MILLICENT BELL
43
her custody of her son but eventually restores him to her. Meanwhile, she
has become involved with another legal battle over a book she recom–
mended to her firm, a book which - like
Lady Chatterley
-
becomes the
object of an obsceni ty trial.
The structure of Byatt's novel is ambitiously chaotic - as though to
deny the connectedness of things which its heroine is having such diffi–
culty establishing. Sliced into the narrative of Frederica's personal
adventures are transcripts of the two trials and other elements - such as
discussions among members of a committee appointed to consider the
state of education in England, and the recounting of bold and original
fairy tales for children composed by another single mother. We participate
in Frederica's further discoveries in Ii terature as a teacher in an evening
class for adults as well as in her developing relation with her small son, and
her new but by no means conclusive love affairs. The reader is supplied
with excerpts from Frederica's own writing, the germs of the novelist she
will, like her maker, eventually become.
In
her diary she experiments with
scissors and paste, cutting up and putting together bits of texts, searching,
in this wreckage of conventional coherence, for serendipitous revelations
- whether the texts are legal documents or the writings of such gurus of
current wisdom as R.
D.
Laing, Norman Brown, Allen Ginsberg. The
result is a patchwork which represents the mood of the times in the six–
ties.
More questionable is the incorporation of what seems to be the entire
book that is under trial for obscenity, its chapters alternating with chapters
of the story of Frederica and modern England. This novel-within-the–
novel, which occupies far too many pages of the whole, is beneath the
level of Byatt's enveloping text.
It
is a labored dystopic satire which relates
the fate of a company of refugees from the French Revolution who seek
to achieve an ideal society of perfect freedom in a "Babbletower" hidden
from the world - and fall into further and further extravagances of poly–
morphous sex and sadism. The object of critique is, obviously, sixties
libertarianism. But it is hard to see how this relates to Frederica's actual
world where the phenomenon is quite invisible, and it does not cast light
on her own quest. Though the depravities to which the Babbletower
commune descends are only mildly pornographic, the invention and style
of this encapsulated fiction are too feeble to deserve the
Lady Chatterley
defense of literary quali ty.
Byatt's massive book is more than two-and-a-half times the length of
Hilary Mantel's novel about another English girl who possibly resembles
the author,
An Experiment in Love.
Wi th the rest of the social scene present
only by implication, Mantel focuses on her female coming-of-age story.
Carmel McBain, like Frederica Potter, is a young seeker from the north of
