The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt

The story told in The Children’s Book begins in 1895, when two boys find a third hiding in the cellar what it is to become the Victoria and Albert Museum, and it ends when WWI comes to a close. It’s a story whose scope is so large that it can only be described as being about life. It’s a family saga, and a portrait of life in late Victorian and Edwardian times. Most of the main characters are the members of three families: the Wellwoods – both the Todefright branch, whose matriarch is Olive Wellwood, a writer of fairy tales and children’s adventure stories reminiscent of E. Nesbit, and the London branch, where Basil Wellwood lives with his German wife Katharina; the Fludds, who tiptoe around the brilliant craftsman Benedict Fludd and his explosive temperament; and the Cains – Prosper Cain, a widower, a military man, and a museum curator, and his two children

This isn’t much of a summary, I know, but The Children’s Book is difficult, and indeed almost pointless, to summarize. Though there is a story, and a good one, the book’s appeal is not so much the plot as it is the period detail, the passing of time and the changes it brings, and how involved the reader becomes with the characters’ lives. The cast of characters is very large, but A.S. Byatt handles it with complete mastery. This passage, from the beginning of chapter three, will give you a good idea of the social world these three families inhabit:

This was the Wellwoods’ third Midsummer Party. Their guests were socialists, anarchists, Quakers, Fabians, artists, editors, freethinkers and writers, who lived, either all the time, or at weekends and on holidays, in converted cottages and old farmhouses, Arts and Crafts homes and working-men’s terraces, in the villages, woods and meadows around the Kentish Weald and South Downs. These were people who had evaded the Smoke, and looked forward to a Utopian world in which smoke would be no more.

Among other things, the title The Children’s Book refers to the books Olive Wellwood writes for each of her children:

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 begun, of course, with Tom, whose story was the longest. Each story was written in its own book, hand-decorated with struck-on scraps and coloured patterns. Tom’s was inky-blue-black, covered with ferns and brackens, some real, dried and pressed, some cut out of gold and silver paper. Dorothy’s was forest-green, covered with the nursery scraps of small creatures, hedgehogs, rabbits, mice, bluetits and frogs. Phyllis’s was rose-pink and lacy, with scraps of gauzy-winged fairies in florid dresses, sweet-peas and bluebells, daises and pansies. Hedda’s was striped in purple, green and white, with silhouettes of witches and dragons. Florian’s book was only little, a nice warm red, with Gather Christmas and a yule log.

I’m sharing this passage not only because I find it lovely, but also because I want to give you a fair idea of how descriptive the book is – I realize this is something not everyone will be as enthusiastic about as I was, but I loved all the details about pottery, jewellery making, children’s literature, Art Nouveau, the Arts and Crafts movement, etc. I loved accompanying the characters to the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900. I loved immersing myself in the cultural climate of the Edwardian period, which has always fascinated me.

Let me tell you what some of the people and things that are mentioned in this book are, whose appearance filled me with joy: Kenneth Grahame, particularly The Golden Age and The Wind in the Willows, Oscar Wilde, the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, William Morris, Walter Crane, H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, D.H Lawrence, Peter Pan’s opening night, E. Nesbit, Hope Mirless, Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill.

But of course, it’s not all art and innocence and pretty things. This was a time of change, of strikes, of social agitation, and these are portrayed just as accurately as the artistic movements: the Boer Wars, the suffragist movement, anarchist bombings, conflicts within the Fabian Society, the increasing political tension that eventually leads to WWI, new ideas, new ways of seeing the world, new challenges brought on by new expectations.

Ah, it’s all so satisfying. The Children’s Book is everything I could ever want from historical fiction: it shows not only what happened, but what it felt like for those who were living it. These were interesting times, but there’s of course a reason why “may you live in interesting times” is a curse. Most of these characters do not live very happy lives.

