A.S. Byatt: A Whistling Woman

By PAT BASKETT

Snails are best observed at dawn, after rain." This innocuous sentence begins a paragraph of breath-taking beauty in which Byatt describes a mist-filled valley where three scientists are studying snail populations.

On the next page its deadpan nature becomes clear when we read of matrimonial alliances and 60 happy couples, referring to snails.

The year is 1968 when universities were shaken by student uprisings against the tyrannies of academia and bureaucracy and this long novel (421 pages) - the fourth in her quartet which includes The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life and Babel Tower - is Byatt's serious (hilarious) send-up of both sides on that debate.

But, as Byatt-aficionados will expect, this is only one stream in her story in which themes interweave like a braided river.

The book opens with a very different setting in which a mother is recounting a long (and tedious) excerpt from a fantasy tale she has written, to two children and some adult listeners.

Excerpts from the tale recur during the novel but I failed to pick up their significance - a second reading might have made this clear but I also failed on that account.

One reading of this dense, challenging and deeply humorous work was quite enough.

Its characters include an oddly named assortment of university types - Vice-Chancellor Sir Gerard Wijnnobel (whose comically mad wife is a vehicle for Byatt's derision of astrology), a cognitive psycho-linguistician named Hodder Pinksy (American, of course), Elvet Gander and Kieran Quarell, a pair of psychiatrists, and two scientists studying the brains (brains?) of snails, called Luk Lysgaard-Peacock and Jacqueline Winwar.

The work of the latter includes: " ... trying to master the differential equations needed to map and measure the action potential of the symmetrical giant cells on the ventral surface of the snail-brain".

At the Anti-University the names are equally absurd - Avram Snitkin, Jonty Surtees - and in between the two factions is a group of religious fanatics lead by Joshua Lamb, also known as Ramsden after his aunt Agnes Ramsden who brought him up when his clergyman father was hanged for the murder of his mother and sister.

Byatt's satirical hand is never light. Near the book's end there is a performance of The Winter's Tale in which Byatt gives Leontes' line:

The fixture of her eye has motion in't, As we are mock'd with art.

Mocked indeed.

Along with the esoteric focus of academic research ("She realised that though she had understood what he had said, which was lucid, and interesting, she was profoundly ignorant, blackly, thickly ignorant, of what he was talking about"), Byatt's subjects include pseudo-intellectual television programmes, vivisectionists, Freudian and Jungian analysts, sociologists, and various theories of language.

Her world is cool and cerebral and the warm, fuzzy ending is a surprise, as if this whistling woman needed some form of redemption.

Technically, Byatt gets away with murder, leading us in and out of one person's head after another, often with a series of he/she thoughts.

Lengthy paragraphs of indirect speech include a dozen he/she saids. So slick is she, we read on unperturbed.

* Chatto & Windus, $54.95

* Pat Baskett is an Auckland journalist.