Review: The Game, by A. S. Byatt

Review: The Game, by A. S. Byatt

by Rich Horton

I fell in love with A. S. Byatt's work when I read Possession, her Booker Prize winner, back in 1990 when it came out. I quickly read her previous two novels, The Virgin in the Garden (1978) and its sequel Still Life (1985); and since then I've read a great many of her short stories, as well as the two novellas in Angels and Insects and her novel The Biographer's Tale. Somehow I haven't yet read the other two novels in the series begun with The Virgin in the Garden (Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman) nor her last major novel, The Children's Book, but I'll get to them eventually. But I had never really even looked at her first two novels, The Shadow of the Sun (1964) and The Game (1967).

Among her shorter works I particularly recommend "Sugar" and "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye", but there is lots more at less than novel length that is wonderful. And she wrote a great deal of non-fiction, criticism mainly, and some academic work, and some literary biographies. She was an authority on Iris Murdoch, another of my favorite writers, and wrote a couple of book length examinations of Coleridge and Wordsworth. 

Antonia Susan Drabble was born in 1936. Her siblings are all highly successful -- Margaret Drabble is a novelist of considerable repute, Helen Langdon is an art historian, and Richard Drabble is a barrister and a King's Counsel. Her father was a Quaker, and was a Queen's Counsel, and her mother was a scholar and expert on Browning. Some of these family details -- the Quaker upbringing, and the younger sister who is a novelist -- are interesting when reading The Game. She was educated at Cambridge, Bryn Mawr, and Oxford. She married Ian Byatt in 1959, so that A. S. Byatt became her writing name. They divorced in 1969, and Antonia later married Peter John Duffy. She had two children with each of her husbands. She taught at the Central School of Art and Design and at University College of London. She was named a Dame of the British Empire in 1999, and thus is properly styled Dame Antonia Susan Duffy. She died just recently, November 16, 2023, at the age  of 87.

I listened to The Game though I have a copy of the book as well. It is ably narrated by Wanda McCaddon. The Game centers upon two sisters. The elder, Cassandra, is a lecturer at Oxford, specializing in Medieval Literature. She is unmarried, indeed apparently a virgin. The younger, Julia, is a writer of fairly successful light domestic novels. Julia has a 15 year old daughter, Deborah. Her husband is Norwegian, and a manager of charitable concerns.  The book is primarily set in 1963, when Cassandra is 38 and Julia a couple of years younger, though there are flashbacks to the girls' youths.

The action is set in motion primarily by the death of their father, prompting each to return to their childhood home in Newcastle. The two women are thrown together for the first time in a long time, and they revisit some of their childhood memories, especially the game they invented and played together -- an involved game set in a fantasy milieu they jointly created, with apparently complicated and recomplicated rules and back stories. And we start to learn more of their history, and their longstanding rivalry. They grew up in the Quaker church, with a father who did time in prison because of his pacifist views; and who was always working in movements for justice. Julia reacted by marrying another Quaker, whom she met through her father. Cassandra reacted by converting to Anglo-Catholicism (which I have learned was, by this time, essentially synonymous with High Church Anglicanism.) Cassandra was the prickly elder sister, seemingly bossing Julia when she could, and jealous of her privacy. Julia was the more social, and would also invade her sister's room and read her journals and suchlike. She even began her writing career with a story she based on a scenario Cassandra did for the game.

But perhaps their most significant point of disagreement concerned Simon Moffat, a neighbor of roughly their age, who became close to both girls; which, inevitably, Cassandra regarded as another "theft" by Julia. Simon has his own issues, such as a father who committed suicide right in front of him, and he eventually becomes an herpetologist, and moves to the Amazon to study reptiles in their natural habitat. By happenstance, he has become a television star, as another man tracked him down in the jungle and eventually started filming him -- and both Julia and Cassandra have seen his show.

So, after the funeral, a whole series of events start to change both women's lives ... a television show about the arts in which Julia appears ... a crisis in her family as her husband wants to move to Africa where he can do more good, and Julia refuses ... Cassandra struggling with her religious beliefs ... both getting back in touch with Simon as he returns from the Amazon ... an affair ... Julia's daughter getting close to Cassandra ... a disastrous visit from Julia to Cassandra in Oxford ... and, perhaps most significantly, Julia deciding to write a more challenging novel -- a novel which will be transparently about her sister and Simon. And there are no easy answers, and no real stop in the slide to tragedy.

I liked the novel, but didn't wholly love it. It's absorbing throughout, and beautifully written. There are symbols and motifs aplenty -- snakes, multiple suicides, two women who in very different ways don't seem to truly connect with anyone (and don't like sex), a lot of examination of the twisted pair of the two sisters. I think my issue -- and it's not a serious issue but a reason I don't think this novel stands with the best of her later work -- is that Byatt's philosofphizing, while never boring, is not always convincing. The characters and their actions are interesting, but at times seem too overtly programmed, too much types designed to allow the novel to proceed as it must. Julia may be the more fully realized character, but she's also the shallowest. Cassandra is fascinating -- and she's the one I wanted to read about more -- but she's also the more artificial construction, at least to my eyes. Simon, too, seems at times a construct. 

Then there's the question of autobiographical elements. There are clear parallels with Byatt's life -- a Quaker upbringing in the North of England, a younger sister who was a rival and who wrote at least one novel that seemed to draw from their shared history, the older sister an academic. That said, the Drabble sisters are about a decade younger than the Corbett sisters in The Game, and neither Margaret nor Antonia's lives and careers really resemble those of Julia and Cassandra that closely. It could almost be Byatt poking a bit at Drabble for her earlier novel (The Millstone, I believe.) Anyway, it's always dangerous to put too much stock in autobiographical parallels. But it's hard not to at least think of them in this case.

Bottom line -- The Game is a fine novel, and a worthy if not central part of the oeuvre of one of the best writers of recent decades. Definitely worth reading.