Word: byatt
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...Byatt's recent book, Angels and Insects, is a somewhat uneven pairing of two novellas. The first, "Morpho Eugenia," is a feast for naturalists. This story's butterflies and ants provide the insects of the book's title, while "The Conjugial Angel," the second and weaker novella, is organized around seances, and of course provides the title's angels. Both stories are set against the backdrop of Victorian England's exploration of the natural and supernatural world; shipwreck and return play important roles in both stories; and both shift between two lines of narration: in "Morpho Eugenia" it is between...
...Morpho Eugenia" will satisfy readers of Possession, Byatt's prize-winning last novel. It is the story of William Adamson, a naturalist back from a decade of butterfly collecting in the Amazon who marries into the family of his aristocratic patron. Detailed accounts of ant colonies benefit from Byatt's richly detailed descriptive style, and the life of the ants provides a strong counterpoint to the life of her human characters. Indeed, she is often at her strongest when describing the ants...
...disruption of the plot's family drama and provides a distraction from his feeling of imprisonment in the family. His entrapment is a comment on Victorian class structures, from which, through an unexpected twist of the plot, he is ultimately able to escape by returning to the Amazon. Byatt makes subtle use of the American Civil War as background both to the ants' warfare and slave-making, and to the inhuman treatment of one of the family servants by her employers...
...Conjugial Angel" is the weaker half of Angels and Insects. The story's conceit is to pair fictional characters with figures from literary history, and Byatt has much more success in evoking the fictional characters than in breathing life into the historical ones. As a result, the novella has something of the feel of a clumsily-executed insertion of live-action characters into a well-drawn animated piece. Alfred Tennyson, his sister Emily, and the ghost of their beloved Arthur Hallam (his best friend and her fiance, and the subject of the poet's In Memoriam) move through Byatt...
Throughout the book, Byatt immerses her readers in the social mores and concerns of the mid-nineteenth century, resembling her nineteenth century predecessors perhaps more than she does other twentieth-century authors. Despite the frustrations of "The Conjugial Angel," "Morpho Eugenia" makes Byatt's latest effort worth reading, and a welcome respite from the pressures of post-modernity...