THE CHILDREN’S BOOK

I’ve always counted A.S. Byatt as one of my very favorite writers, but after being uninspired by her last few books, I’d started to fear that either her glory days were over or my earlier passion had been a misguided youthful illusion (I first fell in love with Possession in high school, when I was more easily impressed, and The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life in the heady days of college, in the midst of studying the Elizabethans and art history, which they heavily reference). So I was relieved by how much I enjoyed The Children’s Book. Admittedly, I’m predisposed to like anything focused on the Victorian/Edwardian era, but I do think this is a good book. Basically a story of several generations of a loose group of artists and freethinkers and their tangled relationships, it’s huge (688 pages) and sprawling (spanning about 25 years and encompassing fairy tales, pottery, puppetry, theater, Fabian socialism, anarchism, the World’s Fair, the suffrage movement, World War I) and dense (in fact, parts of it read almost like nonfiction, as Byatt describes the sweeping social and political changes of the day). Luckily, it also reads like the best kind of soap opera, with romantic affairs, questionable parentage, secret pregnancies, and other dark secrets abounding. Once again, I stand amazed at how Byatt can create compelling individual characters while simultaneously summing up an entire bygone age, and make it all so pleasurable to read that no matter how long it lasts, you’re sorry when it ends and immediately want to start rereading.