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The Biographer's Tale

A.S. Byatt

3.19 · Rating details · 1,231 ratings · 121 reviews

From the Booker Prize-winning author of Possession comes this erotic, playful, and provocative novel about the collision of art and truth.

Phineas G. Nanson, a disillusioned post-graduate student, decides to leave his abstract studies and pursue a seemingly concrete task: to write a biography of a great biographer. But Phineas quickly discovers that facts can be unreliable ...more

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Paperback, 305 pages

Published December 4th 2001 by Vintage (first published August 1st 2000)

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Sep 21, 2017 Marina rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This is the tale of a would-be-biographer’s research for the purpose of writing an account of the life of another biographer, an obscure and forgotten figure in the novel’s world of letters.

If I were to use only one word to describe this novel it would be erudite. A S Byatt is remarkably adept at showing off her extensive knowledge and enticing the reader into wanting more. But here, this doesn’t quite seem to be the case, all of the time. Our hero has to sift through his subject’s writings ...more

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May 30, 2008 Cecily rated it it was ok

Shelves: miscellaneous-fiction, biog-and-autobiog, lit-crit

Story of a graduate student of lit crit who gives it up for the more concrete pursuit of facts, by writing the ultimate biography of a biographer. So layers of fictional biography, and lengthy and detailed diversions into the diverse interests of the original subject.

The narrator is a man (admittedly of ambiguous sexuality to others), but it reads more like a woman telling the story, though I can't put my finger on why.

When I read this way back in 2005, I found it “All very disjointed and ...more

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May 06, 2010 Lizzie rated it it was ok

Shelves: fiction, read-in-2010, culled, big-disappointment

So this is a story told by an academic who decides to quit that and pursue concrete things. He decides to write a biography of a great biographer, known for his writings about a British adventurer. He obtains a number of essays written by the biographer, presented to us by Byatt, as she did with the poetry in Possession. They're puzzling - they describe playwright Henrik Ibsen, naturalist Carl Linnaeas, and scientist Francis Galton. All very well. But if they're intended to be biographical, they ...more

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Feb 06, 2013 Chris rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

The Maelstrom: how evocative that name is, the Charybdis that tempts you, the whirlpool that draws you down into its watery depths, a volatile spiral maze from which there is no escape. The Maelstrom, or Moskstraumen as the Norwegian original should really be called, features only sporadically in The Biographer’s Tale but its symbolism permeates the whole novel.

In The Biographer’s Tale we have A S Byatt, critic, novelist and onetime academic writing in the first person as Phineas G Nanson. We The Maelstrom: how evocative that name is, the Charybdis that tempts you, the whirlpool that draws you down into its watery depths, a volatile spiral maze from which there is no escape. The Maelstrom, or Moskstraumen as the Norwegian original should really be called, features only sporadically in The Biographer’s Tale but its symbolism permeates the whole novel.

In The Biographer’s Tale we have A S Byatt, critic, novelist and onetime academic writing in the first person as Phineas G Nanson. We learn that Nanson, a postgraduate disillusioned with critical theory, is introduced to a biography of Victorian explorer Sir Elmer Bole, author of nearly a dozen texts and a real-life Gahmuret, siring children in Europe and the Middle East. Nanson then becomes obsessed with Bole’s elusive biographer Scholes Destry-Scholes, eventually discovering that Destry-Scholes may, in chasing up notes on Carl Linnaeus, Francis Galton and Henrik Ibsen, have been drawn to his death by the allure of the Maelstrom. Destry-Scholes’ notes and his few relics that the young scholar examines seem to throw doubt not only on what is true and what is fiction but also on whether any single biography is capable of delineating the whole of a subject’s life, works and thoughts. Circles within circles then, but, like the spirals of a whirlpool, all connected in seamless seething turmoil. Hanging over the whole are the questions, who exactly is the biographer – Byatt, Nanson, Bole or Destry-Scholes – and is it the biographer who’s telling the tale or is the tale about the biographer?

I very much enjoyed this erudite yet entertaining fiction: it combined a love of cataloguing, pigeonholing and cryptic puzzles with a snapshot of a gauche young man who, through questing for a particular grail, manages to find some equanimity. It’s not a perfect novel – as critics note, the erudition and the entertainment don’t quite gel a lot of the time – but it certainly gives pause for thought. With its sifting through fact and fiction in the lives of three great cataloguers of minutiae – taxonomer Linnaeus, anthropologist Galton and playwright Ibsen – it becomes evident that, failing a Library of Babel, it is never possible to find out everything about even the small things of life. If it seems that Byatt, through her puppet Nanson, avoids getting to the roots of these conundrums by concluding with Phineas Nanson settling down to a modus vivendi with his complex relationships (the blonde ecologist Fulla Biefeld, the dark-haired Vera Destry-Scholes and the esoteric travel-agents Christophe and Erik), then perhaps that is her message: human relationships matter more than dry fact-filing, however diverting.

