THE DIVISION OF TONGUES

By Paul Gray

Possession is by far A.S. Byatt's best-known novel. A miraculous blend of contemporary and Victorian morality and romance, it won the 1990 Booker Prize in Britain just as it was being published in the U.S. to glowing reviews and warm sales. Babel Tower (Random House; 625 pages; $25.95) is Byatt's first novel since then, and will surely attract the attention of all those enchanted by Possession. It is also likely to provoke some head scratching, since the new novel continues a story begun in two of Byatt's earlier, pre-Possession books.

Not that it's necessary to have read The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life to pick up on the action and characters of Babel Tower. Still, the opening pages suggest that a lot has gone on before anything here begins.

It is the early 1960s, and Frederica Reiver, nee Potter, has married and borne a son to an unsuitable mate. Wealthy Nigel keeps her isolated in his country manor, strongly discouraging any contacts with her former Cambridge friends. "You knew what I was when you married me," she complains, "you knew I was clever and independent and--and ambitious--you seemed to like that." Nigel responds to their disagreements with escalating violence, and one night Frederica flees with her small son to the comparative safety of London.

A major strand of the novel follows Frederica's attempts to make a new life for herself and prevent Nigel from taking her son from her. This conflict will wind up, of course, in court. So does another subplot of the novel, the appearance of a strange, semipornographic novel, Babbletower, about a group of escapees from the French Revolution who try to form an ideal community and lapse instead into an orgy of violence and torture. Chapters of the novel are interspersed throughout the first half or so of Babel Tower, and when the thing is finally published, with the helping hand of Frederica, the government decides to prosecute it under the 1959 Obscene Publications Act. And yet a third narrative follows the members of a government committee as they travel to various schools in order to file a report on ways to improve the teaching of English.

If nothing else, Babel Tower suggests a reason that not very much thrilling fiction has been written about the workings of education committees. Byatt's interests here are more philological than dramatic. All her various plots underscore the mixed blessings of language, its power to obscure as well as reveal, to enslave as well as liberate. The subject is certainly worthy but not perhaps sufficiently vivid to propel readers through a long, long literary haul. Byatt writes beautifully, and passages of this novel come to brilliant life. But the net effect of the whole, as opposed to the parts, seems to be every bit as cacophonous as the original Tower of Babel.

--By Paul Gray