The Children's Book by A. S. Byatt

The Barnes & Noble Review

A. S. Byatt published her first novel in 1964 and, over the ensuing two and a half decades, produced a series of successors that were admired by critics but had little reach beyond intellectual circles. Yet when Possession, her literary romance and thriller, became a bestseller on its publication in 1990, the author evinced no surprise. Quite the contrary: this time, she said, she had written with a larger audience in mind. In tone and scope, the resulting novel proved a gripping and original blend of the Victorian and postmodern, serving up two love stories, some improbably sexy critical theory, and countless deft pastiches of Rossetti and Browning. "I knew people would like it," Byatt told The New York Times. "It's the only one I've written to be liked, and I did it partly to show off."

Nearly 20 years later, still mashing up genres, switching historical periods, and unfolding tales with supple and convincing omniscience, the author has continued to challenge and entertain her readers. She has ventured into fairy tales, suggesting that "they form, or until recently formed, the narrative grammar of our minds." She has excoriated grown-up readers of the Harry Potter books, claiming that J. K. Rowling's series "speaks to an adult generation that hasn't known, and doesn't care about, mystery." And she has questioned the practice of including real-life people in fiction, arguing that that using an actual person "as the single original in fiction" inhibits creativity by failing to leave room for "the necessary insertion of inventions."

By her own admission, Byatt peoples her books with composites. Types, she says, tend to recur. Olive Wellwood, the preening, selfish, and blinkered, if basically good-hearted, children's writer at the center of her latest novel, is one part D. H. Lawrence, one part E. Nesbit, two parts Alison Uttley, a dash of Rebecca West, and, of course, a great deal of the author's imagination, all steeped in the pot of her moralizing. Writers and other artists who steal too directly from other people for inspiration fare badly in The Children's Book, another brainy crowd-pleaser -- a vast Edwardian-era panorama so spellbinding it invaded my dreams, but also frustrated me, in the end, as characters' fates bent to Byatt's ethical agendas.

Our story begins in 1895 as Olive visits the (new) Victoria and Albert Museum, seeking ideas for a story. She charms the curator, Prosper Cain, while her eldest son (and favorite child), Tom, and Prosper's boy, Julian, spy on and then confront a lad who's sketching the museum's treasures. Having fled a miserable job working the kilns in a pottery, Philip Warren hasn't eaten a proper meal in weeks but spends his days drawing and his nights sleeping amid the artifacts stored in the museum's cold basement. Surveying his drawings, all are amazed by the level of his craft. As Philip devours tea and sandwiches, it is agreed that he must be whisked away to Todefright, the Wellwoods' rambling farmhouse estate, until they can decide what to do with him. Soon the Wellwoods throw a party, and one of the guests offers Philip his dream job. The boy becomes an apprentice to the brilliant but monstrous potter Benedict Fludd, a man given to intermittent "werewolf-changes" and "religious fits."

Life for the Wellwoods is darker and more complicated than it initially seems. With the help of her wellborn husband, Humphrey, Olive has escaped a life of terrible poverty and grief and constructed a new one that enables her to spend her time creating fantasy worlds. But it's Olive's writing income that supports their landed lifestyle, at least once Humphrey resigns from his banking job to turn his attentions to political activism (and womanizing) full-time. And unbeknownst to the Wellwood kids, not all are biological children of both Olive and Humphrey; some are the offspring only of one or the other, although all were born during the marriage. The brood dislikes Violet -- Olive's spinster sister and their round-the-clock babysitter -- even as several of the children begin to suspect that she may actually be their mother. This possibility particularly consumes Dorothy, a bright, matter-of-fact girl who yearns to be a doctor and doesn't get on with Olive. Stern and diligent, a perfect foil to Olive's whimsy, Dorothy emerges, like Jo in Little Women, as the tomboy heroine and moral center of the book, and her eventual quest to know the truth about her parentage is tremendously affecting.

