The Children's Book
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3.6 • 5 Ratings
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Famous author Olive Wellwood writes a special private book, bound in different colours, for each of her children. In their rambling house near Romney Marsh they play in a story-book world - but their lives, and those of their rich cousins and their friends, the son and daughter of a curator at the new Victoria and Albert Museum, are already inscribed with mystery. Each family carries its own secrets.
They grow up in the golden summers of Edwardian times, but as the sons rebel against their parents and the girls dream of independent futures, they are unaware that in the darkness ahead they will be betrayed unintentionally by the adults who love them. This is the children's book.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Byatt's overstuffed latest wanders from Victorian 1895 through the end of WWI, alighting on subjects as diverse as puppetry, socialism, women's suffrage and the Boer War, and suffers from an unaccountably large cast. The narrative centers on two deeply troubled families of the British artistic intelligentsia: the Fludds and the Wellwoods. Olive Wellwood, the matriarch, is an author of children's books, and their darkness hints at hidden family miseries. The Fludds' secrets are never completely exposed, but the suicidal fits of the father, a celebrated potter, and the disengaged sadness of the mother and children add up to a chilling family history. Byatt's interest in these artists lies with the pain their work indirectly causes their loved ones and the darkness their creations conceal and reveal. The other strongest thread in the story is sex; though the characters' social consciences tend toward the progressive, each of the characters' liaisons are damaging, turning high-minded talk into sinister predation. The novel's moments of magic and humanity, malignant as they may be, are too often interrupted by information dumps that show off Byatt's extensive research. Buried somewhere in here is a fine novel.
Customer Reviews
Tom Underground
As with other reviewers, the research is noticeably telegraphed here. It is important and gives the text a sense of anchorage, but needs to be less prevalent. That said, this is a strong novel. The interpolations of family, under the Wellwood roof, are intriguingly convoluted. The themes of evolution, human appetite and man being a thing born of, and being returned to, the earth are a development of similar explorations in Byatt's previous work. The inability of parents to provide a nurturing home, is harrowing. The Edwardian house is a place of peril and threat. It's society brutal and unforgiving.
Really wanted to enjoy this, but...
...reading it was a major endurance test. The learning does not sit lightly, and as the families grow and time passes the historical context becomes "busier". I get that. But I wanted to know more about the characters, not to be presented with the (albeit impressive) fruits of the author's archival work in a form that is (to me) far from satisfactorily digested.
Byatt is, one would assume, imagining her ideal audience as well-educated, so why flood us with background information much of which is too "common knowledge" to require extensive description?
The novel has I'm wonderful characters (I love Dorothy, for example), but also bails out, too, unexplainedly, on others (e.g. Tom).
Disappointing: a curate's egg, and one that I wouldn't recommend swallowing whole.