What Book to Read?

Today I’d like to talk about AS Byatt’s most recent novel, The Children’s Book.

The first thing to say is that it’s not a book for children – indeed it is not a book for the faint-hearted adult reader. For a start, it is huge – over 600 pages. And it is incredibly dense – with both ideas and information. As one critic said, where Byatt has to choose between two details, she includes both. And Byatt does not shy away from the fact that she loves ideas; ‘intellectual passions are as vibrant and consuming as emotional ones’, she says. ‘Perhaps the most important thing to say about my books’ she goes on, ‘is that they try to be about the life of the mind as well as of society and the relations between people’. This book is about all of these things – and also revels in historical details of the period in which it is set –including the arts and craft movement, particularly pottery, the creation of the Victoria and Albert Museum and children’s literature and theatre.

The action takes place between 1895 and 1919. The focus of the story is a group of adults and their children, who belong to a middle class section of English society that has progressive ideas and believes, generally, in the betterment of human kind through education, opportunities to appreciate beauty and greater equality for the sexes. Most of the action takes place before 1914, in a period that has sometimes been described as a golden age of European society. But the knowledge on the part of the reader that these lives will be overtaken by a terrible war casts a dark shadow over the years leading up to it. And the age that Byatt presents is not exactly golden; just as we know that war will come, so Byatt knows that human passions and selfishness undercut the desire to do good, and that high ideals often come to nothing.

There is no single main character, but at the heart of the story is Olive Wellwood, writer of children’s stories, and mother of a large family. The book follows the lives of her children and their friends and relations, and of a young working class boy befriended by Olive who wants to be a potter. The book places side by side what looks from the outside like an idyllic childhood – where the children run free in the woods and fields and have love and security at home – and the children’s stories that Olive writes, where magic and nature are combined to create an equally idyllic world, for though there may be fear and darkness in the stories, they always come out happily in the end. Olive also writes a private book for each of her children; this is what gives the novel its title. But it is as if she communicates better with them through her writing rather than she does through real mothering. And unlike in stories, childhood doesn’t always end happily. Even without the threat of war, growing up is hard enough, and not all is as it seems in the Wellwood household.

 There are so many different ideas and plot lines in the book that it has no single theme. I rather suspect that different people will emphasise different things about it. One critic, for example, thought the overriding themes were the relations between men and women and parents and their children, where another narrowed it down to the way in which creative people may be poor parents because they put their work ahead of their families. While I agree that all these themes are important, I was equally struck by the way in which Byatt shows that most of the main adult characters don’t live up to the ideals they profess. This is particularly so in relation to the hopeful social views which have so little useful outcome. There are times in the story when people act out of kindness and concern for others, but the Fabian socialism which a number of the characters embrace is shown as largely ineffective, on a personal level where it is undermined by selfishness and on national level where it is overwhelmed by war.

 There is also a strong sense of futility in the hopes held for material progress. A number of the characters visit the Paris exhibition of 1900, where all major countries were represented as part of a huge international technological display of human ingenuity. International friendship and cooperation is also illustrated though the relationships between the characters at a personal level. But belief in internationalism and progress are cruelly fractured 14 years later, though some of the personal relationships do survive the carnage. 

 Whatever I thought important in the book, I don’t think Byatt wants readers to think anything in particular as a result of reading it – she just wants us to think.  And she certainly gives the reader a lot to think about. In fact I’m going to read it again to pick up again on some of the themes I undoubtedly missed the first time round.

 If you’d like to read more about AS Byatt, she has a web page, and a selection of reviews of the book can be found here.