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The Shadow of the Sun

3.41 of 5 stars 3.41 · rating details · 281 ratings · 18 reviews

This is the debut novel by the author of the bestselling Possession. Byatt tells the story of troubled, sensitive seventeen-year-old Anna Severell, who struggles to discover and develop her own personality in the shadow of her father, a renowned novelist. New Introduction by the Author.

Paperback, 324 pages

Published April 16th 1993 by Mariner Books (first published 1964)

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Jul 10, 2009 Elizabeth rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2009, in-by-of-england, on-writing, reviewed

Just for a moment, imagine a D.H. Lawrence book without the sex.

Right. Imagine 300 pages of someone writing like that but without any life in it. I now understand the criticism of Byatt, that she offers lifeless, emotionless, intellectual beings who you can't seem to believe when (or even if) they say, I love you. And they don't seem to do anything.

I realized about half way into this book that there wasn't a single character that I liked. The men were cowards, and that is the best thing I can s...more Just for a moment, imagine a D.H. Lawrence book without the sex.

Right. Imagine 300 pages of someone writing like that but without any life in it. I now understand the criticism of Byatt, that she offers lifeless, emotionless, intellectual beings who you can't seem to believe when (or even if) they say, I love you. And they don't seem to do anything.

I realized about half way into this book that there wasn't a single character that I liked. The men were cowards, and that is the best thing I can say about them. Not one of them seemed to be able to make a decision except to run away. One actually climbs out the window to avoid his wife, who is making his dinner in the kitchen (singing a Mozart aria that reminds her of the career she abandoned for him).

Are they any better than the women? No. Those go insane. They hate their children. They -- well, I, at least, have never sat on my bed for a week (a week!) waiting for my lover to call, or my father to call, and not knowing which one it would be. Who are these people?

Seriously, Antonia, this is what you think of people? Is this sort of meaningless despair what you see every day? And this is what you think is important to share with the world?

Actually, what she wanted to share was an appreciation of D.H. Lawrence that she had learned at Cambridge and their shared love of the sun and the countryside of the English Midlands. And she wrote the book while at school and finished it while her children were small and she was living at home. With these influences is it any wonder that no one is likable or happy or doing anything? Oh wait, there is that one woman who is starving herself, I guess you could say she's doing something.

The interesting parts of the book were when Byatt was musing about what it means to be a writer. A pretty daring topic for a first novel, but she does capture the selfishness of the writer, and juxtaposes it with perspective, and forgiveness, of those who can't or don't write, but orbit the writer (yes, they live in the shadow of his sun. I know.) There is a great deal of cleverness in this book, but no love. I felt cold, and excluded, from these characters and it's not a feeling I particularly appreciate as a reader. Nor have I suffered from it before with Byatt, so this was a strange experience.

I am usually very pleased with the early books of authors I love. They may not be as sophisticated as later novels but the voice is pure. The potential is visible. Ideas that become major themes in later works get their first handling and that's fascinating, especially after you've read the later ones. Think of Northanger Abbey or The Professor. Margaret Atwood's first book? Brilliant. Toni Morrison's? Amazing. A.S. Byatt's? Lifeless. I am deeply disappointed. (less)

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Oct 01, 2011 Rachael Eliz rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Henry Severell is a particularly interesting character because of the ways in which he sees nature around him. He often goes on walks, away from his family with no warning, exploring. He just walks and walks as though he is convinced he must find something. Something greater than this world. He sees the shapes of things, and all things he believes have a greater significance than we realise. It reaches a point where all natural things are weighing him down, where he feels as though the world is...more Henry Severell is a particularly interesting character because of the ways in which he sees nature around him. He often goes on walks, away from his family with no warning, exploring. He just walks and walks as though he is convinced he must find something. Something greater than this world. He sees the shapes of things, and all things he believes have a greater significance than we realise. It reaches a point where all natural things are weighing him down, where he feels as though the world is crushing him and he cannot write a formed book any longer, he can only write notes, scrawls of what he sees in the moment, racing. But then comes a time where he finds that he begins to be open not just to nature but to people. He begins to understand what it is to feel the emotions that he always observed, and he begins to care and take responsibility of his own choices. He is no longer just an outside observer; he has begun to put himself openly into the world to feel and see what it is that he was always writing about. He gains a new understanding of what is.

Anna has spent seventeen years of her life hiding from herself and others. Believing that she will never be good enough to become anything due to living in the shadow of her father and with her antagonistic mother Caroline refusing to take notice of anything in Anna’s life apart from to look down on her with distaste, Anna became a miserable young woman who had no hope and did not believe that a good life would be possible. Scared by feelings and then ignorant of them, she almost completely destroyed her life. She is forced into an education that she does not want and has no passion for, and falls in love with Oliver. She has spent her life running away. Running out of fear that it is not possible to be strong in a world that seems to the negative-minded to be intent on destruction. But she sees Oliver again and knows that she will be alright. She stops running. She opens herself. She lets love in. And here her life truly begins.

