The Virgin in the Garden, by A.S. Byatt

Second paragraph of third chapter:

Outside this trim anonymity was a piece of wasteland, once an Officers’ Training Camp, where there was a semi-circle of battered Nissen huts on splitting tarmac; through long cracks in the surface willowherb and groundsel poked weak, tenacious stems. There was no flagpole in the concrete slot: no cars in the designated car park: the place appeared, not recently, to have undergone a successful siege. The huts let out, through dangling doors, a strong smell of stale urine. In one, a long row of basins and urinals had been deliberately shattered and fouled. The regulars, Alexander saw, were there. A circle of grubby boys lifted their heads from the cupped glow of matches as he passed. In a doorway a gaggle of girls whispered and shrilled, leaning together, arm in arm. The largest, skinny and provocative, thirteen maybe, stared boldly. She wore a drooping flowered dress in artificial silk, and a startling red latticed snood. A cigarette stub glowed and faded in one corner of her pointed mouth. Alexander made a rushed and incompetent gesture of salutation. He imagined they knew very well why he, why anyone, went there.

I see a lot of online reviews complaining that this book is dense and incomprehensible. I loved it actually. It’s the story of Frederica Potter, turning 18 in the summer of 1953, and her crazy academic family and the English town where they live. A lot of it is about a pageant celebrating the life of Elizabeth I, with the coronation of Elizabeth II running in the background. A lot of it is about sex and love. There are some vivid set-pieces, and some well observed bits of humanity. I found Frederica’s father, dominant in his own family until his children grow up and away from him, a particularly interesting character.

This is the first of four books in a sequence, and I read and really didn’t enjoy the fourth Babel Tower, when I was living in Bosnia in 1997. I wonder if it would have made more sense if I had read the previous three? I’m certainly willing to give it a try.

You can get The Virgin in the Garden here.

This was my top unread book by a woman. Next on that pile is The Spellcoats, by Diana Wynne Jones.