AS Byatt had a writing career that spanned six decades and featured award-winning novels, short stories and literary criticism. Whether you’re new to the author’s work or wanting to revisit it, John Mullan suggests some good ways in.
The entry point
The weightiness of Byatt’s fiction puts some off. So start with Angels and Insects, a pair of novellas that explore, in brief, some of the themes that most fascinated her. Both are set in the 19th century, where Byatt always seemed peculiarly at home. Morpho Eugenia is the story of William Adamson, an amateur entomologist who returns from years in the Amazon rainforest to court a beautiful young heiress and study English ants: the two pursuits become strangely connected. The Conjugal Angel features two Victorian ladies who conduct seances, sometimes for the benefit of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s sister. Tennyson’s poem In Memoriam provides the characters with solace as they pursue the dead. It is not all brainy and literary stuff: both stories include the vein of sensuality to be found in most of her novels. Byatt was definitely not afraid of sex scenes.
The (possibly) self-revealing one
Something of a Byatt alter-ego, Frederica Potter appears in four of the writer’s novels. The first in the quartet, The Virgin in the Garden, has high expectations of its reader (did you catch that allusion to Spenser’s The Faerie Queene?). However, it is also an engrossing coming-of-age novel, set mostly in the early 1950s, when Byatt herself was a teenager. Clever, bookish, sexually innocent Federica is 17 at the beginning of the novel. She is good with literature but finds men more than a little perplexing. One of these men, Alexander, has written a play about Elizabeth I which is to be performed in a garden to celebrate the new Queen’s coronation. Cue lots of symbolism and literary allusion – but the real story is about Frederica’s pursuit of carnal knowledge.
The one to enjoy in small bites
Byatt wrote long novels but also short stories. Indeed, she was a connoisseur of the form. She edited The Oxford Book of English Short Stories, in the introduction to which she said that the best English examples were “shocking – and hard to categorise”. Her own short stories usually have the quality of experiments – and are none the worse for that. Among several of her collections, try the (very short) The Matisse Stories. These three connected tales take their inspiration from Matisse paintings. They do some kind of justice to Byatt’s huge enjoyment and knowledge of visual art.
The one to mention at dinner parties
At heart, Byatt never stopped being a literary critic. Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time, written in her early thirties, is still a really excellent introduction to these writers and their relationship. But the one to relish is perhaps the more unconventional Imagining Characters, from the 1990s. This consists of transcribed exchanges with the Brazilian psychoanalyst Ignês Sodré, tackling the heroines of six great novels by women including Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Sodré psychologises while Byatt dwells on narrative logic and use of metaphor. Byatt could be a great literary talker, and some of that is caught in this book, in which she is profitably diverted by Sodré.
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The bumper compendium
Byatt’s last big book was very big. The Children’s Book, which made it on to the Man Booker shortlist in 2009, begins in the 1890s and gives us the stories of the members of the artistic and idealistic Wellwood family across the next three decades. The mater familias and central character is Olive Wellwood, a writer of children’s books who bears some similarity to the writer E Nesbit, and as in other Byatt novels, fictional characters mingle with historical figures: JM Barrie, Oscar Wilde, Emmeline Pankhurst to name but a few. We follow the fortunes of the many Wellwood children, as the first world war swallows Europe. It is a big book because of the historical detail, which is lovingly done. It is also a sharply observed account of how those who believe in art or progress can sacrifice others to their ideals.
The one to avoid
Babel Tower. Having tried out an austere prose style for the second of her Frederica Potter novels, Still Life, and deciding that it had not worked, Byatt let rip in this, the third in the sequence. In the opening pages we are offered four possible beginnings, and from there on the metafictional flourishes never let up. You know you are in for a hard time when you find that one of the characters is writing an execrable novel called Babbeltower, large chunks of which are duly given to us by Byatt. The book suffers badly from literary overload. When Frederica is writing lectures we get all the passages from Forster or DH Lawrence that she is analysing, and her thoughts on them. Buried inside it all is a potentially absorbing story of a woman living inside an unhappy marriage, but it is buried very deep.
If you only read one, it should be
Possession, of course. Byatt’s 1990 Booker prize-winning “romance” (as its subtitle proclaimed it) made a pure pleasure of erudition. It is as rich in literary allusions as any of her novels, but is also a successful love story. Not for nothing was Byatt a fan of the historical romances of Georgette Heyer. Possession shifts back and forth between the present, where two academic researchers pursue the secrets of Victorian poets Randolph Ash and Christabel LaMotte, and the 19th century, where Byatt brings these two poets alive for us. Here the formal tricksiness has a real purpose: the time shifts make the narrative gripping. The novel includes clever pastiches of Victorian poetry (Byatt is particularly good at inventing new Browning poems). Some readers skip these, thinking that the author is just showing off, but in fact the poems contain important clues to a secret sexual passion.
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