About 3/4 of the way through the novel I was made rather apprehensive by some rather inhuman actions and descriptions in lack of care. However the ending was better than I thought it was going to be, and it came together well. I loved to be reading the language of the 1960s (although rather predictable as most 1960s novels seem to be), and appreciated the symbolism throughout the novel. Overall, a good read.(less)

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Sep 07, 2010 Rowland Bismark rated it 3 of 5 stars

The Shadow of the Sun (originally published as Shadow of a Sun) was A.S. Byatt's first novel, published in 1964 -- but, as she explains in an introduction to the new edition of the book, written (at least the first draft) while she was an undergraduate at Cambridge (1954 to 1957).

The two part tale sends its young heroine, Anna Severell, to Cambridge too -- though with considerably less success than Byatt had. (Her story can also be compared to another Byatt-Cambridge-lass, Frederica Potter in S...more The Shadow of the Sun (originally published as Shadow of a Sun) was A.S. Byatt's first novel, published in 1964 -- but, as she explains in an introduction to the new edition of the book, written (at least the first draft) while she was an undergraduate at Cambridge (1954 to 1957).

The two part tale sends its young heroine, Anna Severell, to Cambridge too -- though with considerably less success than Byatt had. (Her story can also be compared to another Byatt-Cambridge-lass, Frederica Potter in Still Life (see our review).)

Anna is the daughter of the renowned novelist Henry: he's her "distant and largely unknown father", and she does suffer some from being in his shadow. She got herself kicked out of school -- for running away without telling anyone -- but over the course of the novel gets her act together a bit and does finally win a place at Cambridge.

One of the people to give her a push in that direction is Oliver Canning, a summer guest who comes to stay with the Severells with his wife, Margaret. Oliver tutors Anna and helps her along: over the summer it remains a fairly uneasy relationship of sulky girl and well-meaning know-it-all. Matters are complicated by the relationships between the adults: Henry the artist and Oliver as friend and critic; Oliver and his wife, who has to hide the glossy women's magazines she enjoys from her husband because he "believed the reading of such papers to be positively morally wrong", and even Henry and his wife, Caroline.

The first part of the book focusses on the summer this group spends largely together. Oliver and Anna work together much of the time, and eventually it is even suggested that Anna return with him and Margaret to London, as a sort of substitute daughter. That comes to nothing, but much of the book is about Anna's attempt to escape from under her father's shadow -- and from the late-adolescent listless and aimlessness that's taken hold of her at home. Oliver warns that she must get away: she'll just be "a ghost, a shadow" if she remains breathing her "father's rarefied air".

The second part sees Anna at Cambridge, where she still can't find her way. Here matters are complicated when Oliver again appears, and this time their relationship turns into a sexual (and not-quite-romantic) one. Margaret's worries as her marriage collapses without her understanding much of what is going on and the Severell's concerns about their daughter add to the tension -- which culminate in Anna suffering the not too surprising consequences of a sexual relationship and then accepting a marriage proposal. Yes, it does get almost melodramatic there for a while.

The strengths of the novel lie in numerous penetrating, strong scenes. Byatt goes on at some length in analyzing characters and their actions, and much of this she does well. There are also several nicely framed scenes -- a dark and rainy encounter between Anna and Oliver, lost Henry found again, a Cambridge party that doesn't go as hoped for -- though many of these are too obviously staged to fully convince.

The story, too, remains too artificial: a forced novel-plot conceived by someone who has read a good many novels but doesn't have any real material of her own yet. Details ring true, especially about Anna, but the character is forced into circumstances Byatt clearly only imagined -- and at this stage she wasn't novelist enough to get away with relying so much on purely speculative imagination.

The novel plods along, in part, but on the whole is solid and a decent read. Certainly of some interest.
(less)

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Aug 27, 2009 Moira Russell rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: favourites, 2009-50-new-books-challenge

Possession is one of my favourite books, and, as I suspect is true for many people, it was the first novel of A.S. Byatt's I ever read. I bounced hard off nearly every single novel of hers I tried after that -- not just earlier ones: this included The Biographer's Tale and A Whistling Woman. Luckily I was quite fond of her short stories, else I might have given up on her for good. (Amusingly, years ago I carefully printed out the new Introduction to this version -- one of the rushed post-P reiss...more

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Mar 28, 2013 Dark-Draco rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction-without-genre

Found this a bit of a hard slog for the first section, not helped by the long chapters, but the pace picked up in the second and I found myself even more intrigued by the characters. This is the story of Anna, the daughter of a famous writer, who struggles to make an identity and a life for herself. It's a story where there is little action, but the characters go on a journey nontheless. I have to say that I found Anna to be a bit annoying and too much of a wet blanket to be truly sympathetic to...more

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Jan 19, 2013 Patricia Stewart rated it 5 of 5 stars

The reader is introduced to a family expecting company – Anna, the seventeen year old daughter, Jeremy, the younger brother, Henry, the father and author/writer who seems to suffer with some sort of mental anguish due to being a prisoner of war and his wife Caroline who keeps people, places and things in a seemly ordered way.

