THE CHILDREN’S BOOK
A. S. Byatt
Knopf
Historical Fiction
ISBN: 9780307272096
A. S. Byatt’s new novel, THE CHILDREN’S BOOK, will inevitably draw comparisons with her Booker Prize-winning POSSESSION: A Romance, considered by many to be her finest (or, at least, her most commercially successful) work. Although some of the comparisons are justified --- both rely on mythic and fairy tale elements to underscore plot and theme --- THE CHILDREN’S BOOK is far less an exploration of individuals and of individual relationships than it is of a whole time and place as viewed through the lens of one particular family and their host of acquaintances.
The time and place is England in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, bridging the transition between the Victorian and Edwardian ages. The family is the large Wellwood clan, headed by the writer Olive Wellwood and her husband Humphrey. Humphrey has made a successful career as a banker, but is derailed by his desire to revile his employer in pseudonymous articles written for socialist publications. As Humphrey reinvents himself as a successful writer and social critic, Olive comes under increasing financial pressure to support the family by writing immensely popular fantasy fiction for young people, inspired not only by the fairy tales of Grimm and others but also by their idyllic country house, Todefright, and by her own brood of children.
Just as Olive constructs imaginary worlds on paper, she also constructs a “reality” of her family’s life: “The woods, the Downs, the lawn, the hearth, the stables were a real reality, kept in being by continuous inventive willpower. In weak moments she thought of her garden as the fairytale palace the prince or princess must not leave on pain of bleak disaster. They were inside a firewall, outside which grim goblins mopped and mowed. She had made, had written, this world with the inventive power with which she told her stories.” As the novel progresses, readers discover just how tenuous this family’s reality is and the kinds of secrets that are masked by the image projected to the outside world.
That image is largely one of art, a self-consciously Bohemian identity that is introduced masterfully in one of the novel’s opening chapters, a brilliant account of the family’s annual midsummer party at which the family and their assembled guests (nearly all of whom will go on to play their own roles in the drama that unfolds) play parts in a Shakespearean play. The heady mix of childhood fantasy, art-making and thinly veiled sexual desire sets the stage for everything that is to follow, which includes long-buried family secrets, life-changing encounters, and an abundance of children trying to find their way either within or deliberately outside of their parents’ idealistic, assertively creative lifestyle.
This generation of children, Byatt argues compellingly through literary and historical example, had a particularly difficult time with this process, given as their elders were to maintaining permanently childlike sensibilities, engaging in youthful fantasies, conducting frivolous entertainments, and writing literature ostensibly aimed at children but also read by adults. It’s no wonder that a character such as Olive’s oldest son, Tom, is tragically altered forever by his one attempt to follow convention by heading to boarding school, an experience that causes him to retreat from society permanently: “He had sensed that the Garden of England was a garden through a looking-glass, and had resolutely stepped through the glass and refused to return. He didn’t want to be a grown-up.” Of course, as Byatt reminds us, in the shattering closing chapters of the novel, the Great War was looming on the horizon, forcing members of all the generations that lived through it to grow up despite themselves.
There’s no doubt that Byatt’s latest, like many of her most accomplished novels, poses intellectual challenges for the reader. She often draws back from her own plots to place them in historical and literary context, not only littering the narrative with encounters with real-life figures (including the anarchist Emma Goldman, the playwright Oscar Wilde and the sculptor Auguste Rodin) but also pausing to reflect on the place of all this in the larger philosophical and aesthetic debates of England and the Continent during this time period. It’s tempting to think of THE CHILDREN’S BOOK, then, as primarily a “novel of ideas,” an exploration of those debates in fictional guise. But that’s not it at all.
Byatt’s genius lies in combining these big ideas with a story that, although far-reaching and in many ways unconventional, is nevertheless a ripping good tale of a family’s journey from innocence (or something like it) to experience. Her painstaking utilization of detail, her exploration of key characters’ inner lives and aspirations, her trademark use of stories within stories to underscore character, plot and theme --- all these things ground THE CHILDREN’S BOOK in storytelling as firmly as it is rooted in literary and historical theory and make the novel one that will deeply engage readers both emotionally and intellectually.
--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl
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