The Children's Book

I had preconceptions when I went into the challenge of reading The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt. When I say challenge I am not solely referring to the challenge of reading the Man Booker 2009 longlist/shortlist but that The Children's Book was a challenge in itself. I was daunted, not by its length as 615 page books don't normally faze me but by the tome-like density of The Children's Book. It was a slog to read; at times I felt as if I was wading through waist-high snow and not progressing anywhere very quickly. My boyfriend said that he has never -in six and a half years of us being together- seen me take so long to read a book; it took me nine days to eventually finish it. The sheer epic scope of this novel and its minute attention to period detail made it, for me, a very slow read and feat of endurance. The overwhelming amount of detail provided was impressive but I found most of it superfluous and thought that Byatt required a lot more editing.

The Children's Book is certainly accomplished but I often felt that I was reading a historical account of the Victorian and Edwardian periods and not a piece of literary fiction; I was not engaged at all in the characters or the plot that was hidden amongst the detail. I did enjoy the last forty pages -the final section, "The Age of Lead", that was set during World War I- but it was not long enough nor good enough to make up for the other 575 pages of boredom. If I had not had to read this book for my Booker challenge, I honestly don't think I would have finished it as it was a chore. For the most part I did not find it enjoyable and was actually counting down the pages until it was over; at the last 150 pages stage I kept nodding off at every second paragraph, which I think is telling of something far greater than tiredness.

The premise appealed to me and literary fiction that was both about fairy tales in part and also about one of my favourite periods in history should have engrossed me but it didn't. I find Byatt dry and like Rachel of Book Snob I suspect that she was attempting to write a thesis about Victoriana and not a novel. I haven't provided a synopsis of the novel because it can easily be found on an online bookselling website or in other reviews; what I have provided is my gut reaction to the book and apologies to the Byatt fans or to those who thoroughly enjoyed the book.

As I said at the beginning, I went in with preconceptions. Reading the first glowing review of The Children's Book only served in putting me off when large, detailed quotes were used to highlight the novel's style; I know that books that contain such historical detail at the expense of storyline are not for me. Byatt has a large cast of characters that mainly belong to four families: the Wellwoods, with matriarch children's writer Olive Wellwood at their helm; their cousins; the Cains, the father Prosper Cain the alchemist of the South Kensington Museum - later to become the Victoria and Albert; and the Fludds, headed by the famous potter, Benedict, who is a volatile genius; the remainder of the cast are integrated into one or all of these families or are merely supplementary but at times I felt the need of a family tree to keep them all straight in my head especially when one of the characters begins to be referred to by another name...

Proportionately I have given you over 600 words of what I didn't like but now for what I did. I appreciated the ambition of the novel, even if it did not engage me. I was interested in the period but it was altogether too much. I enjoyed the intertextuality of the novel and the use of popular literature of the time to parallel sections of the plot; where I didn't enjoy the sections of Olive Wellwood's tales, I did enjoy Byatt's references to them and comparisons with Peter Pan. Tom Wellwood didn't want to be a grown-up and his shadow was "snipped off his feet in his cradle, by a monstrous rat." I also liked the war poetry that was written in the final section. The Bluebeard allusions were interesting as was the puppet theatre and I welcomed the cameos by Oscar Wilde and Marie Stopes and the walk-on appearances by J. M. Barrie and H. G. Wells.

Lastly, some of the writing that I liked:

Dorothy was born in the late autumn of 1884. Phyllis was born in the spring of 1886. In 1888 a girl was stillborn. In 1887 Olive wrote some stories for children, and sold them to various magazines. These were conventional tales of children suffering hardship - an orphan rescued by a nabob, miners' children fending off starvation, a sickly child restored by a talking parrot.

Hedda was born in 1890 and Florian in 1892.
In 1889 Andrew Lang's Blue Fairy Book appeared. Tales for children suddenly included real magic, myths, invented worlds and creatures. Olive's early tales had been grimly sweet and unassuming. The coming - or return - of the fairytale opened some trapdoor in her imagination. Her writing became compulsive, fluent and daring.

The story books were kept in a glass-faced cabinet in Olive's study. Each child had a book, and each child had his or her own story. It had began, of course, with Tom, whose story was the longest. Each story was written in its own book, hand-decorated with stuck-on scraps and coloured patterns.

Olive considered him. Reasons for his madness flickered across her mind and were rejected. The writer in her could could have imagined a scene in which the secret had 'slipped out'. The woman in her felt both threatened and enraged. The woman needed to keep calm, or the writer would be unable to work tomorrow. The woman was afraid of age and loss.

Backwards and forwards both. The Edwardians knew they came after something. The sempiternal Queen was gone, in all her manifestations, from the squat and tiny widow swathed in black crape and jet beads, to the gold-encrusted, bedizened, crowned idol who was brought out at durbars and jubilees. That pursed little mouth was silent for ever. Her long-dead mate, who had most seriously cared for the lives of working-men and for the wholesome and beautiful and proliferating arts and crafts, persisted beside her in the name of the unfinished Museum, full of gold, silver, ceramics, bricks and building dust.