Ever since reading Possession last year, I've been reading pretty much every Byatt book I could get my hands on at the library. This has had the perhaps unfortunate effect that I am now reading her lone series, consisting of four books, utterly out of order. The series started off with Virgin in the Garden, continued with Still Life and Babel Tower and concluded with A Whistling Woman. Whereas I started with Babel Tower, continued with A Whistling Woman, and now read Still Life, thus saving the first for last. Fortunately, the four books are sufficiently stand-alone in terms of time and plot that this is quite doable, if not ideal.

In Still Life, the protagonist of the series, Frederica Potter, has finished secondary school and is about to head to Cambridge. Her sister Stephanie, already graduated from the same university, is settling in with her husband Daniel near the Potters' home in northern Yorkshire and has gotten pregnant. Her brother Marcus is facing his psychological problems and trying to find something he can do in spite of it, while their parents are adjusting to life without children around. The date is the middle fifties - I don't know how autobiographical this series is intended to be, but Frederica and A.S. Byatt herself (born in 1936) seem to be exactly the same age if nothing else, and are obviously both women with a strong will and a keen interest in British literature.

Like every Byatt book, Still Life's plot is functional but relatively simple, and mostly serves as a framework for the exploration of ideas and themes. In this book, unlike the later ones, this is occasionally underlined by Byatt actually writing in first person and making observations about the process of writing this novel. I'm not a fan of that - I want to know those things, sure, but then in a preface and not in the book itself - but it's rare enough that it doesn't really detract from the book.

A few themes are present in all the books of the series: the evolving position of women in British society in the post-war period, family and its evolution in that same period, religion (if not always to an equally great extent) and art/literature. More specific themes in this book include Van Gogh, colour, academia and the difficulty of communication within relationships (though you might argue that last one is a recurring theme as well). Frederica's love life is difficult, though on this particular topic I find it probably would have helped if I'd read the previous book first, while having read the later books already also coloured my view. Her character is very well-developed with its flaws and strengths, and Byatt manages to create a credible family of characters, with certain traits shared between some or all members, and others not so much. The father of the family gets perhaps too little screentime for the large changes we see in his character in this and later books, but that is not a matter of faulty character development really, merely something I'd gladly have read about in more detail.

There is really little bad I can say about this novel, though of course I'm an enthusiastic Byatt fan and others may not enjoy the book as much. Those who find her patronizing or too keen on displaying her broad knowledge and intelligence in other books, will think the same thing here. Personally I can be bothered by that too when other writers do it, or if they write things that make me feel dumb, but somehow with Byatt I don't mind either thing. Most of the time it's merely a matter of my not having read enough of the British classics, although in this case it was nice to have read Brideshead Revisited just a few days earlier (even if I didn't recognize the scene she referred to). Still, the book wasn't quite as superb for me as Possession or Babel Tower. I would enthusiastically recommend it, but not to people who disliked these two books or Byatt in general.