Quotation and literary padding
Having enjoyed immersing myself in the first two novels in AS Byatt's Frederica Potter quartet last year, I'd been looking forward to Babel Tower, the third, and I finally read it this week. Unfortunately, while the main plot still gripped me and Byatt's language was as rich and evocative as ever, I was disappointed in the book as a whole, particularly in its heavy use of quoted passages from real and imaginary sources. Be warned that if you haven't read Babel Tower and might intend to, I give some plot points away below.
The first two novels (The Virgin in the Garden, and Still Life) both have as their connecting strand, plays which one of the characters, Alexander, is writing, although the theme is more subtly present in Still Life. When Babel Tower, after the first few pages, has an inserted passage from Babbletower, a novel in progress, I assumed it would turn out to be written by Alexander or another main character, and would perhaps lend cohesion to the book - at any rate it would be important to read it. As Babel Tower progresses, further Babbletower passages are inserted, 7, 11, even 21 pages long, breaking the flow of the narrative and occasionally making me put down the book for a while because that's not what I wanted to read. I didn't want to skip the excerpts, thinking they must be there for a reason, but they were alternately dull and unpleasant - Babbletower is the subject of an obscenity trial later in the story so they were never going to be light and easy reading. By the end of Babel Tower I was still unsure why the Babbletower excerpts were there at such length; short passages would have sufficed to show the character of that book so that we knew by the time of the trial what the charges were based on.
I got the impression throughout Babel Tower that various segments were there because they could be, because they had occurred to Byatt while she was writing and no-one had ever cut them out again, resulting in a novel over 600 pages long when it could have been two-thirds that. There was a story that Frederica's housemate Agatha is writing, which she reads regularly to her young daughter; a short extract would have been sufficient to show the style (if necessary) and to allow other characters in Babel Tower to gather round and listen, as they do. Again I read the extracts despite them breaking the flow because I assumed they were there for a reason, something would refer back to them perhaps, but I'm not sure they added anything, and as a couple of years have passed by the end of Babel Tower, I imagine the children's story won't reappear in book 4, though of course I could be wrong.
Frederica herself begins to keep a notebook with a view to writing a book later. I would have been quite satisfied to read Frederica's original passages and simply be told that she interspersed these with official letters, scholarly papers, quotes from textbooks etc, or at least keep the quotes short rather than having pages taken up with bits of Tolkien, DH Lawrence, RD Laing, William Blake, and biological information about snails. Elsewhere we are given the entire text of several reports on manuscripts, when Frederica is reading for a publisher. These are more necessary to the plot, but they do go on a bit. Part of this is a question of style: the list of members of a committee both Alexander and Agatha belong to; the script-like layout of the long passages of dialogue that give us every tedious legal utterance and roundabout cross-examination in court.
Overall, though there was plenty of evidence of layered writing, intricate plotting and interesting characterisation, as well as thoroughly tense moments and chapters that pulled me in as before, eliciting groans, gasps and bitten nails, all the extraneous quotes and the sub-themes that petered out betrayed a lack of focus. I will be reading the final book in the quartet, but instead of waiting a while to make the pleasure last, I may start on it straight away so as to give the series an immediate chance to redeem itself.