Some years back, in a New York Times interview, A.S. Byatt confessed to being "more interested in books than people, and I always expect everybody else to be, but they're not." Books have not only played an important part in shaping and creating Byatt's formidably intellectual imagination, but within her own work, books themselves play a role as important as any character. In The Biographer's Tale, as in Possession (1990) and Babel Tower (1996), a book sets the plot in motion.
Revulsed by Empedocles's idea of the fragmented body-parts in search of each other and "Lacan's theory of morcellement, the dismemberment of the imagined body" Byatt's first-person narrator Phineas G. Nanson, in this new novel, decides to stop being "a post-structuralist literary critic".
Heady stuff, Empedocles and Lacan. But that same opening page contains the true mark of a novelist - that human dimension which guarantees that a novel lives. Nanson tells us that "it was a very sunny day and the windows were very dirty" and that "It was May 8th 1994. I know that, because my mother had been buried the week before, and I'd missed the seminar on Frankenstein."
Abandoning theory, Nanson, an evasive, "computationally inept" and reticent narrator, plans to write a biography of a biographer, one Scholes Destry-Scholes, supposed drowned, whose papers include jottings on Linnaeus, Galton and Ibsen, taxonomist, statistician and dramatist. This deliberately labyrinthine and "aleatory" tale (keep the dictionary by Byatt!), the mixtures of styles, the use of illustration and photograph are devices which allow Byatt to chart and question the nature of biography, autobiography ("that most evasive and self-indulgent of forms") and memoir ("repulsive"), only to have her self-effacing hero conclude that biography is pointless too.
Nanson finds his source materials, "this limp cache of unbegun and unended stories", which are quoted at length, "intriguing and irritating", but when research leads him to Vera Alphage, a radiographer, Erik and Christophe's unreal travel agency, and the marvellous Fulla Biefeld, a Swedish bee-taxonomist, life begins to be lived.
The self-conscious writing voice, the peeled onion metaphor from Peer Gynt, the send-ups and put-downs highlight language's inadequacy. Typically, Byatt offers a bibliography and tells her reader that it is a "patchwork, echoing book". Barthes on photography, semiotics, pornographic websites, snuff movies, stag beetles are all grist to her mill. And yet Byatt's ironic and playful voice gives way to a convincing lyricism in the closing pages. Nanson, "brought up as a child to believe in self-effacement and as a student to believe in impersonality", accepts his own presence, his own self. Ultimately, at least within this novel, people are more important than books.
Rich in ideas and very rewarding, The Biographer's Tale is both quaint and up-to-the-minute. Caviare to the general it may be, but then Byatt never did dumb down. An odder novel will hardly be published this year.
Niall MacMonagle teaches English in Wesley College, Dublin