Still, shuffling around those cataloguing cards is great fun. Take Phineas Nanson, for example. ‘Phineas’ may remind us of that fictional explorer, Phileas Fogg, who travelled around the world in eighty days; Phineas is also a Thracian prophet who helped Jason and the Argonauts in their quest for the Golden Fleece. Phineus’ middle name, Gilbert, may or may not derive from the great English naturalist Gilbert White, himself concerned with the great chain of being. In addition, Byatt tells us that Phineas discovers that “nanus was the Latin for dwarf, cognate with the French nain,” and notes with a frisson that he himself is “a little person, the child of a little person” and that he has a name in a system, Nanson, suggesting that his role as potential biographer renders him of small significance. Of course, there is more to this than Byatt explicitly tells us. Later on, someone mistakenly credits him with the name of the great Norwegian explorer Nansen. The postgraduate scholar willy-nilly finds that nominative determinism has predestined him to be questing, classifying and exploring.

However, a large clue comes from Byatt’s own acknowledgements at the end of the novel. Thanking an entomologist for specialist help, she notes particularly an insect with a suggestive name, Phaeogenes nanus, that reminds us of Phineas’ own name. It may not surprise the reader that this insect is a parasitic wasp, and perhaps gives us an inkling of the role of biographers in the lives of real people. Into such depths does the literary maelstrom deliver us. ...more

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Aug 08, 2007 Quandong rated it did not like it

Normally, I am A.S. Byatt's bitch. But I couldn't get into this book, I couldn't even get past the first 50 pages. I'd love to hear if anyone finished this and thinks I am missing something.

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Dec 05, 2011 Peter rated it it was amazing

Shelves: fiction

One must bow to the scope of A.S. Byatt's fiction. Her knowledge is broad; her interests wide; her allusions many; her literary references dense. More impressive than all of these, however, is her skill as a storyteller - how she weaves her academic musings into epiphanies about life.
The Biographer's Tale follows Phineas G. Nanson from the abstraction of graduate school to the discovery of wonder in the natural world. "...the vision of these very real, chattering birds said to me... that the ...more

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Nov 16, 2013 Ron Charles rated it liked it · review of another edition

Entering a novel by A.S. Byatt is like going to a party of very smart people. The initial thrill of mingling with such brilliance is tempered by the nagging sens e of one's relative stupidity.

You know you're in trouble when a book opens with a quote from Empedocles and a reference to Lacan's theory of morcellement.

"The Biographer's Tale," a wildly inventive, over-demanding novel, reads like a parody of all things intellectual, Byatt included.

The narrator is a comically self-conscious graduate ...more

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Jul 04, 2009 Rick rated it really liked it · review of another edition

A.S. Byatt’s THE BIOGRAPHER’S TALE, is a mystery reminiscent of POSSESSION, although much more abstract and intellectualized. In the novel, graduate student Phineas G. Nanson drops his work in literary theory to pursue the “real,” embodied in his attempt to write a biography of biographer Scholes Destry-Scholes.

Information about Scholes Destry-Scholes, however, is elusive and cryptic, and Nanson can only come up with clues. He eventually stumbles across a stack of index cards and a bag of ...more

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Mar 21, 2012 Maddy rated it liked it

I've read a few of Byatt's books, and have been thinking about how to summarize my experience with them. She seems concerned with intellectual people (I think of all her characters having an I in their Mayer-Briggs classification) who, though some sort of academic or research-related journey, make strides in their romantic, sexual and emotional lives. The interesting thing is the weird, dark undercurrents that seem to go along with this journey. Usually it seems like the protagonist's journey to I've read a few of Byatt's books, and have been thinking about how to summarize my experience with them. She seems concerned with intellectual people (I think of all her characters having an I in their Mayer-Briggs classification) who, though some sort of academic or research-related journey, make strides in their romantic, sexual and emotional lives. The interesting thing is the weird, dark undercurrents that seem to go along with this journey. Usually it seems like the protagonist's journey to sexual completeness (or whatever) ends up being all sweetness and light and healthy, well-expressed sexuality, but the character seems to have some doubts and fear of darkness along the way.

