Babel Tower, like most of Byatt's fiction, has an extensive cast of characters. She even admits to borrowing one minor one from a novel by Iris Murdoch. In addition to Frederica, her parents, brother, niece and nephew, all make minor appearances, while Daniel is one of the stronger presences in the novel. Outside of her family her son's friends, her students, the lawyers at the trials, her husband's sisters, her boyfriend, her friends from Cambridge, her colleagues, and connections of all these people appear in the novel. All these characters have some part to do with the culture of Britain in the 1960s; the artistic community, the scientific community, the business world, the rural life, are all represented by individuals who are rarely stereotypes. Further, just as Byatt quotes frequently from other writers, she makes up a review of Babbeltower by the author Anthony Burgess; although he does...