intellectual and social life of 1960s Britain, with allowance for the occasional grisly murder. <em>--Regina Marler</em></p>From Publishers Weekly<p>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.<br />Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. </p>