So, I like that Byatt is unafraid to write about nerdy, not particularly good looking, people who fall in love. Us mediocre-lookin' geeks need some representation in the literature. She writes well about the insecurity and gratitude and eventual move to self-confidence in people with little sexual experience. On the downside, I was pretty confused by the message of the romantic portion of this story - if a sexually liberated Phineas loves two different women equally and wants to divide his life between them....okay? Except that the women seem unaware of this. Perhaps I'm sensitive about this, but keeping women uninformed in order to fulfill your own needs? This does not smack of respect or feminism to me.

Anyway, besides the (to me, problematic) romance, I found the theme on the back of the book ("How can you ever know what's true?") sort of vaguely fleshed out at best. There's not a lot of the main character trying and failing to follow clues about his subject, just a lot of him not trying, for financial or practical reasons. I think I would have liked this better if it had been more of an expensive, mad quest - Phineas somehow scraping the funds together to follow Destry-Scholes' footsteps, only to come up empty.

So the best part about the book, for me, was Destry-Scholes' notes on Bond (who is fictious?), Ibsen, Galton and (most interesting to me) Linnaeus. Also, if you're more up on your post-modern literary theory than I am, and have been a PhD student in English, you'll probably find a lot of in-jokes. But my overall feeling is: This is about a nerd (who comes off effeminate to strangers) who seems to find fulfillment by *becoming closer to our culture's masculine ideal*. Maybe there's a smart comment here that cultural expectations are not *entirely* inherently wrong-headed, simplfying and offensive, and that they, like cliches, contain a grain of wisdom. But I don't think so. ...more

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Nov 10, 2018 Steve Wiggins rated it it was ok

I confess upfront that I like classical novels. Stories that follow a progressive storyline that isn't opaque and that involves the reader in the emotional life of the character. I appreciated the humor of a grad student (having been one) becoming fed up with the nonsense of deconstructionism (I agree) and trying to make a life as a biographer's biographer. Very meta. Still, the story feels like it's trying to be too erudite, too sophisticated. It's hard to feel for the narrator.

There will be I confess upfront that I like classical novels. Stories that follow a progressive storyline that isn't opaque and that involves the reader in the emotional life of the character. I appreciated the humor of a grad student (having been one) becoming fed up with the nonsense of deconstructionism (I agree) and trying to make a life as a biographer's biographer. Very meta. Still, the story feels like it's trying to be too erudite, too sophisticated. It's hard to feel for the narrator.

There will be some spoilers after this, so be warned.

Byatt is quite adept at some aspects of writing from a male voice. The opportunistic aspect of sexual liaisons is funny, but also serious and one of the less appealing aspects of the novel. The interesting characters, such as Erik and Christophe, are only in the story to the point of wondering about their lives, and then dropped as a solipsistic Phineas G. Nanson finds his way into two women's beds, while not really loving either of them. It's difficult to identify with such a man. Having written novels (unpublished) myself, I know that the protagonist who doesn't know what he wants is a tough sell. Phineas is even more difficult in that he takes advantage of those who have the capacity for being true lovers. It is strange to find a story by a female author that presents an opportunistic lover so casually. Maybe that's the point.

The story is naturalistic until, very near the end, when a faun appears. Many pages of disjointed note cards from Linnaeus, Galton, and Ibsen are probably capable of being arranged into a meaningful puzzle by those who have the time to study the novel in (ironically) and English department class, but for the casual reader they are tedious and don't really add much to the novel. Then to put photos of two of them dead into the text is a somewhat sobering experience for a witty novel.

I admit the fault may be entirely my own, but I didn't know where this novel was going. I didn't care for the protagonist, and I closed the back cover with a shrug. Others, however, may find it captivating. ...more

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Dec 09, 2010 Melanie rated it it was ok

Shelves: brit-lit, 2010-reads

As a recovering post-sturcturalist who is quite glad that grad school is well and truly done with, I loved the premise of this book: Phineas G. Nanson ups and quits his graduate degree and critical theory seminars to write a biography of a biographer. In theory, I admire the elegance of a composite novel about a man researching a biographer who was working on a composite biography of three men who were obsessed in some way with the idea of the composite. In practice, I got bogged down by all of ...more

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Jul 23, 2008 Judy rated it liked it · review of another edition

Seeing that this was a blend of history and present-day narrative, I expected/hoped for another 'Possession'. It isn't - but maybe I shouldn't have expected that, as a writer like AS Byatt isn't likely to write the same book twice! I did enjoy it, all the same, although some of the long sections with little bits of the main character's research, as he aims to write a biography of the ultimate biographer, can be heavy going.

