A.S. BYATT is, as she must be, in the new Companion to English Literature edited by her sister Margaret Drabble, and there is even a plot summary of her last novel. ‘Her most substantial work, The Virgin in the Garden (1978), is set largely in the Coronation year of 1953; the second Elizabethan Golden Age is celebrated by a performance at a Yorkshire country house of a new verse drama by public schoolmaster Alexander Wedderburn, in which schoolgirl Frederica Potter plays the role of the Virgin Queen. Rich in complex allegorical allusions to Spenser, Raleigh, Shakespeare and many others, the novel also provides a realistic and vivid portrait of the Potter family, and of provincial life in the 1950s.’ This is, as it must be, a mere logarithm of a remarkable piece of art (rich, complex – the epithets are just) which overwhelmed me in the reading and disappointed me in the ending, which seemed arbitrary and left all the characters up in the air, dangling. I should have had the sense to perceive that a sequel was necessary. Still Life is the sequel, and there seems to be no reason why there should not be a sequel to the sequel. Quite apart from her duty to her characters – which are far too substantial and too much, event after about seven hundred pages, still in a state of urgent psychological growth to be permitted to bow their way off – A.S. Byatt has a duty to postwar British history. She is still recording the fifties in Still Life, and no one has done it more sharply or aromatically. As I lived in the Far East from 1954 until 1959, I missed that particular phase of social evolution in, so to speak, the flesh. There is here all the flesh I need, as well as the taste and the colour.
The colour is important, as the title suggests. Alexander is writing a play about van Gogh, whose wonder at the mystery of colour is partly expressed in his letters by his unwillingness to let colour-epithets obey the laws of French accidence: colour is primal, separable from objects, an entity divorced from gravity and physical extension. The novel itself is flooded with colour, and the question seems to be raised: how far can language, a kind of spectre, cope with the reality of the spectrum? The novelist herself raises questions directly, though not that particular one. She tells us she is writing a novel and indicates its roots in certain images, but the subtlety and complexity of the whole structure forbids our accepting her occasional presence in the naïve terms of traditional auctorial intrusion. There is a terrible moment in the narrative when an accidental death occurs, and one feels: A.S. Byatt is a kind of Borges; she can reverse this event, if she wishes. Then we realise that she cannot. She is not manipulating, as Borges always is: she is presenting personages and events which have a disjunct reality. The writer herself is being written.
Still Life would seem to be an inept title for a novel so full of movement, but altogether appropriate for a work in which the world of colour and form demands to be looked at. Frederica Potter, the exasperating but fascinating virgin of the previous novel, bloodily but voluntarily deflowered in Scarborough towards the end, herself becomes caught by the sun in Provence, a chromatic feature to be examined. But there are modes of examination quite distinct from the aesthetic. There is a wonderful and shocking moment when the bulky curate Daniel, husband of Frederica’s elder sister Stephanie, makes love to his wife. The descriptive register shifts from the realistic narrational to the biological: we observe the swimming spermatozoa dying, the surviving Noah reaching its goal. We are tempted to think of Aldous Huxley in Point Counter Point, but Huxley’s science was in the service of irony; A.S. Byatt’s promotes awe. The shifting of levels is always surprising. The terrible accidental death is caused by an unearthed refrigerator. A sparrow has got into the kitchen, a search for it causes the calamity. While a woman lies dead the sparrow flies out through the window, and we are struck by the significance of the epigraph from the Venerable Bede: ‘…adveniens unus passerum domum citissime pervolaverit; qui cum per unum ostium ingrediens, mox per aliud exierit…’ We are faced with the ghastly fragility of life.
Babies are born, and the obstetric details are presented without flinching, in the language of epic struggle and victory. We fear for these children, not because of any dark omens inserted into the plot but because of the mystery of life itself, with which reason has no covenant. The mystery of colour may be taken as a correlative of this. The symbols of the novel are woven with great skill, enforcing the notion of an artefact as cunningly contrived as a van Gogh still life, but the book is thoroughly valid as a narrative in the great realist tradition, in which we are concerned with what the characters are going to do next.
Our concentration is, as in The Virgin in the Garden, on the flamehaired Frederica, now up at Cambridge, having affairs but wholly absorbed in literature, which is more mysterious than life. Her sister lives her married life with Daniel in his Yorkshire curacy, bearing children, looking after her introverted brother whom their father’s loud dogmatism has ruined, starved for the opulence of language in which Frederica wallows. The divisions and hostilities of the previous book are now to some extent resolved, though at a shocking price. Meanwhile art is a reality parallel to life and, through the magic of the narrative method, the parallels seem to meet. There is an appearance of looseness, sprawl, casualness of construction, serving the unpredictability of life, but this is a mere illusion. Never was a novel more tightly organised. The two novels together represent a highly distinguished contribution to British art. We are in the presence of a remarkable intelligence which recognises how essential it is for literature to absorb literature. The allusiveness of Still Life is part of its strength, but the primal strength derives from the courage of the clear eye and an almost frightening compassion.
Fiction Magazine, 28 May 1985
Review of Still Life by A.S. Byatt
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1985)