It's beginning to look like new releases are getting plentiful enough that we're gonna have to make separate fiction and nonfiction lists for awhile. Here's fiction — in a couple days non...
The Children's Book
by A. S. Byatt
A.S. Byatt, the English novelist, poet and Booker Prize–winning author of Possession, regards the novel as an ideal art form because “you can get the whole world in it.” Her rich, layered works especially lend themselves to the creation of locked-away, densely-packed versions of veracity. The sweeping The Children’s Book fits the bill as, set in the evolving world between Victorian 1895 through the end of WWI, it takes in a formidable cast and a wide variety of subjects such as socialism, women's suffrage, and the Boer War, and concerns four different families, centering especially around that of famous children’s book author Olive Wellwood. When a working-class runaway named Philip is found by Olive's oldest son sketching in the basement of the new Victoria and Albert Museum, she takes him into the storybook world of her family and friends. There are other children – considerably so, as Olive is pregnant with her seventh child in an increasingly complicated domestic life. With a dark side. Three of the children Olive is raising are not hers with her husband, and in another household great works of art reveal acts of incest, while another family copes with a suicidal father, and sexual interconnections between characters are slowly revealed.
What Byatt seems most concerned with, as military powers come closer to World War mobilization, is that psychological intersection where idealism and visionary utopianism comes into contact with human nature. Her adult subjects, she writes, "saw, in a way that earlier generations had not, that children were people, with identities and desires and intelligences ... But they saw this, so many of them, out of a desire of their own for perpetual childhood." If Byatt “can get the whole world" in The Children’s Book, it’s possibly a case of a world being a little too much with us in another one of her trademark finely-detailed tomes, but there will be no doubt you’re immersed in a meticulously-researched late 19th century and early 20th century setting, in a book that makes us care about the characters, and that will enmesh us in its opulence and intelligence.
Article comments