The Virgin in the Garden by A. S. Byatt

I decided to read this because I read Possession and found it quite clever last year, and because I took a great class on early modern literature this last term and became fascinated by Elizabethan history and culture. What I find annoying about Byatt is that she constantly and incorrigibly tries to imitate Iris Murdoch (whom I worship) and a lot of space and energy gets wasted in the attempt. She doesn't come up to Murdoch's masterful creation of bizarre atmospheres and situations, but she does have a charm of her own. This is an intricate postmodern novel involving a play about Elizabeth I staged to coincide with the ascension of Elizabeth II. The plot is quite easy to follow, but the endless literary tangles of allusion, imagery, quotes, and themes are very much less so. What really won me over in this novel were the characters, especially the 'dreadful', overdramatic, vain, madly intelligent, embarrassing, over-enthusiastic Frederica Potter. Byatt manages to portray the characters so piercingly, so vividly, that I felt I knew them as people whose actions I could not predict, but who were amazingly alive. The contrary, interfering, domineering Bill Potter and the helpless, limp (in more senses than one), passive, beautiful Alexander were two other favourites. I also really liked the fact that we never get to hear about the play in detail, only scattered bits of episodes, so that, by its absence, it allows the action of the novel to 'take over'. The novel and the play become fused and complement one another, which I thought was a genius and well-structured move. The position and power of the author and/or writer is another theme running through the novel that was very interestingly executed. However, I didn't like how much of the novel was taken up by the ravings of one of the characters, or how the whole novel built up too pointedly towards the climax of the dress rehearsal/'virgin in the garden' scene. It felt like everything leading up to it was just preparation that we had to sit through to get to the real thing. I was also serious disturbed by the way the characters seemed to be completely okay with some of the sexual situations that arose throughout the action (mostly various instances of underage sex that were very creepy). Besides referring to Elizabethan literature, this (and the other novels in this quartet) allude a great deal to D. H. Lawrence, whom I quite fiercely dislike, and that bothered me a bit too. But overall, I quite enjoyed it.