The Game

by A. S. Byatt (1967) Published by Vintage International. 286 pages.

Reviewed 20 April 2007

I’ve been carrying this book around for the last couple of weeks, and people keep asking me if it’s any relation to the David Fincher film starring Michael Douglas. The book and movie have no relation, except for their shared title, and for the fact that both works set out to expose elements of brutality embedded in what we see as the normal world.
This is an early work by Byatt, an author whose later books “Possession” and “Babel Tower” I've liked very much. I’m not sure if this is her first novel, but it reads very much like a first novel, ambitious, uneven, and with all the elements there to tell a good tale but lacking ultimately in vitality.
The story is about two sisters from Newcastle who developed an unusually elaborate game of pretend when they were children. The eldest sister, Cassandra, had a vivid and often violent imagination. The younger sister, Julia, developed on her sister’s ideas and expanded on them. Later in childhood she incorporated elements of the Game into a short story that won a prize. Later still, the sisters competed over a boy named Simon who had a passion for snakes. Now the time is 1963. Simon is in the Amazon rainforest, the subject of a series of BBC documentaries. Audiences think he’s quite sexy. Julia is a frustrated housewife who writes novels about frustrated housewives. And Cassandra is a professor at Oxford, lonely and spinsterish.
When Julia and Cassandra’s father die, they meet again for the first time in years. They're able to reach a truce in their estranged relationship, and Julia invites herself over for a visit to Oxford. There, a concerned friend of Cassandra suggests that the lonely Oxford don might be suffering from schizophrenia. The concept appeals to Julia, who can’t resist the temptation to build a new novel around this scenario. The novel is a huge success, but what will the consequences be for Cassandra and her precarious mental state?
Summed up like this, the plot sounds interesting, even a little lurid, and you could imagine a director like Fincher developing it into a dark, brooding film full of special effect tropes and suspenseful flashbacks. It would probably wind up hokey and lurid, but it would be better than the overly earnest mess that Byatt has served up here.
The worst flaw is that Byatt seems to have little confidence in the book's main plot. She goes out of her way to work in situations where characters might debate weighty issues, as if she is constantly trying to remind the reader that she is determined to write Serious Fiction. Therefore, we learn that Cassandra and Julia were raised as Quakers. Both have broken away from Quakerism, but Julia’s husband, Thor (!), is still quite dedicated to the Quaker ideals of humanitarian beneficence. As the novel goes on he becomes more and more of a pill. He sulks and pouts and throws around insults when Julia expresses reservations about moving, at the drop of a hat, to the Congo for a charitable project; while Julia’s away at Oxford, he invites a homeless family to live in their already crowded apartment; and finally, a woman Thor has been trying to help commits suicide, causing him to break out in a tantrum that seems both violent and contrived.
Why does Quakerism play such a big role in this novel? For all I know, Byatt herself comes from Quaker roots. But even then, it seems suspiciously as if Byatt has included the religion as a way to substitute a set of social issues (the will to improve the world through charity) for a believable character history. At heart, Thor is just your typical Bad Husband from your typical domestic romance novel, but Byatt seems to think that by giving him this philanthropic side, she’s creating an ethical dilemma for the readers. She’s not. Thor’s a complete asshole. It’s a no-brainer. He treats his without the slightest shade of respect. We’re not sad to see him go, we just wish he wouldn’t talk about it so much on his way out.
Byatt also treats Cassandra’s schizophrenia as an opportunity to make a point. What point's being made is never clear. Cassandra seems preoccupied with inanimate objects and feels that they’re somehow oppressing her. She’s sometimes unsure whether her own life is real or just a fiction. The passages dealing with her are absolutely unconvincing; she doesn’t have the sort of loss of mental control that you sense when talking to someone who really has a thought disorder. Her thoughts are actually more lucid than those of the other characters. So why does she have such a problem?
I suppose this is a really book where the young Byatt uses a story of two sisters to sort out two sides of her own style. Julia represents the more grounded part capable of human interest, and Cassandra represents the more abstract part, caught up in ideas.
But in the end we simply see that Julia’s life is too full of nasty people to be of much interest, and Cassandra’s conversations are too vague to seem like fiction at all; they’re an author’s attempt to work out a concept on the page.
Surprisingly, it's fun to see a young author work stuff out on the page, even when it fails. The novel implies that that passionate Julia and abstract Cassandra will never reconcile, and that any attempt to do so leads straight to tragedy. But Byatt’s later work is remarkable precisely because she’s so able to bring the abstract and the passionate side-by-side.