Book review: The Children's Book, by AS Byatt

Published on Thursday 7 May 2009 16:02

Chatto & Windus, 617pp, £18.99 Review by TOM ADAIR

ALMOST 20 YEARS HAVE ELAPSED since the novel Possession came to possess us, winning the 1990 Booker Prize. Before that, AS Byatt's vibrant talent was signalled by The Virgin in the Garden (1978) and Still Life (1985), a double down payment on what turned into a lustrous quartet of light-filled novels, (Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman completing the set).

Those books proved Byatt's command and assurance, her depth of vision and her broad accomplishment as a novelist – a general practitioner of sorts. Shock and romance, the domestic set-piece, the crowd scene, tragic introspection, the life of academe, sibling rivalry between sisters, the tangled morass of married relationships and deceptions, and the mysteries of art and creativity – to these she brought a rare and unruffled intelligence, an empathy that was perfectly matched by her scrupulousness and scrutiny.

Possession enlarged the scale and scope of her work without diminishing her focus. Now, with The Children's Book she reminds us that big – at 617 pages – can still be beautiful, bracing and bold. Her handling of dialogue is unfussy, precise and true. She revels in characters who think. Thinking matters. And when the thinking is trumped by a character's emotions, tragedy threatens to ensue.

This happens to Florence, the daughter of Prosper, who is Special Keeper of Metals at the South Kensington Museum, but Florence survives. Her several male counterparts fare less well, consumed by the Great War. One of them kills himself beforehand, cast adrift from his family's mainstream. And only two of this book's young protagonists make it home from the trenches.

But that is the endgame. The novel begins when play is still innocent. When children still fall asleep wrapped up in stories, and dreams are benign. The principal teller – the fount of this wonder – is Olive Wellwood, a writer for children, married to Humphry, who is a Bank of England official and a prominent member of the Fabian Society. Olive, already well known, sells well if not best. And for each of her children, Tom, Dorothy, Phyllis, Florian and Hedda, she writes a separate, private book.

Later on, her breach of this privacy proves costly. But in the meantime life is a carnival – with its masks and joys and mayhem – staged at the Wellwoods' house in Kent amid a ferment of debate about free will, or the place of women in society, about the tensions between ambition and domesticity, confinement and self-fulfilment, all conducted against a social life of great privilege at a time of great radical change and cultural flux.

The Wellwoods' guests are socialists, anarchists, Quakers, Fabians, artists, free thinkers and writers. They enjoy themselves with "dancing to flute and fiddle", unaware that as the Victorian age slips into the 20th century, their Utopian dreams are doomed.

The story's gamut runs from 1895 to 1918 and embraces the Wellwoods' wider kinships, rippling outwards to lap up the lives of such characters as the potter, Benedict Fludd, a tormented genius, and his apprentice, the working-class Philip. There is a German connection (Olive bearing a daughter to Anselm Stern, a puppeteer), and a great deal of mingling with Prosper's children and with the family of Humphry's brother.

Byatt brilliantly catches the ferment of ideas and juxtaposes it with the brief Edwardian love affair with stories and plays about children, how children are fantasised, Peter Pan being the prime example. At one point one of the characters muses: "You wonder where the real world really is." Does it really exist? And is the world within a novel real, or unreal? Can it be both? Or does that depend on how good the book is, on the reader as well as the writer? Byatt never labours these questions. You're meant to enjoy yourself, and you do.

The tradition of storytelling is central to the novel – as told in puppet plays, books, in the theatre or at bedtimes, "a form of love" and "a form of separateness", thinks Dorothy, while considering the real nub of her mother's writing.

By the end, as some of the characters share a meal, they carry tales brought back from the war: "stories they survived by never telling them". And their sense of life's throwaway permanence, belonging to long ago childhood, is gone forever. This is a moving book. Its words are beautifully chosen, (with one rocky sentence – only one, at the top of page 495). Everything connects. A S Byatt is Gaudi and Christopher Wren rolled into one.