Friday Fiction: A. S. Byatt

--by Hanje Richards

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This week for Friday Fiction, I selected an author that I know very little about. I frequently have read something by the Friday Fiction author, or have some other reason (like a new book) to feature a particular author. This week, I have not read any by A.S. Byatt, but I have been curious about her for a long time. I learned some things about her this week, doing the research for this blog post. I hope you find something new and interesting here, too. Perhaps you will check out something by A. S. Byatt from the fiction section at The Copper Queen Library.
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Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, usually known as A. S. Byatt, is an English novelist, poet and Booker Prize winner. In 2008, the Times newspaper named her among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945." She is the daughter of His Honor John Frederick Drabble, QC and the late Kathleen Marie Bloor, and is married to Peter Duffy. Her younger sisters are the novelist Dame Margaret Drabble and the art historian Helen Langdon.

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Angels and Insects: Two Novellas - The author of Possession returns to the territory of her bestselling novel in two breathtaking fictions that explore the social and psychic landscape of Victorian England. Set in a proper country house with undercurrents of brutality and at a séance where historical figures yearn for one another.

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The first, Morpho Eugenia, is a Gothic fable that explores the multiple themes of earthly paradise and Darwin's theories of breeding and sexuality. There is an implied parallel between insect and human society throughout. The second novella, The Conjugal Angel, is reminiscent of Possession, Byatt's 1990 Booker Prize winner for fiction, wherein poetry is woven into the narrative.

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Babel Tower - At the heart of the novel 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.

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Biographer’s Tale - Here is the story of Phineas G. Nanson, a disenchanted graduate student who decides to escape the world of postmodern literary theory and immerse himself in the messiness of “real life” by writing a biography of a great biographer. In a series of adventures that are by turns intellectual and comic, scientific and sensual, Phineas tracks his subject to the deserts of Africa and the maelstrom of the Arctic. Along the way, he comes to rely on two women, one of whom may be the guide he needs out of the dizzying labyrinth of his research and back into his own life. A tantalizing yarn of detection and desire, The Biographer’s Tale is a provocative look at “truth” in biography and our perennial quest for certainty.

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Children’s Book - A spellbinding novel, at once sweeping and intimate, that spans the Victorian era through the World War I years, and centers around a famous children’s book author and the passions, betrayals, and secrets that tear apart the people she loves.

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When Olive Wellwood’s oldest son discovers a runaway named Philip sketching in the basement of the new Victoria and Albert Museum — a talented working-class boy who could be a character out of one of Olive’s magical tales — she takes him into the storybook world of her family and friends.
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But the joyful bacchanals Olive hosts at her rambling country house — and the separate, private books she writes for each of her seven children — conceal more treachery and darkness than Philip has ever imagined. As these lives — of adults and children alike — unfold, lies are revealed, hearts are broken, and the damaging truth about the Wellwoods slowly emerges. But their personal struggles, their hidden desires, will soon be eclipsed by far greater forces, as the tides turn across Europe and a golden era comes to an end. Taking us from the cliff-lined shores of England to Paris, Munich, and the trenches of the Somme, The Children’s Book is a deeply affecting story of a singular family, played out against the great, rippling tides of the day. (Shortlisted in 2009 for the Man Booker Prize)

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Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice - Richly imaginative story collection that transports the reader to a world where opposites -- passion and loneliness, betrayal and loyalty, fire and ice -- clash and converge.

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A beautiful ice maiden risks her life when she falls in love with a desert prince, whose passionate touches scorch her delicate skin. A woman flees the scene of her husband's heart attack, leaving her entire past behind her. Striving to master color and line, a painter discovers the resolution to his artistic problems when a beautiful and magical water snake appears in his pool. And a wealthy Englishwoman gradually loses her identity while wandering through a shopping mall.

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Little Black Book of Stories - Like Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, Isak Dinesen and Angela Carter, A. S. Byatt knows that fairy tales are for grownups. In this collection she breathes new life into the form. The collection offers shivers along with magical thrills. Leaves rustle underfoot in a dark wood: two middle-aged women, childhood friends reunited by chance, venture into a dark forest where once, many years before, they saw – or thought they saw – something unspeakable. Another woman, recently bereaved, finds herself slowly but surely turning into stone. A coolly rational ob-gyn has his world pushed off-axis by a waiflike art student with her own ideas about the uses of the body. Spellbinding, witty, lovely, terrifying.

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Matisse Stories - Three intensely observed, beautifully written stories, each inspired by a painting of Henri Matisse, each revealing the intimate connection between seeing and feeling. In A.S. Byatt's hands, these tableaux come to life, exposing the unruliness of grief, desire and creativity.

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Possession - An exhilarating novel of wit and romance, an intellectual mystery, and a triumphant love story. This tale is of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets.
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A double-edged romance that bridges Victorian England and modern-day academia. At once literary and highly readable, the book boasts a compelling narrative that exposes the real life behind the art of two Victorian poets, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte, and contrasts their passion for life with that of Maud Bailey and Roland Mitchell, contemporary scholars who stumble upon romance hidden in dusty papers. (Booker Prize for Fiction, 1990; Irish Times International Fiction Prize, 1990; Commonwealth Writers Prize (Eurasia Region, Best Book), 1991)

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Still Life - A highly acclaimed novel which captures in brilliant detail the life of one extended English family -- and illuminates the choices they must make between domesticity and ambition, life and art. (PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award, 1996)
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Whistling Woman - This novel 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.

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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. A Whistling Woman is a thought-provoking meditation on psychology, science, religion, ethics, and radicalism, and their effects on ordinary lives.