Blick. Bluck. Blech.

I'm not a huge Byatt follower (give me her estranged sister, Margaret Drabble, any day). But at her best, she's good.

Here... she ain't.

But why?

Why is this book called The Game?

There is a game the two sisters played as children, and this game is still important in their later lives. I also know that the one sister needs the other one to weave a web, and that snakes always try to deceive women, but which man is the snake? I further know biting a apple isn't always biting an apple and that bananas often represent something that isn't a fruit.

Byatt seems to love the romantic poets. Nobody can blame her for that, but in this novel she seems to get stuck in her own metaphorical web. I think I was disappointed because I really loved The Children's Book.

Nevertheless, this book is food for thought, and in some passages you recognise the fact that Byatt is a good writer. I wouldn't suggest this book to anyone, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't read Byatt. I still have Possession on my shelf. I wont read it know, but reading this book doesn't mean I'll never read it.

( )

A tale of two sisters and the complicated ways their identities intertwine and influence one another’s. This seemed to me very similar to Byatt’s Frederica novels until the very last few chapters. Lots of soul-searching, lots of food for thought. The very last sentence reminded me of that of Possession, but a much darker spin. ( )

This was Byatt's second novel of the sixties, whose writing overlapped with The shadow of the sun. It picks up different aspects of the same theme, the way social expectations at the time wouldn't allow a woman to be both an academic and a creative artist, or indeed both an academic and a wife and mother. But where The shadow of the sun does this by presenting a young woman with (false) choices, The Game shows us two sisters in their thirties, after their lives have been sent off down diverging tramlines, with Cassandra — the imaginative, dogmatic one — turned into a spinsterish don in an Oxford ladies' college and Julia — the one who's connected to the real world — into a successful social-realist novelist with a family and a slot on a TV arts programme.

There are plenty of hints in the text that we are meant to read these two women as different sides of the same person, but of course we're also going to be jumping to conclusions about possible autobiographical elements, and Byatt exploits that knowledge by talking about the way that novelists can't help stealing from real life, and having Julia precipitate the novel's crisis by writing a book about a character obviously based on Cassandra.

There's also a lot in the book about engagement with the real world, and what it means: Julia and Cassandra are both, in different ways, still stuck in the Brontë-ish fantasy country of the Game they played as children, which was clearly at least in part an escape from the well-meaning rootedness of their Quaker family. At the same time, Simon, the boy they fought over many years ago, is off in the rain-forest trying to convince us all that what a snake is to the world and to itself is more important than what the image of a snake suggests to a human, and Julia's charity-organiser husband Thor burns with frustration at his inability to solve the real problems that he sees around him.

Iris Murdoch's footprints are all over this, of course (Byatt was also working on a critical study of her early novels at the time), but it isn't quite a pastiche Iris Murdoch novel. One very striking element (which I'm sure some readers hate) is the way the novelist and the critic constantly seem to be fighting in the background, forcing us to be constantly aware that this is a novel we're reading: characters are forever realising why they've just said what they did, and what effect they must have been trying to achieve with those words; towards the end of the book Byatt amuses herself by parodying a Sunday Times review of Julia's book-within-a-book, in which the reviewer picks out for particular criticism some of the most memorable images in the "real" story, like Cassandra's crucifix necklace dangling in the college spaghetti. ( )

What's not to love? Doomed, obsessive sisterly and romantic relationships entangled with myth and the ever-present atmosphere of menace and darkness. ( )