At the heart of Babel Tower are two law cases, twin strands of the Establishment's web, that shape the story: a painful divorce and custody suit and the prosecution of an "obscene" book. Frederica, the independent young heroine, is involved in both. She startled her intellectual circle of friends by marrying a young country squire, whose violent streak has now been turned against her. Fleeing to London with their young son, she gets a teaching job in an art school, where she is thrown into the thick of the new decade. Poets and painters are denying the value of the past, fostering dreams of rebellion, which focus around a strange, charismatic figure -- the near-naked, unkempt and smelly Jude Mason, with his flowing gray hair, a hippie before his time.

We feel the growing unease, the undertones of sex and cruelty. The tension erupts over his novel Babbletower , set in a past revolutionary era, where a band of people retire to a castle to found an ideal community. In this book, as in the courtrooms, as in the art school's haphazard classes and on the committee set up to study "the teaching of language," people function increasingly in groups. Many are obsessed with protecting the young, but the fashionable notion of children as innocent and free slowly comes to seem wishful, and perilous.

Babel Tower is the third, following The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life , of a planned quartet of novels set in different mid-century time frames. The personal and legal crises of Frederica mirror those of the age. This is the decade of the Beatles, the Death of God, the birth of computer languages. In Byatt's vision, the presiding genius of the 1960s seems to be a blend of the Marquis de Sade and The Hobbit . The resulting confusion, charted with a brilliant imaginative sympathy, is as comic as it is threatening and bizarre.

A.S.拜厄特（A.S.BYATT），

英國小說傢、詩人、布剋奬得主，2008年被《泰晤士報》評為1945年以來英國50位偉大作傢之一。

1990年憑藉天纔之作《占有》獲得布 剋奬，一舉 轟動世界文壇；1990年和1999年，先後被授予大英帝國司令勛章和大英帝國女爵士勛章。

拜厄特以令人嘆為觀止的博學和綺麗高超的修辭藝術聞名。她的作品主題涉及生物學、達爾文主義、繪畫藝術，體裁包含戲劇、詩歌、書信，兼之以豐富的隱喻和超凡的想象力，磅礴壯麗，又洞悉人性之微。

拜厄特的成長四部麯（《花園中的少女》《靜物》《巴彆塔》《吹口哨的女人》）是她耗時近30年寫就的頗負盛名的代錶作，以一位英國知識女性弗雷德麗卡的成長史詩，串連起二戰後幾十年英國的曆史變遷。

= 譯者簡介 =

王一鳴，畢業於澳大利亞濛納士大學新聞係，全職記者，主攻文化、藝術。曾專訪阪本龍一、伊東豐雄、杉本博司、譚元元、林懷民、安妮·萊博維茨等諸多文化名人。業餘從事翻譯工作。現居新加坡。