The Biographer's Tale

"The ideas explored here are ones that Byatt has already examined at great length, and this may account for the staleness of [the book]....Taxonomy, unfortunately, is not the only area in which THE BIOGRAPHER'S TALE treads familiar ground. The book reads like a tired rehash of POSSESSION....Rather than interspersing 'original texts' with narrative, as she did so effectively in POSSESSION, Byatt allows the three mysterious manuscripts to occupy nearly seventy pages smack in the middle of the novel, and they are slow going, not least because it's virtually impossible to make head or tail of them.A. S. Byatt is the author of 'The Biographer's Tale' with ISBN 9780786235230 and ISBN 0786235233.