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A review by newishpuritan
The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt
5.0
This is a remarkable book, which I didn't fully appreciate first time around. It's the culmination of Byatt's admiration for nineteenth-century writers like George Eliot, in that it borrows from them an omniscient viewpoint, now out of fashion, including summary overviews of cultural trends, and indeed many similar overviews of character biographies, or long interludes in character lives between the dramatized scenes, which are spread out over many years, from 1985 to c. 1919. It also has a great deal of description of materialities, some of which I admit I found a little tedious. It has Byatt's usual use of intertexts, fragments of books, or (in this case) ekphrastic accounts of visual art (pottery jewellery) and performances created by the characters (puppetry and theatre). The literary examples of this, the childrens' stories composed by Olive Wellwood, are actually fairly disciplined, without the sprawl and threat to take over the whole narrative of Byatt's previous two novels.
Its sprawl is seriously impressive: many, many characters, most of whom are fully realized and vividly drawn, and lives with full, complex arcs.
It is a pretty grim condemnation of patriarchy: the (adult) men here are all either feckless or abusive, usually both to one degree or another, aided and abetted by a culture of unquestioning acceptance of male authority within the family (and it's one of the strengths of the novel to explore how this applies even within Fabian and supposedly progressive circles). None of the characters can even bring themselves to acknowledge the novel's dark heart, which is only represented indirectly. But discourses of liberation can also be cover for abusive behaviour, as was also the case in Byatt's account of the 1960s.
The most daring aspect of the book's structure is its extreme acceleration towards the end. The 1890s are richly described at length; as is the first decade of the twentieth century. But after 550 pages of this, the First World War destroys this entire world, and many of its male characters, in 70 pages of casual summary, with very few isolated dramatic scenes, as if history itself has simply swept half the pieces off the board with an abrupt and violent gesture. This book, with its loving commitment to the aesthetics of Art Nouveau, cannot encompass Dada or modernism, the aesthetic responses to the war: its only recourse can therefore only be this curt brutality.
It's looking like this may be the last major novel we get from Byatt. I hope not, but if so, it's a great achievement.
Its sprawl is seriously impressive: many, many characters, most of whom are fully realized and vividly drawn, and lives with full, complex arcs.
It is a pretty grim condemnation of patriarchy: the (adult) men here are all either feckless or abusive, usually both to one degree or another, aided and abetted by a culture of unquestioning acceptance of male authority within the family (and it's one of the strengths of the novel to explore how this applies even within Fabian and supposedly progressive circles). None of the characters can even bring themselves to acknowledge the novel's dark heart, which is only represented indirectly. But discourses of liberation can also be cover for abusive behaviour, as was also the case in Byatt's account of the 1960s.
The most daring aspect of the book's structure is its extreme acceleration towards the end. The 1890s are richly described at length; as is the first decade of the twentieth century. But after 550 pages of this, the First World War destroys this entire world, and many of its male characters, in 70 pages of casual summary, with very few isolated dramatic scenes, as if history itself has simply swept half the pieces off the board with an abrupt and violent gesture. This book, with its loving commitment to the aesthetics of Art Nouveau, cannot encompass Dada or modernism, the aesthetic responses to the war: its only recourse can therefore only be this curt brutality.
It's looking like this may be the last major novel we get from Byatt. I hope not, but if so, it's a great achievement.