With A Whistling Woman, A.S. Byatt concludes one of the grandest and most ambitious fictional projects anyone has undertaken since the war. This fourth and final novel in a sequence begun with The Virgin in the Garden and continued in Still Life and Babel Tower is full of new energy and a sense of new directions, and it is a very different novel in tone and technique from the first novel in the series, published 25 years ago. She is the most questing and restless of novelists, and decades of learning, ceaseless reinvention and imaginative growth have taken her a very long way from her starting point. There is, undeniably, a perceptible and sharp break in tone between the second and the third volume; by the third, the late-period fascinations with fables, with systems of ideology, with science, had moved into the foreground. An Edwardian like Arnold Bennett would have been interested by the first volume; this last volume, on the other hand, could only look to them like something H. G. Wells's Eloi would enjoy. We have come a long way.

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