The Game by A. S. Byatt

Cassandra did not look at him: she said, 'It seems sufficiently clear to me--to me--that you can both destroy and create reality with fiction. Fictions--fictions are lies, yes, but we don't ever know the truth. We see the truth through the fictions--our own, other people's. There was a time when I thought the church had redeemed fiction--that the Church's metaphors were truths--but lately that's seemed meaningless. Dangerous even, like any other fiction. We feed off it. Our fictions feed on us. 'And to deform and kill the things whereon we feed.' I don't know quite why Coleridge should have found the serpent's method of indigestion so peculiarly repellent... but it's a powerful metaphor..."

Julia is a successful author of domestic novels. She has a habit of drawing too heavily from life; her daughter and husband are resentful of the way their lives are often transformed into scenes of patriarchal oppression. Her sister, Cassandra, is an Oxford don of medieval studies. Once upon a time, Julia and Cassandra were a pair of imaginative siblings who bonded over "The Game," a medieval fantasy with carved pieces and an oilskin map they created together. Their present occupations can both be seen as an outgrowth of "The Game": Julia taking up the spirit of fiction, Cassandra retreating into the relative surety and safety of history and literature. As teenagers, the sisters grew apart because of their shared love of Simon, a young man who has since become a renowned nature presenter on TV, like David Attenborough. The sisters watch his programs religiously, and hate each other.

The Game throws Julia and Cassandra back into each other's lives, first through the death of their father, and then the return of Simon, who wants to reconnect with the sisters, but has troubles and anxieties of his own. Julia and Cassandra continue to treat each other in ways that are somehow both abominable and subtle--cold, dismissive Cassandra; Julia, who fashions a version of her sister and Simon into a new novel that threatens to make everyone miserable.

The strength of A. S. Byatt's novels and stories, in my opinion, has always been the way they draw on literary and artistic sources: the imitations of Rossetti and Browning in Possession, Lord Byron in Angels & Insects, Matisse in--well, The Matisse Stories. The Game makes a few gestures at medieval literature and philosophy, especially in Cassandra's work, but it doesn't really have an extratextual interest. "The Game" is something of a red herring, an important bit of context for the sisters' relationship, but never really explained or explored in a way that would provide another layer, as in those other novels. It's almost as if The Game is an opportunity to see Byatt as a pure novelist, writing a work with no references. The results are pretty middling, I think; what we're left with is a kind of Murdoch-ian novel of ideas in which the ideas themselves often feel absent.

The lack of a Byattesque textual reference is sort of strange, given how important the idea of "fiction" is to The Game: as in the passage quoted above, Cassandra struggles to understand how much our understanding--of life, of people--is purely fictive. She concludes that our lives are entirely fictional, that like Julia, we can only see through the fictions we create. It's this idea that Simon, who was once studying to become a priest, has run from, into the arms of cold, factual science. When Simon sees a snake, he sees only the animal--not, as Cassandra might, a symbol of sin, or death, or duplicity.

There is an interesting thread, too, with Julia's husband Thor, a Swedish Quaker--Julia and Cassandra are brought up Quakers, too--who is so obsessed with the need to do good that he invites a disadvantaged family to stay at their home without asking or informing Julia. He presses Julia to uproot her life and move to the Congo, where they can do more "good," and finally angrily leaves her because her commitment to "good" is not as total as his is. This was, I thought, one of the most interesting things about the book: an exploration of the limits of "the good" and the competing obligations we have to our immediate family and the larger world. But I struggled to see the connection between this thread and the central love triangle. Mostly, I thought The Game was a little too cold, too think-y, without the fun literary pleasures that define Byatt's best novels.