Beginning at Midsummer, 1895, and spanning the years until May 1919, A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book is a majestic novel whose astonishing scope demands time and concentration on the reader's part. It is as much a portrait of an age as of the families who people its pages, but alongside its charting of political and social shifts is a compelling account of creative energy and movements in art, craft, literature and drama which made its period one of organically sprawling growth and change, mirrored by the novel itself.
At the start of the book the children's writer Olive Wellwood - she is based on E. Nesbit - is visiting the South Kensington Museum (later to be re-named the V&A). She is there as a guest of Prosper Cain, Keeper of Precious Metals, and it is from his exhibits she is seeking inspiration for her tales which mix folklore and myth and speak to the child in every adult. The museum has a presence in the story, a backdrop almost permanently under construction and extension, a place of dust and treasure, and later the scene of a beautiful set-piece supper dance. Cain's house within the museum's precincts displays a Morris tapestry, a de Morgan lustre bowl and cushions of flame and peacock silk, and this powerful visual sensibility underpins every scene and exerts a narrative pull where the characters themselves sometimes lack magnetism.
The story moves to Todefright, the Wellwoods' family house in the Kentish Weald where they are neighbours of Benedict Fludd, potter of genius but man of impulsive, unpredictable temperament. And so the three families, Cains, Wellwoods, Fludds, with sundry relations, friends and Fludd's apprentice Philip Warren, co-exist, grow up, form attachments and try to find their paths in life. As they do so, it is against recurring themes of 'second selves', self-expression or restraint, anarchy, misrule and licence, the pastoral compared with the industrial, youth and age and the denial of adult responsibility.
Again and again, A.S. Byatt uses the earth as her leitmotif, from the clay with which Fludd and Philip fashion their pots, to the land itself, its topography and past, to the underground - the cellars of the museum, the bowels of a school, the mines which claim lives, then the trenches of the Somme and the soil which swallows those who don't live out the book.
From family story to thematic exposition to documentary-style statement of historical fact, all are here, but so - for this is Byatt - are discursive cultural examinations of such topics as women's suffrage and higher education, the premiere of Peter Pan, the Paris Exposition, the intricacies of the potter's art. It's a book which has the reader dithering on the intellectual crossroads, wondering which path to follow next, and for that it must be praised.
It's not a flawless book, but it is a mightily impressive one.
