A.S. Byatt: An Appreciation

A.S. Byatt made heavy use of the tropes of mythology and folklore and depicted many wondrous creatures in her stories and novels, yet it does not seem quite accurate to call her a fantasy writer. Her fiction has a solid grounding in human history and social reality, much like that of the late Hilary Mantel, with whom Byatt also shared a fierce intelligence, an elegant prose style, and a considerable prolificity.

Byatt was the sister of the novelist Margaret Drabble, and their literary and personal rivalry was the stuff of tabloid gossip and innuendo for years, though the Guardian’s tribute suggests that journalists may have blown it up to some degree. To bring yet another British writer into the discussion, Byatt’s personal life had something in common with that of Roald Dahl, who came close to losing his infant son when a truck hit Theo’s pram on a Manhattan street. Byatt experienced a calamity that was even worse, because fatal. One day in 1972, a car struck and killed her eleven-year-old son.

The Guardian obituarist, Harriet Harvey Wood, suggests that this experience not only impressed the tragic aspects of life deeply on Byatt but also fostered, in her writing, “an emphasis on the accidental element in human life and death.” Wood is partly right here. Byatt did have an interest in the role of chance and luck, but it may be more accurate to say that her subject was how accident and culpable neglect intertwine. Responsibility is rarely completely absent in even the most freakish events.

While much of the attention in the days since Byatt’s passing on Friday has focused on the 1990 novel Possession, a sprawling Booker Prize-winning bestseller, it is her short fiction that holds out perhaps the most useful key for anyone seeking a belated acquaintance with this author’s work and themes.

The story “Dragon’s Breath,” which appeared in the 1994 collection The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, describes the quiet life of a family that includes three children, Jack, Harry, and Eva. They live in a valley, sow, reap, and enjoy what generally seems like an idyllic bucolic life save for the fact that a mountain looming above the valley serves as an unofficial demarcation point between the realm of people and that of dragons. Byatt relates a folk belief that the rings observable on the sides of mountains are the result of dragons’ tails having coiled around them and tightened with such force as to score ancient rock. Most of the people of the valley, if not the three kids, live in awe and fear of the largely unseen creatures.

We know something awful and dramatic is going to happen. A hunter reports having seen “unusual snowslides in the high mountains,” and scathing steam drives off would-be reconnoiterers. People debate whether landslides or something more sinister might be at work up there. When the dragon attack happens and the creatures’ fiery and noxious breath wafts down the side of the mountain, it destroys homes and businesses and leaves thick layers of ash all over, sending the inhabitants scurrying off into the woods with whatever they can carry. Jack, Harry, and Eva make it to safety, but Harry’s devotion to his pig Boris runs so deep that he returns to the scene of devastation in the hope of rescuing the animal.

The loss of Harry in the midst of this freak occurrence reads like the reflection of the tragedy of Byatt’s personal life in a distorted mirror. But the author has more on her mind that exorcizing that ghost. Byatt describes the scene left in the wake of the dragons’ breath: “The houses flattened, the trees uprooted, the earth scored, channeled, ashy, and smoking.” The villagers are in a daze as tiny relics of the ordered life they lived before the onslaught crop up here and there: “They wandered in the ruins, turning over bricks and boards, some people finding, as some people always will, lost treasures and trivia in the ashes, a coin, half a book, a dented cooking-pot.”

Many will read this story as nothing more or less than an account of a dragon attack on a village and its aftermath. It works well enough on those terms. But for those with a bit of historical perspective, the circumstances of the disaster and a few of the visual details may suggest that Byatt has found a metaphor for the catastrophe that happened in the South Wales village of Aberfan one day in October 1966. Aberfan lay in an active coal-mining region, but the heads of a village in the provinces did not have the political influence, or ability to push for and enforce safe mining policies, as well-connected officials in a powerful municipal government might have had. They had little sway over the National Coal Board.

On one of the hills over the village lay a slurry pond, a turgid mix of water and waste left over from the coal mining. During the morning of October 21, 1966, the slurry spilled over and tumbled down the hill at high speed, landing on the village and completely submerging many buildings, including a school with five teachers and 109 pupils inside. In total, 144 people died.

Dragons’ breath makes for a fitting analogy for the toxic and deadly slurry let loose at Aberfan, and in her description of villagers returning to the scene after the attack and finding discarded items here and there amid the smoldering ruins, Byatt might practically be describing the experience of trying to locate victims and retrieve valuables after the October 1966 disaster. Few things could illustrate as powerfully the irrational nature of the universe and the way that bad luck can put your young son in the path of a car as easily and arbitrarily as it can send a slurry pond cascading down the side of a hill, not toward the space to the right or the left of a village, but directly onto the village, and not before or after school hours, but just as the day has gotten underway and the school is at its most crowded.

Some might say that the dragons’ attack involves agency, or conscious will, and the disaster in South Wales in 1966 did not. Oh, but it did. Both random mishap and culpable negligence came into play here. The actions of the National Coal Board under Lord Robens, which refused to protect the people of the valley or even to come up with adequate compensation in the aftermath, invite comparison to the depredations of beasts. No doubt the survivors of Aberfan felt toward Robens rather the way that Byatt must have felt toward the drunk driver who mowed down her boy and altered her life forever. An accident occurred, but, pace the Guardian’s obituarist, that was far from Byatt’s only concern.

Other tales in The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, namely “The Glass Coffin” and “Gode’s Story,” make use of magical elements and fantastic creatures, even if none achieves quite the power of “Dragon’s Breath.”

In still other of her works, Byatt made use not of the beasts of myth but of real insects and animals to depict caste systems and social cohesion, or the lack thereof. The 1995 film Angels & Insects, based on Byatt’s story “Morpho Eugenia,” presents a number of her themes and ideas in microcosm. A young Mark Rylance plays William Adamson, a natural scientist of humble origins, who lives on the estate of a family of aristocrats and begins a romance with his employer’s daughter, Eugenia, only to earn the enmity of her swinish brother Edgar. The well-meaning protagonist wants to work things out. After an ugly scene where the drunken brother challenges him to a fight, there comes a hopeful moment in which William passes by Edgar standing at a pool table. Edgar asks whether he is correct that they both enjoy the outdoors. William answers that they do, and goes on to say: “I hope that in time we may come to find other common interests.”

Indeed, they do, though not in the sense William meant. The “Insects” of the title turns out be an anagram for another word that applies to the relations between Edgar and Eugenia. For all the passion between William and Eugenia, Edgar is right when he says the lowly intellectual is not part of the host family. Throughout the film, director Philip Haas treats the viewer to vivid shots of ant colonies and conflicts, more perhaps that some will be able to stomach. The point is debatable, to say the least, and a little too broad. It recalls the early novels of William Faulkner, such as Sartoris, where the impossibility of successfully cross-breeding animal species functions as a metaphor for the irreconcilability of the Old and New South.

At the climax, William returns to the estate at a random moment in response to a report that Eugenia has fallen ill. He strolls into a bedroom and makes a shocking discovery about what has been going on between the brother and sister. The circumstances owe much to chance. Yet in one of the film’s final scenes, there are suggestions that he returned and went searching from room to room because the house wanted him to, or certain people shared a knowledge that refused to stay confined to their minds. Once again, agency and chance intertwine with dramatic and vivid results.

Rarely has any writer rendered the beauty, cruelty, indifference, and horror of the world we inhabit as cannily as A.S. Byatt in the wondrous and fantastic tropes that crowd her stories and novels.