Word: victorian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Especially since the separation, the boys' leisure life follows two strikingly different tracks. With Charles it's off to one of the family estates. Sandringham, a vast Victorian pile in Norfolk, is a plinker's paradise stocked with a variety of game birds. Like his father, Wills is an enthusiastic shot. At Balmoral, where an aggregation of royals spend the late summer, there are moors to explore. During these times, the brothers are looked after by Tiggy Legge-Bourke, a plump, cheerful young woman--"a jolly, hockey-sticks sort of person," as she has been described--who has aroused Diana...
Branson runs his conglomerate of nine divisions and more than 100 companies--the mix is churning constantly--out of an imposing Victorian mansion in London's posh Holland Park, only a few steps from his home and family. The office is surprisingly calm. He is cheerfully rumpled, slipping out of his still tied shoes (revealing a small hole in a green sock), shunning coat and tie like a squirmy 12-year-old. Bright blue eyes and a wide trust-me smile are set off by a private-island tan. Longish, turbulent, sandy hair, streaked with gray, and his trademark vandyke...
...cultural Tower of Babel, is part residence and part theme park. Within its 30 stories and two subterranean levels are a beach, a lake, a model New England village, a Moorish bazaar and a simulated asylum for the insane. Criticized as an example of "the worst excesses of late Victorian eclecticism," Dressler's folly fails spectacularly, a case of too much too late. In the end Dressler completes the illusion and his ruination by hiring actors to play customers...
...escape the notice of a modern reader that this overabundance of plot is appropriate to a Victorian novel, not merely to a tale set in Victorian times. So is the central puzzle, which involves not only the story of the naive young cleric but also the distinctly unusual relationship between snobbish Charlotte, the bishop's chilly daughter, and Rose, a lusty "pit girl," or woman miner. It should not be overlooked that Rose is the novel's title figure. Smith's ending is not quite a hanky dampener, but it does bend a hard tale of murder and mine disaster...
Possession is by far A.S. Byatt's best-known novel. A miraculous blend of contemporary and Victorian morality and romance, it won the 1990 Booker Prize in Britain just as it was being published in the U.S. to glowing reviews and warm sales. Babel Tower (Random House; 625 pages; $25.95) is Byatt's first novel since then, and will surely attract the attention of all those enchanted by Possession. It is also likely to provoke some head scratching, since the new novel continues a story begun in two of Byatt's earlier, pre-Possession books...