Despite some beautiful descriptions of thoughts and landscapes "The shadow of the Sun" failed to grab me. I know it was A.S. Byatt's first novel, but that is no excuse for its longwindedness. What bothered me most was that there was not a single really sympathetic character. Even Anna was hard to take most of the time.
I ( )

This was the author's first novel written whilst she was an undergraduate at Cambridge University in the mid-1950s and was first published in 1964.

The novel centres around Anna Severell, the daughter of a renowned but "distant and largely unknown father", novelist. Anna has recently been kicked out of school,for running away without telling anyone, and has returned home unsure what to do with her life next.

Her mother in particular is keen for Anna to go to university so over the course of the summer she is tutored by Oliver Canning, a house guest along with his wife Margaret, in an attempt to get her accepted into Cambridge, efforts which prove successful.

The first part of the book revolves around the summer this group spends largely together. Anna and Oliver have an fairly uneasy relationship, a sulky girl and well-meaning know-it-all teacher. Strained relationships between the adults only add further complications. Oliver and Anna work together much of the time, and it is even suggested that she should move to London to live with him and Margaret. That comes to nothing, but much of the book features Anna's attempt to escape from her adolescent aimlessness and out from under her father's shadow.

In the second part of the book Anna goes to Cambridge, with little change in her listlessness. When Oliver appears again their relationship this time turns sexual with a not unsurprising outcome.

Byatt spends a lot of time analysing characters and their actions and scattered throughout the book there are a few well written scenes. But whilst much of this is well done they also feel so artificially staged that they lack conviction.

IMHO none of the characters are particularly likeable, this seems especially true of Oliver who seems plain creepy and an likely lover. It is certainly no surprise that he finally succeeds in bedding Anna although quite why she would agree to it is quite another matter. Anna is contrast just reads like a stroppy teenager who needs a good kick up the backside.

Ultimately the novel plods along and reads like what it is. The first novel by a young person who hasn't yet had sufficient life experiences of their own yet but have spent a lot of time studying other author's works. It is solid read with some interest but only really from a standpoint of seeing quite where the author's later more critically acclaimed works stemmed from. PS Read the foreword last as it gives a lot of the plot away. ( )

Frustratingly, this 1991 reissue of Byatt's first novel (originally published as Shadow of a sun in 1964) comes with a critical introduction by the author that already says just about everything intelligent that needs to be said about it — it's hard to know what to add!

Byatt started writing the book when she was a Cambridge undergraduate in the late fifties, and completed it as a young mother in Durham a few years later. In its subject-matter, it looks like a typical first novel: a young woman setting out on life and being pushed into a choice between what at that time seemed like mutually-exclusive possibilities: to run away ("to Mexico") and develop as a creative artist; fearlessly to investigate the creativity of others as a critic; or to find sex and security at the kitchen sink. They are embodied by the huge figure of her egotistical great-novelist father, Henry; by the Leavisite critic Oliver; and by various interchangeable Oxbridge young men.

This is England in the fifties, so class comes into it as well, of course: Anna has grown up in a very sheltered Elizabeth Taylor/Dorothy Whipple middle-class, rural, Home Counties, ponies-and-boarding-school world, whilst the puritanical Oliver has clawed his way up from a deprived working-class background, and the Oxbridge young men are an (almost) imperceptible notch grander than Anna's family.

However, it doesn't really feel like a first novel: there are bold and original flights of fancy in the descriptions (Blake and Samuel Palmer always seem to be lurking in the background, as well as the inevitable D H Lawrence) and there is a donnish self-confidence in the witty put-downs (of the ruthlessly-corseted Lady Hughes-Winterton: "God had designed her to be a cottage loaf and she had thwarted him"). Byatt brings such big guns into play in her imagery that there's occasionally a feeling of overkill, that all this literary apparatus isn't appropriate to such charming domestic circumstances, but of course that's part of the point she's making. The charm and security of middle-class domesticity is all part of the self-deception.

I wonder whether it would have been obvious to someone reading this in 1964 that it was primarily a feminist novel? With hindsight, and especially in the light of Byatt's own analysis, it's clear that it's about the way society conspires to limit the choices available to women, even when they are clever and come from privileged backgrounds. But at the time, it might have looked more like a book about adolescent choices that happened to be written from a woman's perspective.

Well worth coming back to, anyway. ( )

In her first novel, Byatt deals with issues of a young woman growing and badly wanting to assert and determine herself. Her unwillingness to do just that and to be "left alone", while still depending on the waves created by people around her, show that she is not mature enough or possibly not strong enough to ever be able to position herself in a situation of her liking. There is nothing unique about this and makes the novel rather ...drab. Other characters have little or no appeal either - this is what life looks like, at the point of coming of age, I suppose. Still, as this is a novel, Byatt could have had some consideration for the readers, I suppose, and somehow made it a little more... interesting. ( )

This work was the first A.S. Byatt published and, while not as amazing as Possession, is nevertheless impressive. The characters, the plot, the imagery and the outcome are believable and complex. I found the work rich and satisfying. I found the ending suitably ambiguous. I look forward to rereading the book, knowing the outcomes and therefore paying more attention to the whole of the work.

Plot Summary: The central characters are a famous writer, Henry Severell, and his over-shadowed, touchy daughter Anna. The writer is not just any renowned father but a possessed, manic-depressive "great" artist barely engaged with the rest of his family, absorbed by his work. The daughter is conflicted, resentful, passive aggressive and, in some ways, much like her father. Other major characters include the writer's wife, his lead critic and the critic's wife. The story is about the relationships between and among a great artist and two almost-artists plus the support team, the wives. It is also about the roles of women, as wives and in their own lives. The storyline takes us from the period just before Anna goes to university and the time she maybe makes a definite decision about what she will be doing with herself.

Remarks: The edition I read is a reprint and includes an introduction by Byatt. I recommend the introduction. Together, the introduction and the novel kicked off at least half a dozen TBRs for me.

4.5 stars ( )