[The Virgin in the Garden] is a very good book. It is a large, complex, ambitious work, humming with energy and ideas. It is a highly intellectual operation. The characters do a great deal of thinking, and have extremely interesting thoughts which are developed at length. But this is no tract or treatise; it is a strong, confident, very long traditional novel, a remarkable achievement. At a time when some critics doom the novel to brevity, narrowness, dryness and ultimate degeneration into a 'text', Mrs Byatt's lively monster triumphantly exhibits the form as a playground for a powerful omnivorous intelligence….
This is, essentially, a historical novel, but set in a period which never seems remote. There is a good deal of 'social comment', but this is never obtrusive and is subjected to the strong necessities of the story. Irrepressible intellectual interests in a novelist may obstruct the most important part of the task, which is the presentation of character. General reflections may diminish the contingent reality of those who utter them. Mrs Byatt has managed to render her people's thinking both individual and dramatically effective….
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