Henry, after some coaxing from Caroline stops his work and pick up the quests at the train station. Margaret and Oliver Cannings with be the quests of honor for a couple of...more

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Jul 26, 2012 greg rated it 4 of 5 stars

Haven't read any Byatt!? Let me treat you to another passage that screams out in affinity to the kind of contemplative assessment of experience, merging past and present, that I so enjoy. After I went back to re-read this passage, I felt it worthwhile to transcribe it to pay closer attention. It is a mini-essay on paying attention in the present and to the past, and the pitfalls therein. The narrator is a 17-year old woman, wanting to be a writer like her famous, distant, and evidently bipolar f...more Haven't read any Byatt!? Let me treat you to another passage that screams out in affinity to the kind of contemplative assessment of experience, merging past and present, that I so enjoy. After I went back to re-read this passage, I felt it worthwhile to transcribe it to pay closer attention. It is a mini-essay on paying attention in the present and to the past, and the pitfalls therein. The narrator is a 17-year old woman, wanting to be a writer like her famous, distant, and evidently bipolar father, but needing to find her independence from a protective and not particularly nurturing family. The scene is the end of a long drive to the coast for a day-picnic with family and friends, in an unspoiled village called St Anne. The narrator's name is Anna, probably no coincidence.

Anna looked out at the pale and glittering strip of sea beyond the wall and wondered what she would most remember -- the very real bodily pleasure she had taken in the St Anne picnic in the early days, as a child, in sand and sea and climbing, in the sound of gulls and water in which she had been, she thought first, absolutely involved, or the enormous social discomfort it now caused her. Looking at it through the car window distanced her, although she was there now, in the middle of it -- it was all overlaid with dust and scratches, like an old film, to be assessed, an object. The empty square, patterned with jutting shadows where she was, white with sun towards the sea, was layered with mystery and importances for her -- the mystery which comes from collecting and choosing between, or attempting not to choose between memories.

St Anne, where she had been first taken by Caroline [her mother] on a conventional picnic, had been for years Anna's dreamed retreat and edge of freedom. It was the first place that she had recognized as beautiful -- probably because she had been told it was beautiful -- and now she carried with her as a touchstone the fined down image of all this emptiness and clarity, of the sudden, peculiarly poised rush of buildings to the edge of nothing and only horizon stretching beyond them, solid, shining metal blue, and the bodiless paler blue of the sky laid on it weightlessly. She remembered the heaviness and darkness of the little church and its damp smell. She remembered the smaller coves, and liked to sit lonely at the bottom of a funnel, enclosed, with high walls of chalk curving almost round her, but with the sky opening above and the sea bright through the gap.

Over the years she had polished these three images so that now they were bright and easily accessible; she had taken, in her way, possession of the place. But her feeling for it was essentially a thing of the past. Once, some time, she had found it violently beautiful, and now she found it so not because it hit her with the immediacy of that postulated moment in the past, but because it was weighted with the memory, and the nostalgia and the recreation of that moment. She suspected, dimly, that in fact the moment of knowledge had never occurred, that she had never, directly, completely, taken anything in, that what she remembered was a whole series of half-realized impressions or even later imaginings, which had little to do with any vision at the time and were much less compatible with her other memories -- the continual frustration of Jeremey's presence [her younger brother], Caroline's insistence that she should enjoy herself, the heat and irritation of walking, scrambling, hurry to arrive and hurry to leave -- than any such vision would have been. Perhaps the past as it really was, she thought, or this present, as it would be when it became the real past, were impossible to remember and not even very relevant. Perhaps one built oneself out of what one constructed of what one had seen, and perhaps what one had done, or really felt, were only important in so far as they affected this. Anna knew perfectly well what she meant by building herself -- it was what she must do -- what she could not find out was how. To build oneself, it was maybe more important to remember a whole vision than actually to have one. Or maybe, on the other hand, to build on that was a lie. It was certain that to care for things seen was important, but how seen? If the way of seeing was artificial, a construct, what then? She thought. St Anne is beautiful for me now -- or will be, even more, when I come to remembering, to reflecting on now -- but when I am honest I cannot remember having seen it as I believed I saw it.