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Apr 20, 2008 Amy rated it liked it

Shelves: contemporary-fiction, read-in-2007

Very literary and a bit over my head. I enjoyed A.S. Byatt's novel Possession, but this one I had a difficult time following. She's a very intelligent writer, which I appreciate, but sometimes it's a bit much. Still interesting, though!

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Jun 11, 2019 Alexandra rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2019, female-nb-gq-2019

I have never read anything by AS Byatt. I have heard of her... but I think I always assumed she was a bit too "literary" for my tastes, which in my head means snobby and convoluted kinda-real-life and not that interesting. I saw this book in a second hand book shop and thought - maybe I should give it a go; biography is an interesting topic and the blurb sounded a bit intriguing.

Plus, cool cover.

Up to about the halfway point, I was utterly charmed. Besotted, even. Phineas Nanson (I was a bit I have never read anything by AS Byatt. I have heard of her... but I think I always assumed she was a bit too "literary" for my tastes, which in my head means snobby and convoluted kinda-real-life and not that interesting. I saw this book in a second hand book shop and thought - maybe I should give it a go; biography is an interesting topic and the blurb sounded a bit intriguing.

Plus, cool cover.

Up to about the halfway point, I was utterly charmed. Besotted, even. Phineas Nanson (I was a bit disappointed when I discovered the narrator was a man; I'd forgotten that from the blurb) has decided to give up his study in postmodern literary theory, because it doesn't mean anything to him anymore. But that means he needs something new to study. A supervisor gives him three volumes of biography by Scholes Destry-Scholes; Nanson has an arrogant literary theorist aversion to biography. However, he is hooked by the charm of Destry-Scholes' writing, and proceeds to attempt a biography of the biographer.

At this point, I thought there were going to be intriguing and possibly convoluted layers upon layers of biography. And there were: Nanson finds excerpts of other, possible, biographies written by Destry-Scholes but unpublished, and there are extended (and I mean a few dozen pages) included in the novel. These excerpts are a bit weird, and their subjects not immediately identified; there are certainly some themes that recur.

Nanson goes on to research the subjects of these incomplete biographies, and of course finds himself in increasing levels of abstraction from his purported subject, the biographer. All of which is quite wonderful to read - including his finding a part-time job at a travel agency who specialise in odd, literary- or art- or otherwise abstrusely-themed holidays for discerning characters.

It was all going so well.

(Spoilers from here, I guess? If you really want to give it a go yourself?)

And then it became a story of a man who ends up having a relationship with two different women at the same time.

I mean, yes, there was discussion about how this attempt at a biography had actually become an autobiography and he has angst about that as a literary form, and then discusses how he surprisingly likes writing for its own sake, and he gives up on Destry-Scholes... but yes, this became a not-yet-middle-aged (I assume) man and his sexual relationships and there was no musing on whether it was right to have two partners simultaneously and did his partners deserve to know about the other or... anything of that sort of moral relationship nature. No. It was just all about him and his experience.

And so I got really quite disappointed. More than I probably would have been if I hadn't been so delighted by the first half. ...more

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Nov 06, 2017 Karen rated it it was ok

Shelves: biography, books-about-books, writers, cerebral

This is a cerebral novel about (narrated by) a graduate student of literary analysis who decides he wants to work with "things" instead of in the conceptual stratosphere that he has been used to so far in his academic career. So, he takes up the idea of writing a biography of a celebrated biographer from the beginning of the 20th century whose magnum opus is the 3 volume life of an 18th century British traveler with an absurdly long and disparate list of accomplishments. He begins his research, ...more

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Jan 16, 2019 Jim Leckband rated it liked it

The tale of a biographer writing autobiography whilst doing biographical research on a biographer who wrote autobiographically whilst doing research on three famous people who described the world (taxonomy, eugenics, and playwright) rather than explaining or changing it. I think one of the upshots is that description is valuable, but the world also needs do-ers in addition to watchers. Or live your own life rather than someone else's.

