Frederica in wonderland

And yet it's all strangely engaging, partly because Byatt constantly tempts us to pursue connections between these disparate elements, but also because she's embedded the cosmic ideas of this ultimate novel of ideas in the lives of such interesting characters.

One of the most gripping and disturbing is a psychiatric patient known sometimes as John Lamb. He gradually emerges as the charismatic leader of the Spirit's Tigers, an apocalyptic cult near the university. Byatt moves back to his childhood and the ghastly murders that derailed his life, sending him into the fiery tropes of the Bible for guidance.

Other narrators watch Lamb too, responding in various ways to his seductive theology. Letters from his Jungian analyst, for instance, to a colleague show the slow corrosion of the doctor-patient relationship. And a sociologist secretly studying the cult provides increasingly terrifying reports about its madness.

In the best tradition of chaos theory, everything in this story refolds to greater complexity. That can be maddening, but it's also fascinating. Where else can a religious maniac explain Kierkegaard's analysis of Abraham's faith, and keep you on the edge of your chair?

The most unnerving implications surround issues of faith in a world rapidly becoming convinced that all thought can be reduced to matter. Trapped in recurring hallucinations of blood, poor Lamb is lost in a thicket of theological symbolism that forces us to confront a blurry line between the mentally ill and the spiritually minded. The psychiatrists studying Lamb ask themselves how science will ever distinguish between a dangerous fanatic and a religious visionary.

On the university campus, even the scientists most devoted to snail and memory research sense something inadequate about their attempts to reduce all cognition to the activity of electricity in gray matter.

Jacqueline, a brilliant young student toiling in the sexist shadow of her adviser, cries out: "I don't know how I got myself so cocooned in my self. I want to be able to do the things people do - I want to live, not just to think." Ultimately, she needn't worry: There are forces within these characters - noble and shameless - that defy their rationality, that thwart their perfectly logical, Darwinian explanations and throw them into life with a vengeance.

Clearly, this is serious play for a writer who can make words do magic, and she's never been more intellectually lush than here. One senses in Byatt's witty satire of the antiuniversity a venting of authorial rage against lazy minds that fail to appreciate the accumulation of wisdom. And yet, the conflagration that ends the vice chancellor's quest for a Theory of Everything casts a humble light on the all-inclusive ambition of this remarkable quartet of novels.

• Ron Charles is the Monitor's book editor. Send comments about the book section tocharlesr@csps.com.

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