מזמן לא התחבטתי כל כך עם ספר וההערכו שלו כמו עם הספר הזה. בהחתחלה חשבתי שהוא מדהים, גם בכתיבה שלו, גם בארודיציה שלו וגם ביכולתו לתת לך להבין על מה מדובר למרות שיש עשרות רבים של גיבורים שאינך מכיר (וזה למעשה כרך אחד ולא הראשון מתוך ארבעה כרכים). עם הקריאה, שאיננה קצרה התחלתי פה ושם להתעייף. יותר מדי ציטוטים, יותר מדי פירוט, יותר מדי ארכנות. ובכל זאת המשכתי לקרוא ובעניין רב ועכשיו אני מהרהר האם לקרוא את שאר הכרכים ואם כן באיזה סדר. בקיצור, בכל זאת ארבעה כוכבים. ( )

I’m presented with the problem endemic to enthusiastic readers who don’t have any formal education in literature; I can tell this is a good book, but I can’t really say why. I suppose the best I can do is say I found the heroine complicated, but appealing and the other characters also complicated, whether they were appealing or not. ( )

see the notes on Reading Byatt's Fredricia Quartet, found with her fourth book, 'A Whistling Woman' ( )

The third in the Frederica saga: we're now in the mid-sixties. Frederica's impulsive marriage to Nigel Reiver has not worked out well, and she's trying to build a new life as a literary single parent in London, teaching adult education classes, reviewing, and reading manuscripts for a publisher. Alexander is on a government committee that's reporting on possible reforms of the teaching of English in schools, and Daniel is working for the Samaritans out of a switchboard in a church crypt.

Byatt comments ironically on the challenge-everything ethos of the Swinging Sixties by bringing in a full-scale book-within-a-book, Babbletower, a fantasy novel set in a libertine community where the do-what-thou-wilt ideals of Sade and Fourier are taken to their grotesque, horrific conclusion.

The book ends in two — parallel — extended set-piece court scenes, as Frederica's marriage is ended under the still unreformed divorce laws of the time in one court, and the author and publisher of Babbletower are tried for obscenity in another. We see how clumsy an instrument the legal mechanism for determining truth is when it has to deal with the emotional reality of a marriage or the literary reality of a novel. But we've already seen Frederica trying and failing to resolve her firsthand experience of sex and love with the supposedly authoritative — but mutually conflicting! — understanding she has learnt to look for from her reading of E M Forster and D H Lawrence. And we see that each of the so-called experts who give evidence for and against Babbletower has taken something quite different from the book from what we saw in it as readers, and different again from what the author thought he was putting in.

This is a very big, serious, complicated novel of ideas, but it's also a very funny book, full of mischievous caricatures of sixties types — two dreadful Liverpool Poets, Anthony Burgess (safely dead, and therefore playing himself, hilariously), Angus Wilson (a friend of the author's sister, and therefore disguised slightly), trendy clergymen and trendier psychoanalysts, a Bowie-esque pop star, various artists, a vicar's-wife novelist, etc. Best of all, of course, but a full-scale character rather than a mere caricature, is the author of Babbletower, Jude Mason, who shares a profession and some aspects of his personality with Quentin Crisp, but turns out to have a quite different background.

Oh yes, this is a Byatt novel, so it doesn't stop with one book-within-a-book: as well as Babbletower there is a Tolkienish quest-novel being written as a serial for the children by Frederica's childcare-partner, Agatha Mond, and there is Frederica's own work-in-progress, a collage and cut-up book she calls Laminations. Not to mention the usual literary fun and games with parodies of reviews, novel reports, student essays, and the documents of Alexander's committee. And — just in passing — a lot of serious discussion of the nature of language, the sources of morality, the way these things develop in children, cults, Happenings, charismatic Christianity, ritual, the sexuality of snails, the effects of pesticides, and much more.

A lot to take in, even at a second or third reading. But vastly entertaining. ( )

One of my friends, who maintains amazing literary tastes, told me two years ago that Babel Tower was unreadable. I now agree. The familial and educational contexts of the first two novels are gone in this one. What is left is simply ugly. Byatt hopes to make sense of the 60s with a pastiche method and pair of court cases. I deign she fails. ( )