Potters’ world ends with a bang and a whimper

The work of A.S. Byatt is best known for summoning up the spirits of ages past. One has only to think of her Darwinian fable of Victorian love and perversity in the 1992 book “Angels and Insects” or of her Booker Prize-winning novel, “Possession” (1990), a story of passion between two Victorian poets and the modern-day scholars studying them.

But what will likely prove to be her most impressive accomplishment is not these tales of another century but the roman-fleuve she has been writing for the last 25 years about the Potters, a plain-living, high-minded Yorkshire family in some ways similar to her own. With “A Whistling Woman,” the fourth and final novel of this sequence, Byatt rounds off her searching, multidimensional portrait of postwar British life in the 1950s and 1960s and takes her place as a major novelist of our era.

Like Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy of World War I, “Parade’s End,” and Evelyn Waugh’s World War II trilogy, “Sword of Honor,” Byatt’s tetralogy conveys an intimate sense of the texture of day-to-day life while affording a sweeping overview of the transformations of an age. With consummate skill and inventiveness, she creates a large cast of characters whose intertwining stories form a richly evocative tapestry.

If, in America, we tend to think of the 1950s as a decade of constriction and conformity, the first two novels of Byatt’s tetralogy remind us that in Britain it was a time of awakening and opening up. In “The Virgin in the Garden,” published in 1978, Byatt introduced us to the Potters: the erudite, defiantly atheistic schoolmaster father; his well-educated but quieter wife; their introverted, mathematically gifted son, Marcus; and their two intellectually formidable daughters -- gentle, blond, scholarly Stephanie and spiky, redheaded, clever Frederica. This is a family for whom literature matters: Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Blake, George Eliot and D.H. Lawrence are real presences in their mental lives.

In “Still Life” (1985), we watched the newly married Stephanie trying to adjust to domesticity after a brilliant career at Cambridge, while undergraduate Frederica pondered the meaning of metaphor and sampled the charms of various young men. The upheavals of the mid-1960s shaped the narrative of “Babel Tower” (1996) in which Frederica fled a bad marriage and became involved in a censorship case, defending a book she wasn’t sure she approved of.

The dynamic of social and cultural change builds toward a shocking culmination in “A Whistling Woman,” set in 1968-1970, a time when the expansive hopes of the 1950s and early 1960s are shaken by violent protest, a burgeoning interest in the irrational and a general breakdown of norms and standards.

Like the weird whistling creatures, half-woman, half-bird, in the fairy tale that opens this novel, Frederica is a woman in transition. She is no longer sure what she wants of her love life, only learning from her disastrous marriage that trusting one’s instincts can be a big mistake. Living in London and teaching part time, she raises her 8-year-old son, Leo, and feels exasperated by demands for a dumbed-down curriculum as student revolt rears its callow head. Asked to host a highbrow BBC television show, Frederica is torn between the scholarly life and the glamour of television, which her BBC producer thinks will change the world:

“Frederica ... said she thought [television] might take the place of the hearth in nineteenth-century fiction, the coals where Dickens’ characters saw the generation of fantastic images, the warmth around which stories were read aloud, or told, or lived.

“ ‘You are still thinking in terms of novels,’ said [the producer]. ‘But yes, that’s just, that’s very just. I was thinking also of Plato’s Cave, with the fire and the shadows.’

“ ‘Novels won’t go away.’

“ ‘That remains to be seen.’

“ ‘We need images made of language.’ ”

In Frederica’s native Yorkshire, the university’s vice-chancellor is organizing a symposium where linguists, biologists, psychologists and other savants will discuss questions about cognition, learning, innate and acquired intelligence. Returning there to do a BBC program on the symposium, Frederica witnesses its violent disruption by student demonstrators. She also sees her family, including her nephew, who has become interested in a local cult-like community known as the Spirit’s Tigers.

