Status
Available
Call number
Publication
Knopf (2009), Edition: 1, 688 pages
Description
When Olive Wellwood's oldest son discovers a runaway named Philip sketching in the basement of the new Victoria and Albert Museum--a talented working-class boy who could be a character out of one of Olive's magical tales--she takes him into the storybook world of her family and friends--a world that conceals more treachery and darkness than Philip has ever imagined and that will soon be eclipsed by far greater forces.
Original publication date
2009-05-07
Media reviews
The novel has a tendency to sprawl, with too many characters and too much to say. Yet Byatt takes tender care with the reader. She is a careful guide, and though this entry is at times a lot to process, it’s a worthwhile journey.
While Byatt’s engagement with the period’s overlapping circles of artists and reformers is serious and deep, so much is stuffed into “The Children’s Book” that it can be hard to see the magic forest for all the historical lumber — let alone the light at the end of the narrative
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tunnel. The action is sometimes cut off at awkward moments by ponderous newsreel-style voice-over or potted lectures in cultural history. Startling revelations are dropped in almost nonchalantly and not picked up again until dozens or even hundreds of pages later. Byatt’s coda on the Great War, dispatched in scarcely more pages than the Exposition Universelle, is devastating in its restraint. But too often readers may feel as if they’re marooned in the back galleries of a museum with a frighteningly energetic docent. Show Less
Byatt’s characters are themselves her dutiful puppets, always squeezed and shaped for available meaning. The Children’s Book has a cumulative energy and intelligence, and the unavoidable scythe of the Great War brings its own power to the narration, but nowhere in its hundreds of pages is there
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a single moment like the Countess Rostova’s free and mysterious irritation. Show Less
As in her Booker Prize–winning novel, Possession, here Byatt has constructed a complete and complex world, a gorgeous bolt of fiction, in this case pinned to British events and characters from the 1870s to the end of the Great War...the magic is in the way Byatt suffuses her novel with details,
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from the shimmery sets of a marionette show to clay mixtures and pottery glazes. Show Less
It begins with the discovery of a boy hiding in a museum.
The time is 1895, the boy is Philip Warren, and the museum is the precursor to the Victoria & Albert: the South Kensington Museum. And, oh, yes –there’s a remarkable piece of art that the boy is besotted with — the Gloucester
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Candlestick. However, while this may make many children’s book mavens think immediately of E. L. Konigsburg’s classical story for children, let me say straight out — A. S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book is a book for grown-ups. It is emphatically not a children’s book although it is about children, about books, about art, about the writing of children’s books, about the telling of children’s stories, about the clash between life and art, and about a whole lot more. A saga of a book teeming with complex characters, fascinating settings, intellectual provocations, and erudite prose, it gets under your skin as you get deeper and deeper into it and won’t let you go even after you reach the last page.... Show Less
If the bestselling Possession (1990) was Byatt’s critique of the Golden Age of high Victorianism, then The Children’s Book, in spite of arriving nearly two decades later, follows from it organically: it is a complementary dissection of the cultural myths, peculiarities and obsessions of the
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Silver Age that followed. . . As the book unfolds, the fairy-tale patterns proliferate in ever wilder arcs, like the brambles around an enchanted castle. . . The Children’s Book is an eloquent testament to the dangerous power of both art and myth. Show Less
It will probably never be said of Byatt's writing that she wears her learning lightly, and her lengthy disquisitions on the building blocks of her narrative both support and bloat the novel . . . But Byatt is brilliant on the gathering forces of England and Germany at the beginning of the 20th
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century, their contrasting attitudes towards the part that the land plays in the collective unconscious, their differing forms of nostalgia. Show Less
But her need to elaborate the elements of her fictional world independently hampers their ability to combine. It takes even this astonishingly accomplished writer a long time to bring one vast sub set of characters to a simmer, and by the time we go back to the last lot they've gone cold again. . .
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There is a potentially fatal unwillingness to trust the reader to get the point or the full range of reference. . . The feverish desire to have nothing be missed can only be self-defeating. A gravely eloquent sentence about a bereaved mother's perception of her son's image everywhere, at every age – "They were all equally present because they were all gone" – loses some of its force when four of the 10 words are italicised. Show Less
Her new novel, The Children’s Book, is the book Byatt wanted Harry Potter to be. . . It’s the sort of high-concept rarefied intellectual fiction we’d expect from, well, AS Byatt. Possession: the next generation.
Byatt's technique is to allow each individual or group a brief limelight and then to move on, picking up their story maybe many pages later. This makes for an exciting pace and rhythm. The downside is that important plotlines and events can lose impact. . . Her research is phenomenal, as she
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attempts to make the reader share precisely (a word she uses repeatedly) the world that her characters inhabit. . . Prodigious as it is, the effect, like A S Byatt's descriptions of the Paris Exposition, is to glut the reader with a superfluity of wonders. Show Less
Every character in this extraordinarily rich book is superbly embedded in the thoughts and beliefs and feelings of the period . . . At times, the impulse toward comprehensiveness does lack balance. . . But this is ungrateful. We are given characters that live through, without being merely defined
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by, their times; and engrossing narrative arcs that draw in the reader. Show Less
The Children’s Book is a richly allusive text. . . The narrative vigour and passionate engagement with the human condition that has always informed Byatt’s writing ensures that one can approach The Children’s Book in perfect ignorance of Nesbit, Gill or any of the social, political and
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artistic convulsions of the Edwardian era and still miss nothing of its astonishing power and resonance. Show Less
Easily the best thing AS Byatt has written since her Booker-winning masterpiece, Possession (1990), it shares strong affinities with it.
This is a long, packed novel, deliberately discursive and crammed to the gills with knowledge about subjects . . . The panoramic quality of The Children's Book is achieved at some cost to brilliance of characterisation and narrative drive. Its success is as a novel of ideas, forcefully and often
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memorably expressed. Show Less
It is a bulging, if not baggy book, and every Victorian and early Edwardian theme is here . . . For all its factual richness, I doubt whether Byatt found it necessary to do much research for this novel: she is a highly informed person in many fields. To that extent, it is a book of useful
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knowledge, as well as being a seductive tale; an improving book, in a word. Show Less