At the heart of <strong>Babel Tower</strong> are two law cases twin strands of theEstablishments web that shape the story a painful divorce and custody suitand ... » 

At the heart of Babel Tower are two law cases twin strands of theEstablishments web that shape the story a painful divorce and custody suitand the prosecution of an obscene book. Frederica the independent youngheroine is involved in both. She startled her intellectual circle of friendsby marrying a young country squire whose violent streak has now been turnedagainst her. Fleeing to London with their young son she gets a teaching job inan art school where she is thrown into the thick of the new decade. Poets andpainters are denying the value of the past fostering dreams of rebellionwhich focus around a strange charismatic figure the nearnaked unkempt andsmelly Jude Mason with his flowing gray hair a hippie before his time. Wefeel the growing unease the undertones of sex and cruelty. The tension eruptsover his novel Babbletower set in a past revolutionary era where a band ofpeople retire to a castle to found an ideal community. In this book as in thecourtrooms as in the art schools haphazard classes and on the committee setup to study the teaching of language people function increasingly in groups.Many are obsessed with protecting the young but the fashionable notion ofchildren as innocent and free slowly comes to seem wishful and perilous.Babel Tower is the third following The Virgin in the Garden and StillLife of a planned quartet of novels set in different midcentury time frames.The personal and legal crises of Frederica mirror those of the age. This is thedecade of the Beatles the Death of God the birth of computer languages. InByatts vision the presiding genius of the 1960s seems to be a blend of theMarquis de Sadeand The Hobbit. The resulting confusion charted with abrilliant imaginative sympathy is as comic as it is threatening and bizarre. «