A Whistling Woman is the fourth novel in A S Byatt’s quartet which includes The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life and Babel Tower. The series spans 20 years in the life of a brainy and somewhat unconventional northern English family in which our heroine, Frederica, is the wildest child. She, like some of us here at LeafSalon, is a mother; like us, wants lots of possibly contradictory things and she of all people should be able to get them. But 'A Whistling Woman and a Crowing Hen Is neither Good for God nor Men', apparently a frequent saying of Ms Byatt’s maternal grandmother.

As the story opens we are in the midst of a trademark Byatt lusciously spooky faerytale about yes, whistling women, and get this… the whistlers are half-bird, half-woman, whose song can drive men mad. Women whose wild desires to 'ride the storm-winds at night' (hey – we wanna do that too!) have seen them condemned to exile in their bird-form forever.

The story, with Frederica at its core, continues to be about intelligent women breaking out of society’s imposed roles in a 60's man's world, whether it’s Frederica’s fabulous forays into early television or Stephanie’s equally fascinating breakthrough studies of neurotransmitters in snails’ brains. Yup. But Byatt’s women still wrestle with problems of love and babies as well as careers, with heart-warming results, though if things are about to become too normal, she challenges us at neurone level and s-l-o-w-s things down to snail speed. (This is great – the whole inner-world thing is as good as outer space for getting things into perspective I find. Like gardening.)

Then there’s the whole other plot based around the strange goings-on up north in Frederica’s home town – a university gone mad and a religious group getting into some Murdoch-esque metaphysical musings. But with lashings of LSD. This is the 60s after all…

So, whew. A huge, funny, brilliant, haunting book by a writer whose almost palpable passion for 'intellectual curiousity of any kind' has done it for me again. She’s utterly glorious, and I for one have been whistling non-stop ever since reading it.