In any case, I liked the postmoderny vibe and the meta parts ...more

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Sep 15, 2007 Susan rated it it was ok

Shelves: fiction-adult

Byatt has a way of making her characters seem like butterfly specimens pinned to a display. You may admire their intricacies, but you can never feel like you get close to them. Perhaps part of this is because they feel like they come from another time. Oddly enough, although one of the main characters is a new-agey earth mother type and computers and the Internet play a role here and there, the story does not gain much in warmth or a contemporary feel from either element. Nature in this book ...more

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Sep 02, 2013 Michael Spiering rated it really liked it

I read this as a delightful satirical novel that cast a sidelong glance at some of the odder foibles not only of scholars, but the scholars they study. The insight behind the jokes, perhaps, is that genius coexists with eccentricity--if you want to think of figures like Linnaeus as genius. Perhaps genius is the wrong word here, but something worthy of scholarly biography. Similarly, we learn that a biographer may himself be a "genius"--here, I believe, the word is applied by a dissertation ...more

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Apr 23, 2009 Brigid rated it it was ok

Since I liked Babel Tower (and long before that, Possession) so much, I thought I would read some other Byatt and found this one. It was so-so. Again, she interleaves multiple created and existing texts, which is only partially effective for me. I love her work with her actual characters so much more than her imitation of scholarly works or her character-created fictions. In Possession I shamelessly skipped the long poems, which didn't affect the read at all, but in both Babel Tower and this one ...more

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Jul 31, 2009 Liviu rated it really liked it

Shelves: read_2010, mainstream

This is another book I started months ago, read some, put it down, restarted it and so on until finally I got to about 50% in small chunks across time and then I read the rest in one sitting.

Overall I liked a lot from it, but it's very unbalanced as a novel - the part that deals with the narrator and his relationships which is maybe 1/3 of the book itself is excellent but the rest which deals with the narrator's investigation of a writer/biographer and in turn that writer's investigations of ...more

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Sep 01, 2010 Paddy rated it it was ok

What disappointment to find mind-numbing mountains of "knowledge" and "faux knowledge" in what started out as a possible romp through the fields of deconstructionists' most playful intellectual games. But haven't I written this before about other recent attempts of Byatt? Clearly, she and her sibs are brilliant scholars and writers, but strutting one's knowledge of others' scholarship weighs on the reader, who wants fresh intimacy with characters, lovable or not. In the end, I wish she were ...more

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Nov 19, 2008 Jeana rated it did not like it

Recommends it for: people who want to fall asleep

I'm saying I've read this because I read the first bit (23 pages) and I just CAN'T read anymore. It's too cerebral; it's too dry; I just don't care about the fact that the main character is reading about how the biographer wrote about some other guy who was "particularly fond of the contrast between red apples and green apples" (p. 21).

I don't like reading biographies. I really don't. I prefer fiction. But the idea of reading a fictional story about a biographer's biography is just too much. ...more

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Jan 01, 2018 Vita O'Brien rated it it was ok

Shelves: read-in-2018

While Byatt has moments of glory with Phineas G. It seems she decided what she wanted to novel to be doing within the last few pages. Huge chunks of the book are devoted to bits of random research which you plod through hoping it will mean something later - only to find that it doesn’t really and could have been cut out completely. Honestly, I had to force myself to finish this book and I only did that because of Vera, Fulla and the men from Puck’s Girdle. Maybe this should have been a story ...more

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Aug 29, 2009 Elizabeth Desole rated it did not like it

I usually love Byatt though there have been times that I found the beginning of her books rough going. This one I actually gave up on. I never do this. It's just far too much like the diary of a not very interesting English Lit grad student

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Mar 11, 2009 Meg rated it liked it

Shelves: library-related, read-09, physicalbook

An interesting book, although ultimately disappointing. I never quite clicked with the narrator and the interweaving of random passages of text did not make for an easy reading experience. It sets up for more than it delivers.

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Aug 11, 2009 Marvin rated it did not like it

Surprisingly, I gave up on this one. Surprisingly, because I really liked her earlier book, Possession. But the elements that made that one intellectually rewarding somehow made this one seem pretentious.

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May 31, 2014 William Leight rated it really liked it

I have a doubtless slightly unfortunate tendency to compare all A.S. Byatt novels to "Possession", but "A Biographer's Tale" makes such comparisons almost inevitable. It is, in a way, a mirror-image, or possibly bizarro-world version, of "Possession". Both novels have as their hero a young academic studying an unfashionable branch of literature; both feature a quest to solve a (fictional) literary mystery; both have a heavy Victorian influence; both involve the interpolation of excerpts from I have a doubtless slightly unfortunate tendency to compare all A.S. Byatt novels to "Possession", but "A Biographer's Tale" makes such comparisons almost inevitable. It is, in a way, a mirror-image, or possibly bizarro-world version, of "Possession". Both novels have as their hero a young academic studying an unfashionable branch of literature; both feature a quest to solve a (fictional) literary mystery; both have a heavy Victorian influence; both involve the interpolation of excerpts from invented works by invented authors (a Byatt specialty, and something that she does about as well as anybody this side of Borges), though the excerpts from never-completed biographies that feature in "A Biographer's Tale" are probably less likely to be skipped over by the average reader than the poetry that features heavily in "Possession"; and both have an exceedingly academic-literary atmosphere (it's possible to read and enjoy "A Biographer's Tale" even if you've never heard of Foucault or have no real idea of what post-structuralism is, but a passing familiarity with literary theory certainly doesn't hurt). But otherwise, everything in "A Biographer's Tale" happens in exactly the opposite way as it does in "Possession". In "Possession", the solution of the central problem leads the hero to academic respect and a job; in "A Biographer's Tale", not only is the central problem never solved, by the end the hero has not just abandoned any idea of studying literature, but in a way the idea of literature itself, with the end of the novel arriving at the point where he decides he is no longer interested in writing.

