Product Description

Olive Wellwood is a famous writer, interviewed with her children gathered at her knee. For each of them she writes a separate private book, bound in different colours and placed on a shelf. In their rambling house near Romney Marsh they play in a story-book world - but their lives, and those of their rich cousins, children of a city stockbroker, and their friends, the son and daughter of a curator at the new Victoria and Albert Museum, are already inscribed with mystery. Each family carries their own secrets. Into their world comes a young stranger, a working-class boy from the potteries, drawn by the beauty of the Museum's treasures. And in midsummer a German puppeteer arrives, bringing dark dramas. The world seems full of promise but the calm is already rocked by political differences, by Fabian arguments about class and free love , by the idealism of anarchists from Russia and Germany. The sons rebel against their parents' plans; the girls dream of independent futures, becoming doctors or fighting for the vote. This vivid, rich and moving saga is played out against the great, rippling tides of the day, taking us from the Kent marshes to Paris and Munich and the trenches of the Somme. Born at the end of the Victorian era, growing up in the golden summers of Edwardian times, a whole generation grew up unaware of the darkness ahead. In their innocence, they were betrayed unintentionally by the adults who loved them. In a profound sense, this novel is indeed the children's book.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #440 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 624 pages

Independent
`...The Children's Book...reassures us there will be more worlds, more unique social juxtapositions and more potted educations from Byatt'

Standpoint
'One of the most grown-up you will read all year. A sexy book, full of erotic longing patchily fulfilled.'

Standpoint
'Alongside such rich, strange meat, Harry Potter does indeed start to feel like a vanilla snack for scaredy cats.'

Customer Reviews

BRILLIANT, BUT....
I wanted to like this book more: A.S.Byatt is a fine writer and I've loved her work in the past. But I'm afraid this one doesn't work for me: it's like a great big stew with too many ingedients. Too many references to fairy stories, too many puppet shows meticulously described, too many lectures on Fabians and suffragettes. The child characters are often beautifully described: A.s.Byatt is especially good at adolescents - but you lose the threads of their individual stories and many of the interesting characters get short shrift. Fairy stories are intertwined with real children acting out fairytale themes in their lives; frozen princesses, lost boys. You get the point - and then you get it again. The language can be gorgeous; she's good on fabrics and textures, the sheen on a piece of pottery, the colours of a dress. But my abiding impression is of a book that stands up in the centre of a stage like a little girl in a pink party dress, saying ,look at me, see how clever I am.
But if A.S.Byatt could return to shorter, sparer narratives, she would show herself to be, as she is, one of our greatest writers

A S Byatt at her best
Complex and many layered this book concentrates on two families and their friends. Olive is a children's author and lives with her sister Violet, husband Humphrey and their children at a country house called Todefright. They live an apparently idyllic Bohemian existence. Benedict Fludd a genius who makes pots lives, by contrast, in Bohemian squalor with his wife Seraphita and children Imogen, Pomona and Geraint. The families are friends and have friends in common - Prosper Cain, a curator at the new Victoria and Albert museum and his children Julian and Florence, and the Methleys who are very much involved with the Fabian Society and the suffragettes.

The book is about the relationships between these people and others but it is just as much about the age they live in from 1895 to 1919. Historical personages flit into and out of the story. The main characters are inluenced by the morals and manners of the age they live in. The background is lush and decadent as the Victorian age gives way to the Edwardian. Social class is an issue and the Labour movement is gathering supporters.

The relationships between the characters are convoluted and nothing is what it seems. The arts and crafts they produce are rich and somehow redolent of decay. All are affected by the Great War and few come through it unscathed. The writing, as one might expect from this author is at once lush and austere. Characters are taken apart with a scalpel and their thoughts and feelings dissected for our entertainment. Descriptions are full of symbolism and many layered meanings. Conversations are cryptic and issues go unresolved and unmentioned.

If I have a criticism of the book it is that the end seemed a little rushed as though the author felt she needed to have an ending - satisfactory or not - for everyone in a very few pages. It seemed unfinished. Maybe this is part of a series and we shall meet at least some of these characters in later volumes. That said this is a masterpiece and every bit as good as the Booker Prize winning 'Possession'.

A bit of a mixture
Unusually for me, this book took me several weeks to read: I can get through a real page-turner in a matter of hours - alright, a bit longer if it is as large as this one. Admittedly I was away some of the time, but I felt no urgency to take the book with me when I went, although equally I had no problem picking it up again when I came home and carrying on. Why? Because for at least the first half the book progresses extremely slowly. It is of course well written (except for the over-use of commas, which I hope I can be forgiven for pointing out as I am no Booker prize winner myself) and exceptionally well researched. But much of the action takes place very languidly. Other reviewers have covered the plot, so I see no need to explain it myself.

It has been noted by other commentators that the book ends in a rush - and if there were quite as much going on quite so fast early on I feel I would have been more eager to carry on reading. However, there is also, especially in the latter part of the book, a lot of jumping about in time (mentioning what happened in 1907 then reverting to 1902 in a slightly disconcerting fashion, for instance) and taking time out from the characters to go into historical detail. None of this makes the book in any way bad, but at times it seems to be a bit of a lecture on history, stepping back from the characters themselves despite the fact that they are all involved, to a greater or lesser degree, in the events that are taking place in the period - Fabianism, anarchism, suffragism, etc.

It took me some time to get involved in the life stories that are told, but eventually I did get involved, and even felt a little emotional at one of the events in the final pages. I just wish the pace had been more even, without the feeling that the first part of the book was stretched out as far as possible and the ending squeezed into a few pages with the distinct impression that the author wanted to get rid of it all at last. Understandable, maybe, after writing such a marathon of a book, but a shame for the book itself. I have read Possession and other works by Ms Byatt and would happily read more, but I have to say that I finished reading this book feeling that it is a slightly uneven work, even if a very readable one.