Rewarding end to a quartet

Vicky Uhland, Special To The News

Friday, December 27, 2002

To understand the scope of A.S. Byatt's latest novel, take a look at the acknowledgments page.

Byatt thanks experts in snails, genetics, physiology and cognition, religion, the culture of the 1960s, television, dyslexia, birds, group therapy and charisma.

This isn't the type of book you skim while riding the bus. It doesn't have one, easy-to-follow theme. It tackles all of the subjects listed on the acknowledgments page and manages to hold widely disparate elements together.

It visits Byatt's pet interests, themes that have appeared in her previous novels and short story collections: fables, literature, academia, science, romance.

A Whistling Woman is the final book in the quartet of Byatt novels featuring Frederica Potter. The series began with The Virgin in the Garden in 1979 and tracks not only Frederica's adventures, but also English culture in the 1950s and '60s.

The title comes from a children's story written by Frederica's roommate. The fable features a flock of bird-women known for their high-pitched whistle that has the power to pierce any ear and kill the listener.

"In Veralden, only men were shape-shifters," says one of the whistling women. "Women stayed in the valley, spinning and teaching, tending fruit-trees and flowers. They never left the valley. We wanted to go out, we wanted the speed and the danger of the wind and the snow and the dark. We charmed a young student into parting with his knowledge, and we made feather-coats, as you see, and rode the storm-winds at night. We flew in, over the mountain-wall, before dawn, plaited our wild hair, put on gown and slippers, and went to sing sweetly to the fruit-trees. But we were spied on, by a traitress, and shamed. And an angry crowd burned our women's clothes outside the gates of Veralden, and almost burned us. But we put a little fear into them, and whistled in their minds, so that they merely drove us away like a flock of geese, calling us evil, and unclean. So we have lived here, where nothing lives, riding the winds, evading hunters and snow-eagles. We have grown angry because no one could hear our speech. Until you came."

Byatt's newest novel has the narrowest focus of the quartet, taking place in only one year, 1969. Frederica is divorced and the mother of 8-year-old Leo. She lives in London and teaches literature until, fueled by the '60s search for meaning, she quits her job and becomes a presenter on an intellectual, avant-garde television show.

There's a parallel story in Yorkshire, home of Frederica's parents and brother, featuring a university where scientists research the sexual life of snails, an anti-university with lectures on astrology and a cult headed by an emotionally disturbed man.

A Whistling Woman is the least plot-driven of the quartet. Not much happens to Frederica and the dozens of other characters. Instead, it is a book about ideas, mirroring the late '60s English fascination with open-mindedness and change.

It is a left-brained book, unlike Byatt's famous novel Possession, which kept the reader balanced between the intellectual and romantic. A Whistling Woman is an ambitious novel, recreating the chaos and energy of a remarkable time.

But the problem with such a novel is that it takes work to read. Put it down and pick it up a month later, and you've forgotten who half the characters are. Skip past the boring parts and you miss the beauty of Byatt's sentence structure and her command of the language.

Ironically for a novel about the anti-establishment '60s, it's a book that demands commitment. Though tedious at times, it rewards the reader who stays with it. It is an unashamed novel from a master of her craft, a novel that refuses to be stuffed into a tidy niche.

As Byatt writes, " 'We are neither birds nor women,' said the Whistler. 'We can never have mates, for we would have to choose, men or birds, and we will not give up our feathers.'"

Vicky Uhland is a free-lance writer who lives in Denver.