At present great importance is attached to the teaching of foreign languages. No doubt, it happens not without purpose

The ending surprised me. Others have complained about it. It made me reassess the rest of the book. That none of the characters is particularly likeable didn’t bother me though. Likeable people although nice to be married to don’t often make the best subject matter. So my wife’s safe there. I won’t be writing any novels about her in the foreseeable future.

The breach between Byatt and her younger sister and fellow novelist, Margaret Drabble, is longstanding and well known. In a 2011 interview in The Guardian, Drabble said that it was her sister's publication of The Game in 1967 that set the seal on it. It is easy to see why. The novel features two sisters, brought up (as the Drabbles were) in the North of England and given a Quaker education. As girls, they would spend their time playing The Game, an elaborate extension of Arthurian romance in which the moves were less important that the elaborate stories they made up together to explain them. When Julia, the younger, annexes one of these stories to win a national writing competition at the age of sixteen, Cassandra, the elder, feels diminished. Now twenty-plus years later, Cassandra has become a rather fearsome medievalist at Oxford, going around in vaguely monastic clothing and churchy jewelry. Julia, married to the saintlike administrator of a Quaker charity, and mother to a teenage daughter, has achieved fame as the author of realistic novels about women whose potential is impeded by the demands of domesticity. Towards the end of the book, Julia will publish her breakthrough novel, featuring an Oxford academic clearly based on Cassandra, and the results will be devastating.

It is not quite a roman à clef. For one thing, the roles are reversed. Julia is clearly based on Drabble, even down to the subjects of her early books, but it is her book about her elder sister that causes the breach, not the other way around. Secondly, Byatt exaggerates the differences between them. While Cassandra's medieval mysticism certainly plays into one aspect of her own literary personality, Byatt did not wall herself up in academic chastity, and was almost as prolific and precocious a novelist as her sister. Julia's decision to skip university and go straight into motherhood and writing about it is very different from the career of Margaret Drabble, who was the star of her year (and mine*) at Cambridge, and went on to become a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. But the essential situation of a novelist "stealing" from the lives of those around her and her own family is surely true, both in general and in particular. You can see that it hurts.But how pleasurable to read a novel peopled with intelligent characters for whom the world of ideas is not separate from the world of social connections and everyday responsibilities! In most novels, plot is advanced and characters defined by what they do; what is important in this one is how they think. Several of the opening chapters, for example, feature a television nature program from the Amazon made by a herpetologist called Simon Moffitt, who appears to have had an important role in the lives of both sisters. Immediately, I found myself looking for clues: brother perhaps, lover of one or both, even the hushed-up father of Julia's child? I'll leave it to the reader to discover the truth, but the point is less What Simon was than Who he was and still is. His essential role is that of catalyzing the evolving philosophies of each sister and, like a photographic developer, bringing out the deep differences between them.