In fact, and rather unusually for a work of literature, "A Biographer's Tale" can be read as a rejection of literature in favor of science. The book opens with Phineas Nanson, the main character, deciding that he is no longer interested in literary theory (many of the references to it scattered through the book are derogatory), but instead wants to learn about "things" and "facts". This leads him to biography, in particular the fictional Scholes Destry-Scholes' biography of an invented Victorian polymath, Sir Elmer Bole, loosely based on Richard Francis Burton. Inspired by this work, Phineas decides to write a biographical study of Destry-Scholes, and the rest of the book describes, more or less, his attempt to learn about Destry-Scholes, an attempt which, not to spoil the book too much, is a total failure. In fact, the title itself is really quite misleading: the book is not the story of Destry-Scholes, who we never really learn much about, and Phineas himself is certainly not the title biographer, as long before the end he has abandoned his initial project. Instead, he is drawn towards science, partly by investigating Destry-Scholes' notes for projects on Linnaeus, Ibsen, and Francis Galton, and partly through the women he meets: Vera Alphage, Destry-Scholes' niece, who is a radiologist, and Fulla Biefeld, a Swedish biologist who he meets at the Linnaean society. Fulla's attitude towards literary study is particularly caustic: to her, the importance of trying to analyze and reverse the impact of humanity on the environment, in particular on pollinators, her specialty, dwarfs that of any literary field. Her beliefs have a powerful affect on Phineas, who is largely unsure where his life will lead: given his desire to study "things", he is lead inevitably to the concreteness of science. At the end of the book, Phineas is in Turkey, helping Fulla engage in a study of pollination by beetles.

More broadly, though, "A Biographer's Tale" goes beyond the literature-science dichotomy to mount an attack on modern methods of gathering knowledge, of overspecialization and abstraction. Throughout the book, the models for knowing are not modern ivory-tower specialists but Renaissance men. Bole, the subject of Destry-Scholes biography, is (at the very least) a naturalist, linguist, art historian, historian, and geographer, in addition to writing translations, travelogues, novels, and poetry, and being an explorer and spy. Destry-Scholes himself becomes an expert in all these fields in the course of writing his biography, so that he can not just explain Bole's work but also elaborate on what he got right and wrong and why. Linnaeus's interests ranged beyond just classification, and Galton was another Victorian polymath (though remembered today solely for coming up with the idea of eugenics, Galton was also, among other things, a pioneering statistician and inventor of scientific meteorology): only Ibsen's place in the book's schema seems a little unclear. And the characters in the book itself are similarly broad. Fulla has wide-ranging scientific interests, and is never seen in a lab or office but is always out in the field getting her hands dirty, performing essential work that hardly anyone does any more. Meanwhile, Phineas finds employment at a specialty travel agency, "Puck's Girdle", that designs literary or historic or scientific or artistic tours and so requires a broad knowledge of many topics. Indeed, by the end of the book it's clear that Phineas is, deliberately or not, modeling his life after that of Bole: he describes himself as a "travel agent and parataxonomist". The dusty and sterile environment of the English department, with its dirty windows that you can't see out of that serve as an obvious metaphor (so obvious the book has to admit to it) for the insularity of academia, has been abandoned for a real world of concrete things to be studied and facts to be learned.

