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A review by jenniferdeguzman
The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt
5.0
This book so utterly enthralled and engulfed me that I had to take a few days off from reading after finishing it, just to process it. It and its author, A.S. Byatt, are wonders. Central to the book's point of view is the role of children's literature during the fin-de-siecle and early 20th century. Byatt is an academic; her novels are often fiction as illustration of a literary thesis, which I love about her. Writers like Oscar Wilde and later J.M. Barrie wrote seriously in children's genres during this time. Fairy tales and mythic stories were explored in all of the arts -- theater, music, painting, literature. The supernatural was a way of interpreting the solid world, or so it seemed.
The narrative follows the lives of a group of children who attend a Midsummer's Night party thrown by the artistic couple Humphrey and Olive Wentworth at their very Aesthetic estate Todefright. There are the six (soon to be seven) Todefright Wentworths, the children of Humphrey and Olive; the London Wentworths, the son and daughter of Humphrey's brother; the son and daughter of a curator at the Victoria and Albert museum (still known as the South Kensington museum), the children of an eccentric and volatile potter and his laudanum-addicted former Pre-Raphaelite "stunner" wife, and an artistically gifted boy who was found hiding in the basement of the South Kensington museum. During the party, all of the children are asked what they want to do when they grow up (including the girls, but only after the boys have had their chance) -- and here the novel becomes a kind of bildungsroman for this large group of young people. How do they fulfill their aspirations? What encourages them? What thwarts them?
The key to this book is its title. Just exactly who are the children in this story? The parents in The Children's Book are each their own kind of naive idealist, beholden of systems of thought, philosophies of living, and the demands of Art-with-a-capital-A, believing all the while that they will create a better world through Fabianism and Aesthetics on the one hand (the Todefright Wentworths and their artistic friends) or through capitalism and thorough integration into polite society on the other (the London Wentworths).
Many of the adults will prove to be what thwarts the children's pursuit of their dreams, using intellectual or philosophical trappings to injure the younger generations, either actively or inadvertently. An author who is a proponent of free love and sexual freedom is a lecherous seducer; a mother who wants her daughter to marry well treats her as a doll; a couple who want to their marriage to be unconstrained by traditional morality muddle their children's lives with the complications that causes. Olive Wentworth, the matriarch of so many of the central characters, is a famous author of supernatural children's stories, filled with fairies and other mythological creatures. But her work, instead of bringing her closer to her children, is a veil between them, and will eventually take such precedence in her life that it cuts off one of her sons forever.
The ways in which the children must strive and must face real horrors during the first World War that their parents never could have imagined, reveals the ineffectual core of their parents' philosophies. As the children become adults, their parents become the real children of the narrative: wide-eyed, ill-prepared for the messiness of real life, unable to cope under the strain of their own idealism.
The weak points in their idealism become clear as the 19th century moves into the 20th and the symbols of those child-like fairy stories beging to break down. Here is Wilde, destitute and near his death in Paris; here is Olive's son Tom, a real boy who will not grow up, brutalized and furiously resistant to suspending his disbelief at a performance of Peter Pan. Here is one of Olive's daughters, beaten and force-fed for trying to bring her parents' idealism about the equality of women to solidity as a suffragette; another one sacrificing her youth and straining under the stress of having to out-perform men in her pursuit of a career as a surgeon.
And then here is the War. Names from fairy tales and stories become the names of trenches. The children of the idealists must face the realities of blood and death, not the fairy story versions of them. They are the generation that brings us not fairy tales but trench poetry, that brings us The Waste Land and Ulysses and To the Lighthouse. (As I wrote this list of works, I realized that the parents of their authors share many characteristics of the parents in The Children's Book.)
All of this, and in A.S. Byatt's beautiful, evocative prose that paints characters and scenes so clearly, that incorporates such specific, solid detail of place and time, and portrays such a keen understanding of the growing mind, of the artistic temperament, and respect for her readers' intellect. After every book I read by her, I say, "It's as if it were written for me."
The narrative follows the lives of a group of children who attend a Midsummer's Night party thrown by the artistic couple Humphrey and Olive Wentworth at their very Aesthetic estate Todefright. There are the six (soon to be seven) Todefright Wentworths, the children of Humphrey and Olive; the London Wentworths, the son and daughter of Humphrey's brother; the son and daughter of a curator at the Victoria and Albert museum (still known as the South Kensington museum), the children of an eccentric and volatile potter and his laudanum-addicted former Pre-Raphaelite "stunner" wife, and an artistically gifted boy who was found hiding in the basement of the South Kensington museum. During the party, all of the children are asked what they want to do when they grow up (including the girls, but only after the boys have had their chance) -- and here the novel becomes a kind of bildungsroman for this large group of young people. How do they fulfill their aspirations? What encourages them? What thwarts them?
The key to this book is its title. Just exactly who are the children in this story? The parents in The Children's Book are each their own kind of naive idealist, beholden of systems of thought, philosophies of living, and the demands of Art-with-a-capital-A, believing all the while that they will create a better world through Fabianism and Aesthetics on the one hand (the Todefright Wentworths and their artistic friends) or through capitalism and thorough integration into polite society on the other (the London Wentworths).
Many of the adults will prove to be what thwarts the children's pursuit of their dreams, using intellectual or philosophical trappings to injure the younger generations, either actively or inadvertently. An author who is a proponent of free love and sexual freedom is a lecherous seducer; a mother who wants her daughter to marry well treats her as a doll; a couple who want to their marriage to be unconstrained by traditional morality muddle their children's lives with the complications that causes. Olive Wentworth, the matriarch of so many of the central characters, is a famous author of supernatural children's stories, filled with fairies and other mythological creatures. But her work, instead of bringing her closer to her children, is a veil between them, and will eventually take such precedence in her life that it cuts off one of her sons forever.
The ways in which the children must strive and must face real horrors during the first World War that their parents never could have imagined, reveals the ineffectual core of their parents' philosophies. As the children become adults, their parents become the real children of the narrative: wide-eyed, ill-prepared for the messiness of real life, unable to cope under the strain of their own idealism.
The weak points in their idealism become clear as the 19th century moves into the 20th and the symbols of those child-like fairy stories beging to break down. Here is Wilde, destitute and near his death in Paris; here is Olive's son Tom, a real boy who will not grow up, brutalized and furiously resistant to suspending his disbelief at a performance of Peter Pan. Here is one of Olive's daughters, beaten and force-fed for trying to bring her parents' idealism about the equality of women to solidity as a suffragette; another one sacrificing her youth and straining under the stress of having to out-perform men in her pursuit of a career as a surgeon.
And then here is the War. Names from fairy tales and stories become the names of trenches. The children of the idealists must face the realities of blood and death, not the fairy story versions of them. They are the generation that brings us not fairy tales but trench poetry, that brings us The Waste Land and Ulysses and To the Lighthouse. (As I wrote this list of works, I realized that the parents of their authors share many characteristics of the parents in The Children's Book.)
All of this, and in A.S. Byatt's beautiful, evocative prose that paints characters and scenes so clearly, that incorporates such specific, solid detail of place and time, and portrays such a keen understanding of the growing mind, of the artistic temperament, and respect for her readers' intellect. After every book I read by her, I say, "It's as if it were written for me."