It took courage, surely, for A.S. Byatt to confront the Sixties, that most frivolous of eras, with the most deadly serious of intentions; and this huge novel, which weighs in at over 600 paperback pages, is the third in a planned quartet which takes a working-class northern family through that time of social and moral upheaval. The book is both an intimate study of Frederica, who has made a good marriage for bad reasons, and an intellectual discussion of artistic integrity.
Frederica's story, and that of her extended family, is interwoven with the text of a strange novel, Babbletower, by an eccentric artists' model - a text which eventually becomes the focus of a court battle which echoes that of Lady Chatterley's Lover.
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