The Children’s Book by AS Byatt
Chatto & Windus, £18.99
The personal and the political are intriguingly – if darkly – brought together in AS Byatt’s The Children’s Book, a family saga that covers the final years of the 19th century and the first two decades of the 20th. Against the tumultuous changes taking place as a new, more liberal order seeks to replace the established and conventional, we follow the trials and tribulations of families attempting to deal with the newfound freedoms, often at the expense of feeling and emotion.
Fairy tales are one of Byatt’s interests, and not only does she spin out the narrative with longish fairy stories but there is a myth-like quality to the complex interlacing of the families she describes. The central family, the Wellwoods, in their rambling house near Romney Marsh, seem to occupy a storybook world. Olive, the mother, is a successful children’s writer, more alive in the world of make believe than in the reality of family life. Both she and her husband, a member of the Fabian Society, are free floating and free living, both taking many lovers and producing a huge brood of children, none quite sure of the identity of their birth parent.
Their friends include Prosper Cain, curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum and his two children, a wealthy stockbroker and his children, and the Fludds, headed by Benedict, a potter, a hybrid between the Martin Brothers and William de Morgan, who has systematically sexually abused his daughters. Into this world comes 15-year-old Philip Warren, escaping the Potteries to admire the treasures in the V&A. Under Fludd’s direction he becomes a skilled and imaginative potter, and if Byatt’s explanations of the craft of pottery are wobbly they still paint a vivid picture.
With what seems at times a cast of thousands – a dramatis personae would have been useful – Byatt tells an engaging tale, taking the reader to Paris and Munich, the dubious ideology of anarchism, the never ceasing class struggle, the battle for women’s suffrage and the search for individual identity in a society in which deceptions that are intended to protect cause hurt and confusion. The horror of the war and life in the trenches brings many dreams – and lives – to an end, the graphic descriptions some of the best and most moving in the book.
With its mix of real and fictional figures, real and imaginary events, The Children’s Book is a commentary on the life and times of an extraordinary period. Fairy story or grim reality, AS Byatt evokes both with consummate ease.
Emmanuel Cooper
