This is much in the vein of Byatt's novel "Possession" in its focus on the artistic, the scholarly, and the desire to create. I always enjoy Byatt, because she's always thinking so hard, and because she creates such vivid objects to fill her worlds--the puppet shows, the pottery, the clothing--one really sees all of it.

Her people, though, are a bit bloodless. I don't believe their passions and I don't sympathize with their sufferings.

Still, though, a smarter, more engrossing, and more complicated book than most I've read this year. ( )

"Masterpiece Theater" fodder. ( )

An English "War and Peace" - although "Peace and War" would be more apt, as the vast majority of the text is set in the halycon days of the late 19th and 20th Century British Empire, when the confidence and prosperity of the ruling classes went unchallenged. "The Children's Book" deals mostly with the comfortable lives of the upper middle classes in the South of England, although Byatt (who is a Northerner herself) throws in a few working class characters for contrast. Messy and prolix, "The Children's Book" is a book that is intelligent and provocative, but also frustrating and inconclusive. Fans of Byatt will read it to find out what she is thinking these days, but I would not recommend this book as a first exposure to her writing.

Byatt, whose sister Margaret Drabble is also a successful novelist, certainly knows a great deal about unhappy families with sibling rivalries. She also has clearly been thinking a lot about the significance of children's literature, particularly in the English tradition of the late 19th century. (She has gone on record with some fairly harsh criticism of J.K. Rowling's contemporary work in that genre.) In some ways, "The Children's Book" is a kind of serious reflection upon the lure of childish-ness which attracted so many in the era of Peter Pan - and continues to do so in our era of the Disney Empire and Harry Potter.

Rather than focus upon a single character - or even two, or four - here Byatt is interested upon an entire generation of young people, born in the 1880s and 90s and raised in the heyday of the late Victorian Empire. It's a collective family saga - and you'll probably need to take copious notes to sort out all the characters and their intricate relationships. (It doesn't help matters when several of their names are similar - Geraint and Gerald, for example. Some of the names seem fairly improbable: Griselda? Imogen? Perdita?)

There is also a great deal in this book about some of the "minor" arts of the era, particularly ceramics and puppetry. Interesting certainly, but I'm not sure quite how the developing craft of pottery fits into the theme of childhood and family relationships.

A few major historical figures from the period (Oscar Wilde, Marie Stopes, Loie Fuller) have small walk-on parts. There is one scene of the novel that takes place at the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris, and later the focus shifts for a while to artistic and bohemian Munich. Nice to see an English historical novel with some interest in contemporary European affairs! Some of the characters are early stalwarts of the movement for women's rights. One becomes a female doctor, another a suffragette. Other female characters face difficult decisions about sexuality, pregnancy and marriage. Really, this could be a quite good book to use in a history class - if only it weren't so long!

It is difficult to offer a coherent critique of this book because it goes off in so many directions. A loose baggy monster indeed! It probably would have worked better if some of the subsidiary characters and plots and themes and historical developments had been cut back - or cut out. Or maybe this should have become a multi-volume saga! There are certainly enough elements in the story that remind me of one of those stately Masterpiece Theatre series! ( )

Set in England between 1895 and 1919, The Children’s Book is a sprawling story centered on the family and acquaintances of Olive Wellwood, a successful writer of fairy tales for children. Olive lives in what first appears to be a bohemian paradise with her husband, sister, and children. But the decadent, free-spirited façade of the Wellwood household conceals dark secrets about the family, which are unveiled over the decades as her children grow older and struggle to move into adulthood unscathed. Throughout, we see the damaging effects of art on its subjects, and on those who are unable to negotiate the differences between fantasy and life. With its enormous cast of characters and microscopic attention to detail, The Children’s Book gathers weight and importance as history takes its toll on the living. ( )

I adore A.S. Byatt more than I can coherently explain. Or at least I've loved the two books of hers that I've read so far, Possession and The Children's Book. I picked up my copy of Possession in a creaky little used bookstore in Norwich, England, and my memory of that February will be forever tinged with the flavor of that particular story -- the delicious combination of scholarly mystery, intertwining histories and rich prose that kept me reading long into the cold English nights.

It's the language that does it for me; Byatt has a style that reads almost like poetry, and she can weave such an intricate tapestry that it reminds me of standing in a restored music room in the Victoria & Albert museum, transported by the gleaming surfaces as much as the weight of history beneath them. Incidentally, The Children's Book features the V&A almost as another character itself; it's set during the end of the nineteenth century, straddling the end of Victoria's reign and the transition to the Edwardian era.

The book begins in the museum, with two boys spying on another at work sketching an artifact -- but it rapidly expands to encompass the trials and drama of several large, interconnected families who are all caught up in the shifting social, artistic, political and religious currents of the times. Normally I don't like sprawling epic family works -- it's hard to keep the characters straight, for one thing -- but Byatt caught me in a web of fairy myth and secrets that kept me reading until far too late at night (again).

I can see where people could argue that the book is too long; there are many passages that feel like long, elaborate exercises in stage setting, more like a study of Victorian England than any plot development -- but since I've always been interested in this time period, it felt like a pleasant diversion instead of a chore. Plus, I was learning a lot -- I had no idea that the suffrage movements in England were so viciously, frantically violent. This wasn't a bunch of ladies in ruffles complaining over tea; marching down the street, smashing shop windows, and oh yes, blowing up houses all made the agenda. And the government response was no less extreme, force-feedings and brutal beatings...with the added strain of class conflict and the looming aggressions of World War I, it must have felt like the world was shaking apart.

Which is probably why children's stories and fairy tales suddenly became popular, as people took refuge from an increasingly chaotic world in creations of fantasy. Not that fairy tales were all fun and games; these are the ancient, shadowed myths that the Brothers Grimm found, not the sanitized pastel-colored romps on most children's shelves today. This world is disturbing and odd, but there are rules here, and something about the stories touches deeper in our consciousness -- Byatt's exploration of myth and fantasy seized my interest as much as her characters' struggles, if not more so.

I could go on (and on), but at some point the rambling must end, so I'll sign off for now with a sigh for my lost bed partner. Even if this means I should be getting more sleep.

Like this review? Come and read more at Ravenous Bookshelf, http://ravenousbookshelf.blogspot.com... ( )