The Biographer's Tale

January 1, 2001
An intellectual romp that doubles as a detective story, Byatt's new novel finds her as imaginative, witty and provocative as ever. A postgraduate at a nameless English university, narrator Phineas G. Nanson decides to abandon his studies as a poststructuralist literary critic to become a biographer instead. He chooses as his subject one Scholes Destry-Scholes, who himself was a biographer of genius. Destry-Scholes's magnum opus was a biography of the Victorian polymath Sir Elmer Bole, a famous explorer, soldier, diplomat, scientist, travel writer, novelist and poet--in short, almost a caricature of a certain British type. As Nanson searches for clues to Destry-Scholes's life, the novel acquires layers of complexity. Nanson finds fragments written by Destry-Scholes about three men: Carl Linnaeus, Francis Galton and Henrik Ibsen. Like Nanson, the reader realizes the identity of these figures only gradually, for the fragments are oblique and mystifying. To his dismay, Nanson discovers that the revered Destry-Scholes has taken great liberties with the facts, inventing false incidents and inserting imaginary details. This calls into question the whole issue of biographical accuracy and allows Byatt, who all along has been taking swipes at poststructural literary criticism, to introduce arch observations about the current fad of psychoanalytic biography. The plot broadens when Nanson falls in love with two women simultaneously: one is a Swedish bee taxonomist; the other is Destry-Scholes's niece, a hospital radiographer. This is only one of the many mirror images here, for Bole had also married two women. In addition to the theme of doubles and doppelg ngers, Byatt's (Possession; Angels and Insects) familiar preoccupation with insects, myths, spirits, metamorphoses and sexuality all come into play. The book is an erudite joke carried off with verve and humor. American audiences may not be quite so patient as the British, however, in indulging Byatt's many tangents. This book will appeal to discriminating readers ready for intellectual stimulation. 7 illustrations. 40,000 first printing.

September 1, 2000
Reminiscent of Byatt's beloved Possession, this new work features Phineas G. Nanson, who tries to make sense of life by writing the biography of a famed biographer. With a nine-city author tour and a 40,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2000 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from November 15, 2000
Byatt, a Booker Prize-winning novelist with a love for fantasy as well as philosophy, is also a scholar and a critic, and she slyly explores the interface between the imagined and the factual, the felt and the reasoned, in this merrily satiric tale about a hesitant young man in search of a fuller life. Bored with his postmodern literary-criticism courses, the physically diminutive Phineas Gilbert Nanson seeks a more tangible subject in biography, diligently reading a recommended three-volume life of a little-known polymath written by a forgotten biographer named Scholes Destry-Scholes. So taken is Phineas with this magnum opus, he decides to become the biographer of a biographer. He devotes many hours to studying Destry-Scholes' inconclusive notes about three unidentified gentlemen, who gradually come into focus as the Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus, the English scientist Sir Francis Galton, and the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen, a trio Byatt uses brilliantly in an intriguing metaphysical inquiry into our mania for naming, categorizing, and ordering. Phineas then has the great good luck of meeting Destry-Scholes' niece, the lunar beauty Vera. He also takes a job at a very strange, possibly sinister travel agency and gets involved with a passionate bee taxonomist named Fulla, the blazing sun to Vera's silvery moon. As he realizes that biography is no more true than any other story, little Phineas evolves from a brittle boy into a happily sensual man, a metamorphosis echoed in his steadily improving prose style. Byatt parlays her hero's awakening into a nimble and provocative pondering of our contradictory desires to belong and to be unique both as individuals and as a species wreaking havoc on the planet. Ardently literary, Byatt nonetheless reminds readers that life itself is what matters and that no work of art can come close to the sheer wonder of nature. \plain\f2\fs17 (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2000, American Library Association.)