Hello Gentle Reader,
Dame A.S. Byatt was one of the most exceptional and extraordinary English language writers of the second half of the 20th century. Few writers were capable of writing with such intellectual authority, while underpinning it with such pleasures of the craft. Few writers discuss writing in the same vein as Byatt, who never described writing as a chore or laborious process. Instead, Byatt, rejoiced and celebrated writing as an activity of the utmost enjoyment. Despite being a English writer, Dame A.S. Byatt maintained a continental and European approach and influence to her work, whereby she explored the interplay between reality, myth/folktale/fairy tale, the active of creativity, history, literature, and interior lives, as intricate facets of an individuals consciousness and life. Dame Byatt’s work flitted between the cerebral and intellectually intangible, to the cemented and palpable. One of A.S. Byatt’s most astonishing achievements, however, is her mastery of narrative. One can talk of A.S. Byatt’s academic aptitudes and digressions, until they are blue in the face, but without her generous ability to actually have a defined narrative, her novels would be dry doorstops, full of brilliant knowledge and thorough research, but deprived of any literary enjoyment or flare. Throughout her literary career, A.S. Byatt never remained completely committed or surefooted in the realistic. Byatt flittered and digressed into the realms of myth and fairytales, exploring the fantastic and whimsical with a serious air. This is clearly seen in her short story collection “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” and the titular novella. Readers expecting lighthearted fantastic tropes will be disappointed, as the novella is a complex display of intertextuality, showcasing Byatt as being a writer whose pastiche and appropriation of fantastical elements could be erudite and challenging, with references to folktales as well as Chaucer and Shakespeare. Other short story collections such as “Angels & Insects,” continued to showcase and display Byatt’s diverse curiosities which included the natural and biological science of geology, entomology, and zoology. Her monumental “Fredrica Quartet,” (“The Virgin in the Garden,” “Still Life,” “Babel Tower,” and “A Whistling Woman,”) traced the social and imaginative life of English society during the 1950’s and 1960’s through the lens of a fiery woman, the titular Fredrica. Not one to be bogged down with histography, mapping out and referencing key points, Byatt created an elaborately textured quartet full of symbols and digressions, as Fredrica navigates the frustrating realties of wanting an aesthetic and imaginative life, but is riddled with the immediate concerns of daily life. A.S. Byatt’s most famous novel is of course the Booker Prize winning: “Possession: A Romance,” which is a typical Byattian novel of ideas. Parading itself as a literary detective novel, “Possession,” is a pastiche of a variety of literary styles (diary entries, letters, and poetry, the Victorian style) and recounts two academics in modern day Britian investigating the previously unknown romance between two fictional Victorian poets. “Possession,” is a maximalist metafictional histography novel, which not only won the Booker Prize but was a bestseller. “Possession,” remains A.S. Byatt’s most popular and well-known novel, her masterpiece as it were. Few novels that followed quite held up to the sheer imagination, research, and invention of “Possession,” though Byatt’s last great historical novel “The Children’s Book,” was a purely marvelous novel and shortlisted for the 2009 Booker Prize. “The Children’s Book,” was a celebration of the golden age of children’s literature, and was a marvelous swansong of a novel, whereby Byatt could reconcile both palpable historical and realistic concerns with the aesthetically interesting and imaginatively wonderous. “The Children’s Book,” was indeed weighty and full of lush exuberant prose. A.S. Byatt wrote in “The Children’s Book,” regarding one of the central figures, Olive Wellwood: “The real world sprouted stories wherever she looked at it.” So too did A.S. Byatt, who found stories in every life and every event. Byatt was an intellectual writer, an author of ideas, and while this may have once been a point of contention at one point, a besmirched snide insult, A.S. Byatt was able to dust off the lofty arrogance of such notions, and showcased that intellectual curiosity and erudite understanding could be not only approachable and engaging but enjoyable.
A.S. Byatt died at home surrounded by her loved ones. She was 87 years old and leaves behind a solid and powerful body of work. A truly fantastical postmodern set of novels and short stories, but also critical studies and analysis, essays of thought and contemplation.
Rest in Peace A.S. Byatt.
Take Care
And As Always
Stay Well Read
M. Mary
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