BYATT DRAWS ON TOWER OF LITERARY DEVICES FOR `BABEL'.

Byline: Julia M. Klein Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

Readers of ``Possession: A Romance,'' A.S. Byatt's 1990 Booker Award-winning novel, know her as a gifted ventriloquist, adept at assuming the voices of a dazzlingly intellectual set of male and female characters spanning the centuries.

Fans of her earlier ``The Virgin in the Garden'' (1978) and ``Still Life'' (1985) - the first two novels of a planned quartet - already admired her as an accomplished storyteller whose literary and artistic interests sometimes undercut, and sometimes reinforced, the seductiveness of her narrative.

Still others who know Byatt only from the successful movie adaptation of ``Angels and Insects'' surmise that she is a master of the sexually shocking tale, quietly told.

It would be neat and convenient to say that these sides of the talented English critic and novelist come together triumphantly in her latest fiction, ``Babel Tower,'' the third work in the quartet. A bit too convenient, as it turns out.

Indeed, many of Byatt's favorite literary devices and thematic concerns are on display in this imposing 625-page tome: the interpolated narrative, the parallel stories that both intersect and comment upon one another, a deliberate self-consciousness about language and literature, a preoccupation with violence and eroticism that for Byatt lies just beneath the surface of English bourgeois life.

``Babel Tower'' - whose title suggests a sense of things falling apart, the center not holding, and language itself fragmenting and failing - is an extraordinarily ambitious, even admirable novel. Like much of Byatt's work, it makes great demands on its reader - demands that it only partially repays.

As one reads ``Babel Tower,'' with alternating fascination and frustration, one awaits the small epiphanies, the inevitable resolution of mounting suspense, the delicate delineations of character that made ``Possession,'' despite its difficulties, such a satisfying work. Instead, after a promising beginning, ``Babel Tower'' dissolves (perhaps as the 1960s themselves dissolved for Byatt) into a series of anticlimaxes.

First, a little background, for those who have not made their way through the first two books of the quartet. ``The Virgin in the Garden'' (1978), set in the 1950s, is a lushly written novel that introduces us to the Potter family of northern England and their insular network of friends and acquaintances.

The family's three children are would-be actress Frederica, who is in love with the verse playwright Alexander Wedderburn; Stephanie, who abandons the life of the mind to marry the fat curate Daniel, and their brother, Marcus, a young boy whose psychic gifts push him, and others, toward madness, and the novel itself beyond the confines of realism.

Much simpler in style, but at the same time more self-conscious about language as a thing-in-itself, is ``Still Life.'' The novel sweeps back and forth between Frederica's social, sexual and intellectual escapades at Cambridge and Stephanie's quieter life as a housewife and mother. It ends with the tragedy of Stephanie's accidental death.

``Babel Tower'' picks up the story in the early 1960s, with Frederica married to the enigmatic country squire Nigel Reiver. She has gravitated toward him because he comforted her after her sister's death; he is also the first man with whom she has experienced true sexual fulfillment.

But Frederica, we soon learn, has been passion's dupe.

Not that she lacks for any material comfort in the moated manor house that is the Reivers' homestead. But her only true companion is her weirdly precocious 4-year-old son, Leo. She has no contact with her friends, no vocation, and nothing but reading to occupy her during the unintellectual Nigel's prolonged absences.

But we ``know'' Frederica, that restless, ambitious spirit, and we feel for her plight, despite its familiarity. Byatt clearly knows her, too: There is an autobiographical cast to the character, who shares the author's Yorkshire roots and bookish proclivities. Frederica's increasingly violent confrontations with Nigel, a man equally inarticulate in love and rage but mighty handy with an ax, are the most compelling threads in this complexly woven tale.

Frederica's story is interrupted periodically by passages from a novel that comes to be called ``Babbletower,'' making it a relative of the book that contains it. It is a densely written work, inspired by Charles Fourier and the Marquis de Sade, about a dystopic world in which complete freedom and sexual permissiveness deteriorate into chaotic cruelty and erotic violence.

While Frederica fights for her personal freedom, she also takes time to observe the gentrification of London, to teach an adult extension course, and to read manuscripts for a small publishing house - all occasions for satiric jabs at British society that may be largely lost on American readers.

As Frederica struggles with life, she also, perhaps inevitably, struggles with writing. She proposes to herself a linguistic collage - made up of literary quotations, letters from her solicitor and personal anecdotes, among other fragments. She calls it ``Laminations.''

Amid these ruminations, ``Babel Tower'' focuses finally on two legal battles: Frederica's divorce and custody proceedings, and the obscenity trial of ``Babbletower,'' with its parade of expert witnesses. Both are curiously dry affairs, exercises in pale anticlimax after the vividly portrayed horrors of both Frederica's married life and ``Babbletower'' itself.

At times Byatt's predilection for long lists of names and the painstaking repetition of legal arguments are hard to fathom. But her prodigious imagination and literary skills will keep the patient reader happily engaged within the fallen world of ``Babel Tower.''