Regardless of how you feel about these issues (personally I think Byatt goes a little too far), the result is a rather strange book. We spend a lot of time investigating Destry-Scholes' investigations of Linnaeus, Galton, and Ibsen, without really ever getting anywhere. There are some parallels between the three, to be sure, but some of them are clearly introduced by Destry-Scholes himself -- the portions of his accounts of their lives that we read are partly fictional, including reports of visions that they never experienced -- and it's never quite clear why, or what those parallels are supposed to tell us about Destry-Scholes. This naturally raises some questions about Vera, who as his niece should presumably know something about, if not him, at least his family, which is, after all, also her family, but once raised these questions are just allowed to linger. And once it becomes clear that the central mystery of the book will not actually be resolved, a certain amount of tension is lost, which is presumably the reason for the introduction of the sub-plot involving Maurice Bossey. Something is needed to keep the story going and prevent it from degenerating into autobiography, as Phineas, who narrates, complains several times that it is doing. In the end, though, this sub-plot doesn't really go anywhere, and does nothing but put Phineas in a rather negative light. And the end of the book is slightly arbitrary: Phineas more or less just decides to stop writing about himself. There's not really a story to end, so the book just kind of peters out.

Prior to that, though, it is largely successful, in its own slightly dry, academic, and literary way (a tone that is largely set by Phineas's narration). Minor characters like Ormerod Osgood, the chair of the English department that Phineas is a member of as the novel starts, and Erik and Christophe, the gay couple who run Puck's Girdle, are excellent, eccentric enough to be interesting while still remaining just plausible. The bits and pieces of Destry-Scholes that we run across during the course of the book are quite well done, though I'm not sure if I would be up for his three-volume biography of Bole. And though Vera is perhaps a bit of a drip, Fulla has energy enough for both of them. Indeed, for the last quarter or so of the book she propels things forward almost single-handedly, without even the aid of a plot (in a way, she replaces the plot), and her forceful ecological arguments are among "A Biographer's Tale"'s most memorable passages. Thanks to Fulla, and to the book's ability to maintain coherence due to its consistency of tone, it never loses interest even as its story loses momentum. ...more

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Mar 04, 2016 Paul The Uncommon Reader rated it liked it

Too many layers for me

This was my third Byatt, after the truly impressive "The Children's Book" and the totally luscious "Possession". Byatt's output is, um, economical, so I've been saving her other stuff for a while. (Does anyone else out there do that? Purposely not read new books by favourite authors so that you've still got stuff to look forward to, and so that you aren't in the situation that you don't have more of your favourite author to read? Or possibly: there are so many other authors

Too many layers for me

But I was disappointed with "The Biographer's Tale". Woah! Let me explain. There were familiar elements. The deep research that made "The Children's Book" so impressive. The interest in the nature of stories, or rather of narrative (a biography is a "factual" story – laced with the interpretations of the biographer, posing the question of whether biography – and story-telling! – is a valid occupation. Or even: does it have any point at all? That is what this book is about, I think, it poses the question of whether a story can ever be told "accurately"). There's even a touching love story in there, which was the element I so enjoyed in "Possession" (Come on, who doesn't enjoy a good, moving love story, eh? Though this one had a Scandinavian, um, "kink".).

But there were problems. Either because I couldn't concentrate (Byatt's writing is very... dense (or I am) (American readers: "dense" is Brit-talk for "stoopid"), or because Byatt tried too hard, got enmeshed in her own plot (which is very complex), there were passages that really lost me. In "Possession", a lot of people criticised the poetry, said it was too... distant, too laboured, too irrelevant to the thrilling plot. In "The Biographer's Tale", I felt the same about the actual "biography" passages. Yes, I liked the ruse that here we have a real author (Byatt), in the guise of a pretend first-person narrator (Phineas G. Nanson may or may not be a wry look at herself (Byatt, I mean) and the way she goes about researching and writing her own novels, or simply about the writing process) writing about a pretend biographer (Destry-Scholes is entirely fictional) researching and writing about (partly) real historical figures (Ibsen and Francis Galton existed) and partly pretend "famous" people (there is no such historical figure as Sir Emer Bole) who researched into "real" (if pretty obscure) things, which involved "real" (as interpreted by Byatt, of course) historical figures, like Darwin. (Pause for breath).

Real issues, in particular, eugenics, the scientific attempt to divide humanity into genetically varying "races", based on the (rudimentary, in those days of course) study of genetics (hence Darwin) which the nazis turned into perhaps the most important, and certainly the most dangerous study of humans in the 20th Century, rear their ugly heads. I liked the subtle interweaving of "fact" and "fiction" a lot, and I thought it was a lovely touch to include real photographs of Ibsen and Galton on their death beds. Very disorienting for the reader to be confronted with actual photos of the historical figures who are embedded into the fictional story. Forces us to ask what is fact, what is fiction and, most importantly, what is the relationship between fact and fiction in a novel?

