Babel Tower is an exhilarating evocation of the private and public obsessions of Britain in the 1960s. At its heart are two law cases: a painful divorce suit and the prosecution of an ‘obscene book’ - in both cases the legal language distorts, denies and re-writes the ‘real’ narrative. Frederick, the independent young heroine of Byatt’s earlier novels, has startled her friends by marrying a young ship-owner and country squire. While she and her son live enclosed in their moated grange, her brother-in-law Daniel is listening to distressed voices on the phone, in the crypt of a London church. Far away, in Frederica’s native Yorkshire, scientists gather snails on the moors, pondering the mysteries of genetic memory, but in city art-schools, poets and painters deny the value of the past, fostering dreams of rebellion which focus on a strange charismatic figure - the naked, unkempt and smelly Jude Mason, with his flowing grey hair, a hippy before his time.......
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