For A Whistling Woman, which covers the period from 1968 to 1970, suffers from the same sins which beset its forerunners - the excessive use of symbols (spiders, spirals, fire, webs, mirrors), a narrative gnarliness, an overbearing sense of allegory - but it suffers from them even more acutely. Nearly a quarter of a century on, Byatt's ambition is unmistakable but the success of her project is increasingly less clear. Looking back, we can see that the publication of the first novel in the quartet, The Virgin in the Garden (1978), was the beginning of a gigantic effort of historiography. More than this, by using her skills as a pasticheur and letting her prose take on the texture of whichever idea, person, or writer she is describing at a given moment, Byatt has attempted to bring her readers to feel the past, rather than simply telling them about it. Byatt, by contrast, has tried to write history as seen from ground level, by creating a central character - the sparky, spiky Frederica Potter - and pushing her forwards through two decades of English life. A more modestly inclined writer, confronted with such a massive historical terrain, might have settled upon a technique of high-altitude mapping noting familiar landmarks and large-scale cultural contours.
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