Book 47: "The Game" by A. S. Byatt
Saturday, September 24th, 2011 00:08![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittiwakeLike certain reptiles she had learned to survive by leaving in Julia's hand the dead stump of the tail by which she had been grasped. One could even, she thought, sacrifice a more necessary limb, a hand, a foot, which would not grow again, and still survive. One could do this for ever, so long as one was not touched to the quick. Let Julia store and catalogue the limp relicts of what had been Cassandra. Successive skins, discarded hair and nails, the dead stuff of witchcraft, like the photographs, like the fiction.
At the start of the story, it seemed that Simon would be the snake who came between sisters Cassandra and Julia and ruined their relationship with each other, but then I realised that Simon had problems of his own and was in many ways just another piece in the Looking- Glass chess game whose moves and maps had been laid out long before his arrival. Oxford don Cassandra has spent her life trying to protect her own privacy and keep her little sister out, while Julia was desperate to be allowed in, but was careless with her sister's secrets.
When SImon comes back into their lives twenty years nearly twenty years after leaving to study snakes, it seems that they may be able to repair their relationship but then Julia ruins everything. Julia is a novelist who uses her husband and child as raw material for her best-selling novels and seems lacking in empathy, constantly having to ask her husband whether she is behaving badly, and asking another friend if she has written a wicked novel, when she should have realised herself that writing it was the ultimate betrayal. I prefer Cassandra but that is probably because she is the character most like me, as she isn't really any more likeable than Julia or SImon.
At the start of the story, it seemed that Simon would be the snake who came between sisters Cassandra and Julia and ruined their relationship with each other, but then I realised that Simon had problems of his own and was in many ways just another piece in the Looking- Glass chess game whose moves and maps had been laid out long before his arrival. Oxford don Cassandra has spent her life trying to protect her own privacy and keep her little sister out, while Julia was desperate to be allowed in, but was careless with her sister's secrets.
When SImon comes back into their lives twenty years nearly twenty years after leaving to study snakes, it seems that they may be able to repair their relationship but then Julia ruins everything. Julia is a novelist who uses her husband and child as raw material for her best-selling novels and seems lacking in empathy, constantly having to ask her husband whether she is behaving badly, and asking another friend if she has written a wicked novel, when she should have realised herself that writing it was the ultimate betrayal. I prefer Cassandra but that is probably because she is the character most like me, as she isn't really any more likeable than Julia or SImon.