I was especially interested in the girls: Dorothy Wellwood, who wants to be a doctor, Griselda Wellwood, who wants to be able to think, Florence Cain, who wants to think and to live, Imogen and Pomona Fludd, who hide a disturbing secret, Elsie Warren, a working class girl who swore she'd never go into service and yet finds herself waiting on the Fludds, Hedda Wellwood, who joins the suffragist movement. I find that The Children’s Book deals with gender more satisfyingly than any of Byatt’s previous works. Most of these girls come from progressive families, families who believe they should be educated and yet still invest more in their son’s schooling. They want to think, but they don’t want to have to give up love, sex, a family if they wish to have one to be able to do so. And yet at women’s colleges, that was what was required of them most of the time.

There’s more: there are family secrets, there are births and deaths, joys and sorrows, losses and disappointments. There’s the transition from Victorian to Edwardian society. There’s the emergence of the concept of childhood as we know it today. There are class struggles, and social consciousness, and the role of art and idealism in the real world. And I’m barely scratching the surface: like I said, this novel’s scope is immense.

And there are, of course, fairy tales: some of Olive’s are included in the book, and, as is to be expected of Byatt, they’re nothing short of wonderful. I loved seeing Olive’s mind at work; I loved watching the process through which she turned things into stories. This was frequently her way of coping with what was happening in her life, but sadly a day comes when she’s hit by a tragedy so great it no longer works.

The last section of the novel, “The age of lead”, is devoted to WWI. It’s only about forty pages long, and while it could have been as long as the rest of the book, the fact is that it doesn’t need to be to fully convey the horror of the war. You almost think—you want to think—did she have to kill so many? But the answer is yes, she did, because this many died. It’s not there for dramatic effect; it’s how it was. And we know all along, watching all these characters grow up, that this is what it will come to. There’s a scene early on, during a Midsummer’s party, where the adults ask the children what they want to be when they grow up. They give their answers, and all along you know what so many of them will grow up to do: to go to Ypres and the Somme, to crawl in the mud, to kill or be killed. You know all along, and yet, like them, you get lost in the golden haze of the time. I cried without pause all through the last section of the book.

I think I’ll say it: The Children’s Book is probably my new favourite Byatt. It’s possible that a re-read of Possession would set me straight, but I can safely say I love it at least as much, which is saying a lot. I’ve mentioned before that as much as I love Byatt, I often respond to her work more intellectually than emotionally. This was not at all the case here – I was fully engaged, and I was often moved. What an absolutely stunning book.

A few more of my favourite passages:

He hadn’t ever considered the fact that the earth was round, that he stood on the curved surface of a ball. Here seeing the horizon, feeling the precariousness of his standpoint, he suddenly had a vision of the thing – a huge ball, flying, and covered mostly with this water endless in motion, but held to the surface as it hurtled through the atmosphere, and in its dark depths, blue, green, brown, black, it covered other colder earth, and sand and stone, to which the light never reached, where perhaps things lived in the dark and plunged and ate each other, he didn’t know, maybe no one knew. The round earth, with hills and valleys of earth, under the liquid surface. It was pleasant, and frightening, to be alive under the sun.

She said, in a different voice, staring into space
‘It is a terrible thing to be a woman. You are told people like to look at you – as though you have a duty to be the object of…the object of… And then, afterwards, if you are rejected, if what you…thought you were worth…is after all not wanted…you are nothing.’
She gave a little shrug, and pulled herself together, and said, ‘Poor Elsie,’ in an artificial, polite, tea-party voice, though she had not offered, and did not offer, to make tea.

‘Toby Youlgreave talks a great deal about the Brothers Grimm and their belief that fairytales were the old religion – the old inner life – of the German people. Well, I sometimes feel, stories are the inner life of this house. A kind of spinning of energy. I am this spinning fairy in the attic, I am Mother Goose quacking away what sounds like comforting chatter but is really – is really what holds it all together.’

These children, Julian thought, had been charmed and bamboozled as though some Pied Piper played his tune and they all followed him, docile, under the earth. The Germans had sunk the liner, Lusitania, and Charles Frohman, the impresario who had staged Peter Pan, had drowned with gallant dignity, apparently reciting the immortal line which had been judiciously cut from wartime performances: To die will be an awfully big adventure.

Other Opinions:
The Indextrious Reader
Farm Lane Books
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