The Shadow of the Sun, A.S.Byatt p 104 ff, 2nd edition (1991)
first published (1964) as Shadow of a Sun

Selective attention is such an important part of how we exist in our world. Paying attention to everything dooms us to noisy overload at best. Hardwired discrimination to notice only the unexpected helps us survive, while the torrent of unsurprising confirmations of our transient world-view passes through our consciousness without sticking, like air through our lungs, each breath like the last, mostly unmemorable. We can teach ourselves to override our involuntary attention-triggers, ignoring or paying attention the way you might decide to notice your breathing. And Byatt here refers to the analogous act of collecting or trying not to choose among your memories. Fascinating.
This is a theme Byatt comes back to in her later work frequently: the reality of narrative and mythology, as a constructed artform, in some ways more true than the shadow of reality that inspired the original.

This edition includes some interesting autobiographical notes by Byatt describing her life at the time she wrote this, her first novel, as a student.(less)

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Sep 25, 2010 Ruby Hollyberry rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: literature, ten-star-books, favorites

As in the case of Zora Neale Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine, I think I like The Shadow of the Sun, A. S. Byatt's first book, the best of all. Possession is much more complex, of course. This is probably the most unadorned writing she has done, and it seems to get more ornate with every book. I do love the complexity of her books. But in this book are her first formulated philosophical ideas, her first and most pungent characters, the clearest and simplest definition of her plotting, and it works....more

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Feb 14, 2009 Paul Dinger rated it 5 of 5 stars

I really liked this book. Henry's daughter Anna runs away from her boarding school, he responds by running away into the woods himself, leaving his daughter to the tender mercy of an older friend Oliver who swoops in wanting to help, when really ... This book owes a lot of George Eliot's MiddleMarch and E. M. Forester's Room With A View and for all her bluster, Byatt isn't in their league, but this is a great first effort full of promise and verve.

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May 06, 2011 Sonja rated it 2 of 5 stars

It was OK. Did not like the ending. A.S. Byatt is, of course, a good writer. I felt, though, that this book could have been a short story. Also, it was so much like a Harlequin but written so much better. It seemed like some of the characters were not very realistic but this book was written in 1964 and maybe that is why it doesn't ring quite true today. I probably wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

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Oct 20, 2009 Christine rated it 3 of 5 stars

First novel by the great A.S. Byatt. It wasn't great, but it was good. Must like an in-depth character study. Much of the story occurs in people's heads. And the people were interesting, but awful. I found it interesting for the feminist themes--a young woman's struggle for identity in 1950's and 1960's England, when it was rare to have both academic aspirations and hopes of a marriage and family.

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Mar 15, 2010 Af added it

I think possibly mainly of interest to people with a massive interest in Byatt - there's a certain sort of autiobiographical tinge to it. It's a bit... 60s-novel for me (pathetic action from women, selfish men). I like it very much as a family novel, I think, and as a unsureness-of-youth one.

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Jan 09, 2013 Lhosa Daly rated it 3 of 5 stars

A good recommendation by a good friend, encapsulating the feelings of suffocation and closeness of a hot summer, a stifling family and a confusing coming of age.

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Dec 26, 2011 JodiP rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: general-fiction

Byatt is a good talent, but I didn't like the ending. I did love her description of Henry and his strange, chaotic creative process. I will read others by her, however.

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Jan 05, 2012 Pam rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This was my first A.S. Byatt book and I think I made a mistake of choosing a book that she wrote in college when she wasn't an established writer. The storyline was a bit dull, but I guess I'm glad that finished it. It wasn't until the final 100 pages or so that I really cared to read it. I won't stop reading Byatt's books though. I just think I chose the wrong one to start of hers.

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Jan 20, 2013 Rebecca added it

lovely well paced gentle read

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May 06, 2009 E rated it 4 of 5 stars

The clarity with which Byatt demonstrates the central problems of her project is thrilling. Less thrilling is the unflattering insistence on conflating authorial frustrations and concerns with those of the characters. I can sense and respect, however, the work that founds this book. And it was really much more compelling than "The Game" which was, I believe, her second novel.

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Feb 28, 2013 Gary rated it 1 of 5 stars

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz...............

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May 13, 2013 Aneesh marked it as to-read · review of another edition

May 09, 2013 Whitney Adams rated it 3 of 5 stars

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Shelves: novel, female

May 05, 2013 Jill Peltzer rated it 5 of 5 stars

May 01, 2013 Iga Kowacka marked it as to-read · review of another edition

Shelves: my-books

Apr 29, 2013 Eleanor rated it 3 of 5 stars

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About A.S. Byatt

A.S. Byatt (Antonia Susan Byatt) is internationally known for her novels and short stories. Her novels include the Booker Prize-winning Possession, The Biographer’s Tale and the quartet, The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman, and her highly acclaimed collections of short stories include Sugar and Other Stories, The Matisse Stories, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s E...more

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