It is my last couple of days in France until September and it is seriously steamy here. Boiling hot days and nights have given way to the odd few hours of torrential rain and for what seems like moments we have been cooled slightly before the sun re asserts itself. It is the kind of weather that makes you slow. On the whole, the last week has been a good time to read A. S. Byatt’s doorstop The Children’s Book. Its long, its complicated, its detailed, it should possibly have been short listed for the bad sex award as well as the booker, but at the end of the long hot day, I think I liked it.The Children’s Book is a sort of fictional collective biography which starts in the late Victorian age and ends in the trenches of the Somme over 20 years later. It weaves together the lives of three interlinked families together with a host of other associates and the outcome is a cast of what feels like thousands. One of Byatt’s greatest achievements in this book is that she keeps each of these characters in focus and well defined whilst also creating the feel of a community. And what a community they are; we have artists, craftsmen; writers; thinkers; Fabians; revolutionaries; poets; female doctors; suffragettes; museum keepers; rational dressers; nudists; feminists. They are linked by ties of blood, sex, childhood and the powerful ideas of the Victorian and Edwardian avant garde.
If there is a centre to this intricate and disparate tale then that centre is Olive Wellwood. Olive is a writer of children’s stories, an expert on fairy tales, the chatelaine of a ramshackle rural family home, a philanderer’s wife and a working class refugee in an upper middle class world. More than anything, she is an emotional but disengaged mother to 7 children. For each of those children she writes a story that is constantly embellished and enriched with re-writings and new elements. The length and complexity of each story reflects the grossly variable love that she feels for each of her children and as the reader will see, the dark corners of her family history and her marriage.
One of Byatt’s chief concerns is the tension between domesticity and art and this is explored in several characters. Olive is a woman who chooses art. Her sister keeps house for her and cares for the children day to day and the two women are as co-dependent as they are resentful of one another. Her children underpin and inspire her best work, but she fails to engage with any of them on a non-fictional level. Byatt’s comment here on the home lives of artists would feel hackneyed if it were not so well documented. Olive is partly based on E. Nesbitt and of course there are many other examples of the same phenomenon.
Fans of Possession will know how much Byatt loves to write of worlds within worlds and The Children’s Book is no exception. The novel is littered with Olive’s stories, plays, puppet shows, museums, craft fairs and general symposiums in which our characters perform. More than this, there is an inside-outness about childhood and adulthood. So many of the adults in the story are childish – they decline to take on adult responsibilities; they do not demand adult behaviour from their children, even when they are adult. At the same time, the children respond to the chaos of the family life with a sort of desperate maturity.
This is a novel with a powerful sense of history and a feeling for the history of ideas. Byatt captures how ideas can fire people and lead them to new vistas. She seems to hold in easy reach both the idealism of early free thinkers and the absurdity of people who talked always of sexual freedom but did not think to educate their daughters.
So why do I only think I like it? Well, Byatt’s fine tale of artists within families almost dies under a welter of detail and digression. Byatt is a self consciously intellectual writer and as well as weaving complex plots she likes to digress into cultural soliloquies. In Possession, I loved this and was happy to sit back and be taught, but I felt that The Children’s Book went a lecture too far. With endless digressions on social movements and moments of history, there was a lot of showing off in this particular education. There was an over reliance on the already well documented life stories of various artists and writers. Olive is based on E. Nesbitt while her near neighbour,
the demented and depressive potter Benedict Fludd is manifestly based on Eric Gill. The spindly-fingered sexual predator Herbert Methley is an almost straight incarnation of D. H. Lawrence. Fictionalisation can be a brilliant way of telling life stories, but not this time. For me the presence of these real lives made the book feel too predictable; reading certain passages was like reading yesterday’s newspapers.The Children’s Book completely divides opinion, so a potential reader may enjoy consulting a few more. There are excellent reviews at Dovegrey Reader; Farm Lane Books; Random Jottings; ANZ Litlovers Lit Blog; Things mean a lot; The Indextrious Reader; Alone with each other; Maud Newton; Medieval Bookworm; Passionate Booklover; and finally the splendid Booksnob.
I have included a picture of the beautiful front cover as well a pictures of A. S. Byatt and her muses Edith Nesbit, Eric Gill and D. H. Lawrence.