So far, so (almost) good. We readers are being toyed with, tricked, challenged. Like all good authors do, via stories within stories, from Shakespeare (Hamlet's play within a play for his mum and step-dad), all the way through to Auster and his narrative jokery, Atwood's onion-skin layers in "The Blind Assassin" (exquisite). I maintain: all good writers write about writing. Just some do it better than others. And I somehow felt that Byatt's efforts here were laboured. After the twenty-somethingth "card" that the "fictitious" (all the characters are fictitious, or (Ibsen and Galton) "fictitious-alised" by Byatt) that Mr. Destry-Scholes "wrote", I kind of gave up, failing utterly to see how it all fitted in. Could be my problem and not one created by Byatt – though I do plead the customer-comes-first amendment and say that if I as a per-retty experienced reader didn't understand what the eff was going on, what we have here is – at best –dense writing, and at worst opaque, laboured and over-complex. I mean, I read the first 50 pages of Ulysses then gave up like everybody else, and I know that's a different league to anything else that's ever been written in sort-of English, but I like to think I can make a judgement here. (I can, but nobody has to believe it. I might be lying, for a start. I might be covering ineptitude. I might be writing this whole article from an entirely different perspective than the one you think. I might be A.S. Byatt's arch-enemy, determined to drag her name through the literary mud. (I'm not). You see what I mean about storytelling? If history is no different from storytelling, writing reviews most certainly isn't.

I shall conclude with a quote from the book, one which applies to Byatt – and every other novelist – as much as to the fictitious Mr. Destry-Scoles. (The quote is, of course, also placed into (the fictitious) Phineas' mouth. But let us assume, for a moment, that he is not an entirely "unreliable first-person narrator"):

"But people he, to use a primitive phrase, 'made up', must in some sense be not only watched strangers but spun from his own fabric, sensed inside his own stance, seen through one or the other of those terrible disparate eyes?"

The message I take from this book goes along the lines of: as soon as we try to present factual information, we always get caught up in our own plots. It is thus impossible to write "accurate" biographies, or perhaps even "truthful" novels. But that's OK, it is in the nature of being human to be thus caught between fact and fiction, because we all perceive the world not as it is, but as we interpret it to be (as many a perceptive philosopher through the ages has, um, perceived).

Which is a beautiful, truthful message, to which I might add: "Please, humans, be careful about saying you have the whole truth. Please rather have, by all means, a good time presenting your version of the truth, but be mega-mighty aware that everybody has their version of the truth. And don't be afraid of that, or threatened by it. Embrace it – and we may yet stand a chance of surviving as a species, though frankly, at the moment, evidence points in other directions. (I mean, give up trying to make the world run on bloody oil, for bloody starters, use the sun, for heaven's sake; isn't it obvious, duh?)

OK. I over interpreted. But at least I told the world my version of the truth.

Whadaya think of my truth, world? World...?

...more

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Feb 28, 2019 Bhaskar Thakuria rated it it was ok

Shelves: literary-fiction

While reading this book I became quite confused after a while as to whether this was meant as a full-length biography or a work of fiction. A.S.Byatt, indeed, is worth much more, much more than this confusing hodge-podge of literary detection and immaculate research. One-fourth into the novel I had given this up for good, and halfway through there was hardly any interest left and I left it like that, stalled for the while. I gave it another go this year and the results were no more different. ...more

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May 27, 2018 Colin rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: colin-read, colin-read-2018

You know when you embark on an A. S. Byatt novel that you're not in for a light holiday read (except I did read this on holiday - not sure what that says about my reading tastes, or my holiday for that matter...). The Biographer's Tale is a novel of ideas certainly, but it's also a novel about facts (known, unknown, half-known and unknowable) and the concreteness or otherwise of things. It explores the impossibility of biography, and in focusing on the lives of Carl Linnaeus, Francis Galton and ...more

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A.S. Byatt

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A.S. Byatt (Antonia Susan Byatt) is internationally known for her novels and short stories. Her novels include the Booker Prize winner 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 ...more

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“It is good for a man to invite his ghosts into his warm interior, out of the wild night, into the firelight, out of the howling dark.” — 11 likes

“We rode back from Richmond decorously side by side on the top of a bus. It was as though my left side (her side) burned and was so to speak dissolving into steam, or gases. Other people may often have experienced this secret journeying with the intention of sex at the end, but I was new to it, as I was new to what Fulla had done to my skin and bone-marrow, my fingers and toes, not to mention the most obvious part, or parts of me. I could have stroked her, or gripped her, or licked her, all that long way back, but putting it off, waiting, keeping still, looking uninterested, was so much more exciting…” — 2 likes

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