The Children's Book

This review is actually one I wrote some time ago, however  I decided it would be nice to include it here as the book I am currently reading put me in mind of it. In fact, for various reasons, this book has been hovering around in my brain a lot recently- over a year after reading it- which is surely the mark of an exceptional read. I think that justifies its inclusion here as an intensely pleasurable read. 

I have a confession to make. I have been putting off reading this book for over a year. When I bought it I read about 20 pages, put it down and decided I would come back to it when I had ‘enough time’ and by that, you know, I meant the right sort of time- long, book reading hours with a really wide awake brain. Once I eventually did start the book I finished it in two days. Ever since, I have been mulling over writing a blog about the experience. The truth is that  A. S. Byatt intimidates me. Now, don’t get me wrong…before we go any further I should say that the book is fantastic, that the reason I read this 624 page epic in less than 48 hours is that it is an incredibly absorbing, well written, finely crafted piece of literature. It is also unbelievably clever. I think it is her cleverness that intimidates me. When I first read ‘Possession’ I naïvely believed in Byatt’s two Victorian writers because I found it unthinkable that a person’s imagined characters could be so fully developed as to include their own entire back catalogues of perfectly crafted 19th Century verse. Of course, I was wrong.

If anything ’The Children’s Book’ is even richer in detail. A dizzying cast surrounds the Wellwood family, each character so complete it would hardly surprise you to bump into them in the street. To call the Wellwood family the ‘centre’ of the book is perhaps misleading. ‘The Children’s Book’ certainly begins with its focus firmly on Olive Wellwood, a successful children’s author, and her bohemian family who live a seemingly idyllic life in the English countryside but fine threads are quickly spun out from these characters to engage other families in the narrative, giving a broad cross-section of late 19th century life. One such family is the Fludd’s, headed by the truly scary Benedict Fludd, an artistic genius with a temperament to match. The exploits of this manic figure only further underline the dark tone of the book. And don’t be fooled by the title or the pretty cover, this book is seriously dark. The dark side of children’s literature is explored brilliantly and I loved the extracts from Olive’s books (yet another example of how completely imagined Byatt’s worlds are) which seemed heavily influenced by the kings of sinister children’s literature – the Grimm brothers. There is, in fact, an interesting thread about the children’s literature of the period running throughout the book with Kenneth Grahame, Edith Nesbit, and J.M.Barrie popping up and exerting their influence on Olive’s work. As an avid fan of children’s literature I was really charmed by these inclusions which acted as one in a long, long list of enriching details.

I know I’m not giving you too much information about plot, but that’s because it’s difficult to put into any sort of neat synopsis. This book is really the sum of its characters. Think big, sprawling stories like Middlemarch or the more sombre Dickens novels and you’ll get the idea. Of course, one thing that makes the novel so interesting is the inclusion of the first world war which we see hanging over the innocent children we meet at the beginning of the novel like an ominous thunder-cloud just waiting to burst. This results in a final section of the novel that is particularly well-handled and an inevitably devastating conclusion.

Although this book is quite long it is also very dense, and it is precisely this density that I both admire and take issue with. The detail is at times overwhelming, and Byatt’s novel is so complete that it leaves little room for the reader to really take hold of the book for themselves. There is not much room here for your imagination to fill in the gaps because there are no gaps to fill. In her earlier book ‘Possession’, Byatt raises some interesting questions about the ’ownership’ of a text, and in ‘The Children’s Book’ I found it very difficult to ‘own’ any of the characters for myself. At times this meant the book left me a little cold.

That being said, this seems like an almost inevitable result when crafting something so complex and full of detail, and I really would recommend picking up a copy of this book. Don’t let it intimidate you like it did me, because when I finally did read it I was sorry that I had left it looking sad on my shelf for so long.  Byatt’s impressive knowledge of her chosen period shines through every word, so much so that it could have been written there and then, and I am finding it difficult not to turn this post into a long (and slightly pretentious) essay. In brief- read this book. It is very, very good. Be not afraid.