Defying the oversimplified notion of the 1960s as a battle between a culture and a counterculture, Byatt creates three distinct milieus that overlap in surprising ways. Largest and most diverse is the world of liberal, humanist values that includes Frederica, her family, friends and the symposium. The second is the soi-disant “anti-university” sprouting like a mushroom on the university’s outskirts.

But it is the third milieu that is Byatt’s most brilliant -- in many ways, awe-inspiring -- creation. This is that strange therapeutic community called Spirit’s Tigers, which is transforming itself into a religious cult. What makes this community so extraordinary is that, for all intents and purposes, it is not a fake, and Joshua Ramsden, the charismatic man at its spiritual center, is not a charlatan: He is a genuine religious mystic. He is sane enough to know that the visions and voices he sees and hears do not actually exist in the outside world. Yet he also feels certain that they are not just inside his head.

Up until now, the Spirit’s Tigers have been led by Gideon Farrar, a standard ‘60s guru who preaches peace and love, and puts the latter precept into practice by having sex with his besotted female followers. But once Joshua enters the picture, Gideon is consigned to the margins. Severely ascetic, averse to touching -- let alone having sex with -- other people, Joshua effortlessly commands the group’s allegiance almost in spite of himself. His Gnostic-Manichaean vision of matter as evil, and life as a battle between darkness and light, exercises a powerful appeal, which Byatt does a remarkable job of conveying.

The community’s resident psychoanalyst, Elvet Gander, is as affected as the others. “It would be so very easy to mock our doings,” he writes to a colleague back in the normal world. “The English style is fatally mocking -- we can only have the Sublime, it seems, if we include the grotesque as a safeguard. So yes, we were absurd, a lot of predominantly middle-aged English people ... prancing, round a bonfire.... The sky was full of sparks, and stars beyond the sparks. I felt. I felt -- why not? Why can’t we have back the tyger burning bright, and the burning lamb, and the Tree of Life.... Why can’t there be singing and ritual and meaning and a grand purpose, as men once thought there was?” Although Joshua’s visions are shown to lead to self-immolation, Byatt invests them with an unearthly, chilling grandeur.

Not only does Byatt handle her many characters, themes and milieus with authority and finesse, she also weaves them into a satisfyingly coherent whole. Like Iris Murdoch, an anatomist of love, she explores the heady world of romance among the highly endowed. She can create characters who shine with intelligence and individuality, and she shares something of Murdoch’s uncanny sensitivity to the nuances of erotic relationships. Science as well as literature come into her ken. Luk Lysgaard Peacock, a researcher on how snails learn, is in love with his colleague Jacqueline, who happens to be in love with the painfully shy Marcus Potter. The university’s dean of students, cultivated, elegant Vincent Hodgkiss, is also in love with Marcus, who’s in love with a girl who has joined the Spirit’s Tigers. And a new love awaits Frederica.

It is no easy thing to come up with a satisfying ending to any novel, let alone a novel that serves as the ending of an entire sequence. “The end is always the most unreal bit,” Frederica tells little Leo and his friends when they complain about the inadequate conclusion of the fairy tale being read to them at the novel’s outset. But the children are right to demand a “real ending,” one that “leaves no sense of let-down, or half-measure, or thinness, or turning-away of imaginative intensity,” which is what Frederica herself finds on rereading Dostoevsky’s “The Idiot.”

Gathering up the various characters and themes of the previous novels, “A Whistling Woman” pours them into a kind of crucible. Out of this emerges an imaginatively intense vision that captures the dangers of a turbulent era while affirming the enduring humanistic values that help keep us from going over the brink.

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From ‘A Whistling Woman’

And across the wet turf, over the dry-stone walls, the snails slid fluently, creating an intricate net of silvery ribbons, their shells glistening with water, their dove-grey translucent bodies glistening with their own secretions, their fine horns wavering before them, testing the air, peering quietly around. Their shells were variegated and lovely, some a delicate lemon, some a deep rose, some a greenish soot-black, some striped boldly in dark spirals on buff, some with creamy spirals on rose, some with a single band of dark on gold, some like ghosts, greyish-white coiled on chalk-white ...