The Biographer's Tale by A.S. ByattMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
A.S. Byatt is a writer of great erudition, a Victorianist who does Victorian studies by writing intelligent fiction for the general public. "The Biographer’s Tale" is another academic quest narrative…
A postgraduate at a nameless English university, narrator Phineas G. Nanson decides to abandon his studies as a post-structuralist literary critic to become a biographer instead, what he believes to be a more tangible pursuit.
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 post-structural 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 doppelgangers, Byatt's (Possession, Angels and Insects) familiar preoccupations with insects, myths, spirits, metamorphoses and sexuality all come into play.
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