Babel Tower by A S Byatt

Babel Tower by A S Byatt

The Booker Prize-winning author of Possession presents an extraordinary story set against the backdrop of the 1960s--a turbulent decade of clashing politics, passionate ideals, and shifting sexual roles.

At the heart of Babel Tower are two law cases, twin strands of the Establishment's web, that shape the story: a painful divorce and custody suit and the prosecution of an obscene book. Frederica, the independent young heroine, is involved in both. She startled her intellectual circle of friends by marrying a young country squire, whose violent streak has now been turned against her. Fleeing to London with their young son, she gets a teaching job in an art school, where she is thrown into the thick of the new decade. Poets and painters are denying the value of the past, fostering dreams of rebellion, which focus around a strange, charismatic figure--the near-naked, unkempt and smelly Jude Mason, with his flowing gray hair, a hippie before his time.

We feel the growing unease, the undertones of sex and cruelty. The tension erupts over his novel Babbletower, set in a past revolutionary era, where a band of people retire to a castle to found an ideal community. In this book, as in the courtrooms, as in the art school's haphazard classes and on the committee set up to study the teaching of language, people function increasingly in groups. Many are obsessed with protecting the young, but the fashionable notion of children as innocent and free slowly comes to seem wishful, and perilous.

In Byatt's vision, the presiding genius of the day seems to be a blend of the Marquis de Sade and The Hobbit. Peopled with weird and colorful characters, charted with brilliant, imaginative sympathy, Babel Tower is as comic as it is threatening and bizarre.

A.S.Byatt is a novelist, short story writer, and critic who has received international renown. Possession, which won the Booker Prize, as well as The Children's Book and The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower, and A Whistling Woman, are among her works. In 1999, she was made a Dame of the British Empire, and she has won numerous awards, including the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award, and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize. She currently resides in London, England.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780679736806
ISBN 10	0679736808
Title	Babel Tower
Author	A S Byatt
Series	Vintage International
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Random House USA Inc
Year published	1997-06-24
Number of pages	640
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.