A. S. Byatt

The Game

Emmett

A strange novel that encircles and returns again and again to its themes before closing in slowly on an unexpected conclusion. Repeated obsession, derangement, estrangement, the separation of bodies from other earthly attachments run through the minds of characters which may seem different at first glance but who are ultimately concerned with how they (and in abstraction, people) connect with and relate to each other, and who and what they are attached to. Proximity proves the capacity for both intimacy and harm. This double-edged promise-threat is intermittently expressed, withheld, embraced, recoiled from but it never loses its fatal attraction. (This may seem like a striking observation at first, but then one becomes reminded that life experience itself is sufficient for us to know that.) I think it is that very thing which drives the characters finally to their own endings.

While the tone of the story and its characters didn't interest me as much as I had liked to be interested in them, one feels obligated to credit and admire Byatt's psychological acumen as she exhibits and explores them in their tortured complexity. She differentiates and pins down their yearnings, doubts, fears and shortcomings in the manner of a vivisectionist. The effect - sympathetic yet merciless - is reminiscent of Iris Murdoch's examination of her characters' morality, actions and culpability in her own novels.

Her capacity for psychological intensity is wonderfully matched with her intelligence. As in many of her novels, a certain subject/topic is evoked (medieval literature and iconography is this one's), which is then explored in considerable depth, and slowly expanded in ripples until the whole novel feels like a web of ideas, each point delicately and discernibly linked to another, trembling in their resonance. One anticipates to be educated by her works, and I have yet to be disappointed. The only dissatisfaction I felt was that, as reader, I was unable to meet the story at the level it deserved, since many of its references went over my head. That lack, however, always seems to be a promise rather than a reprimand, an olive branch held there for the reader willing to do what it takes to grasp it, the proffering of a reward yet to be attained, something there waiting to be known.

The Game

Reviews