The Children’s Book

5 Responses for “The Children’s Book”

1. George A. Soule says:

   March 8, 2010 at 4:49 pm

   I have enjoyed reading Byatt before,. but I could only read 20 pages of this book.
   Rating: 1 / 5

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2. Mrs. C. Chanona says:

   March 8, 2010 at 5:57 pm

   Not an easy read, especially remembering all the characters’ names and families, but very rewarding.

   Set in late Victorian times, closing after the First World War, a rich tapestry of lives, interwoven with tales (not really ‘fairy tales’). I found I really cared about these people’s lives and skills and talents, many of them artistic. I learned a lot about the Women’s Movement of the time, about artists’ communities, within an entanglement of varied relationships.

   This is a book I will keep on the shelf and re-read. High praise indeed!
   Rating: 5 / 5

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3. Book lover says:

   March 8, 2010 at 8:55 pm

   Inside The Children’s Book is a succinct, interesting, intelligent read struggling to get out and failing.
   
   The book is a dog’s dinner with too many undifferentiated characters, too much parallel plotting (5 unwanted pregnancies!)and far too much detail what slows down the plot. It needed an editor with a brutal pencil to cut out all the verbiage. If one more character wore a velvet dress with golden suns and silver moons I would have screamed. The characters had little or no sense of reality and remained flat on the page. As usual the editing was rubbish with lots of mistakes -a spider with ’spinnakers’ and girls wearing ’sunny hats’. For some reason I was reminded of ‘On Chesil Beach’ by Ian McEwen which it in no way resembles but which is an absolute masterpiece of real feeling, poignancy, rounded characters and understated description. AS Byett could learn a lot from it.
   Rating: 3 / 5

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4. Plausible Denial says:

   March 8, 2010 at 11:13 pm

   The Children’s Book, as with all of A S Byatt’s novels, is a superb construct of intricate detail. Set in the period between 1895 and 1919, she starts with the large family of a bohemian writer of fairy stories and their friends in London and Kent and builds a convincing portrait of the late Victorian and Edwardian world of art and left-leaning politics.

   Her eye for the telling detail serves her well, and there are some wonderful set pieces. A dance in the Victoria and albert Museum is particularly deftly executed. She also achieves the shift in focus from Olive, the writer, to the children without discord.

   The end of the novel is, though, rather disappointing. Having completed her tour-de-horizon of the zenith of British pre-eminence, revealed the various dark and entangled secrets of her protagonists and exposed the social hypocrisies of the age, she seems to lose interest.

   The ten years 1910-1919 are rushed through in the last tenth of the book. She makes small but tiresome and uncharacteristic errors; for instance, on the outbreak of war Julian Cain “joined his father’s regiment”, a conventional phrase, but Prosper Cain is a Royal Engineer, which is a Corps not a Regiment. Her evocations of the trenches seem to have come from a quick skim of Pat Barker or Sebastian Faulks rather than her own attention. On the other hand, the pastiches of trench poetry are very well done – I wouldn’t be surprised if they creep into future Schemes of Work on the subject by inattentive teachers.

   This is a shame, because these chapters are necessary to the book; the story requires us to see the survivors washed up on the far shore of the carnage.

   I enjoyed the book, and would recommend it to Byatt fans and those who enjoy intelligent historical fiction, but it is disappointing compared to many of her other works. That, of course, is a very high standard.

   Rating: 3 / 5

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5. C. Ball says:

   March 8, 2010 at 11:13 pm

   Having loved Byatt’s earlier book Possession, I was really looking forward to reading this, particularly after seeing how well-reviewed it was. And yet I have to say I found it disappointing. Byatt has a wonderful way with words, her description of the countryside, the arts in the Museum, the colours and patterns are wonderful, but I was hoping for more than that, and I can’t say I found it.

   I never felt close to any of the characters, I never felt moved by their fates. They all felt artificial. In fact, much of this book felt artificial to me, like a construct deliberately created to tell the real story of this book, which seems to be the passage of time, the changes in England from the Victorian era to the trenches of the First World War. The families in this book, the Wellwoods, Cains, Fludds and Warrens, just felt like props.

   It was an interesting read, certainly, and quite an informative one – I learned a lot I never knew about the Fabian Society, about anarchism and pottery and Arts & Crafts. But it wasn’t an engrossing read, it wasn’t one of those books that you can’t put down. I found I could only read chunks at a time, and by the end it was more determination than enjoyment that brought it to a close.
   
   Rating: 3 / 5

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