Byatt handles her large and complex cast with ease as The Children's Book conjures up the Edwardian period, presenting its freedoms, strictures, and foibles in astonishing detail. This was a time, Byatt has said, when women were gaining freedoms, work conditions were improving, sex was discussed freely, and children still ran wild in woods and fields, their imaginations steeped in "literature and fairy stories and Peter Pan." But it was also an era that saw the rise of the smug do-gooder, of bohemians and Marxists and Fabian Society members whose efforts on behalf of the downtrodden were infused with a fundamental cluelessness and self-satisfaction. As one of the more striking examples of the type, The Children's Book depicts novelist and passionate women's rights advocate Herbert Methley, who beds and impregnates a host of women while seeking inspiration for his fiction (Mr. Woodhouse and the Wild Girl and other stories about lusty young females).

The book of the title consists of Olive's own magical stories -- private ones written for each of her children -- which form an enchanted, occasionally tedious, counterpart to the engaging central narrative. Byatt cautions against reading The Children's Book as an extension of her scathing takedown of Rowling; the book, she says, was not written in reaction to Harry Potter but explores the idea of fairy tales as "an alternative to 'realism,' something necessary to human beings." Yet Olive, if not exactly the kind of "childish adult" the author has decried, is stunted as a woman and a writer. She has a tendency when difficulties arise to lock herself away and live in her fantastical worlds. And increasingly, pressed for ideas, short on time, and needing to sell fiction to make ends meet, she plunders the notebooks that constitute her secret children's book. In particular, she gravitates toward Tom's tale; as her favorite child, he has always served as a kind of muse, and her emotional connection to his character is stronger than to the others. But Tom is a private lad, and a troubled one, and his mother's blithe use of a story that is so fundamentally personal is for him the ultimate betrayal.

While all of these events are skillfully orchestrated and entirely plausible, the culminating tragedy to which they eventually point feels imposed -- almost Calvinist in its predestined tenor -- rather than organic. Tom becomes, in effect, a casualty of Byatt's tyrannical omniscience. We can believe that he might do the terrible thing he does, but we haven't been granted enough access to his deepest feelings and motivations for his actions to resonate. Olive, meanwhile, is cast into such grief she may never recover -- or will this too be a casualty she just brushes off? It is clear that the author doesn't have much patience for Olive's anguish. "There would be no more stories, she thought, dramatically, uncertain whether this too was a story, or a full stop." As World War I flares up toward the end of the novel, the trend continues: those who are virtuous or talented tend to survive, while corrupt and dull characters generally die off.

Yet if Tom's and Olive's fates seem like punishments borne of didacticism, Benedict Fludd's demise rings true. Like Olive, but in a much more grotesque fashion, the potter uses his family to fuel his art. The gloom that permeates his household is palpable, and the listlessness of his wife and daughters -- "pallid silk moths," he calls them, disgustedly -- in the face of his rages, haunting. What befalls him is not merely a relief to just about everyone, but an inevitability.

A few years ago, in a passionate defense of George Eliot, Byatt responded to critics who accused the Middlemarch author of "writing from a god's eye view, as though she were omniscient." "I came to see that this is nonsense," she said. "If a novelist tells you something she knows or thinks, and you believe her, that is not because either of you think she is God, but because she is doing her work -- as a novelist." Byatt does her work as novelist wonderfully in much of The Children's Book, deploying omniscience to fashion a cohesive, evocative narrative strategy; yet at times her formidable intellect works to undermine the complexity of her creations with heavy-handed characterizations and sermonizing -- the kind readers might expect to find in the simpler moral confines of Hogwarts. --Maud Newton

Maud Newton's writing has appeared in numerous publications. Her blog is at maudnewton.com.

From the Publisher

Shortlisted

for the Man Booker Prize


A spellbinding novel, at once sweeping and intimate, from the Booker Prize–winning author of Possession, that spans the Victorian era through the World War I years, and centers around a famous children’s book author and the passions, betrayals, and secrets that tear apart the people she loves.

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.

But the joyful bacchanals Olive hosts at her rambling country house—and the separate, private books she writes for each of her seven children—conceal more treachery and darkness than Philip has ever imagined. As these lives—of adults and children alike—unfold, lies are revealed, hearts are broken, and the damaging truth about the Wellwoods slowly emerges. But their personal struggles, their hidden desires, will soon be eclipsed by far greater forces, as the tides turn across Europe and a golden era comes to an end.

Taking us from the cliff-lined shores of England to Paris, Munich, and the trenches of the Somme, The Children’s Book is a deeply affecting story of a singular family, played out against the great, rippling tides of the day. It is a masterly literary achievement by one of our most essential writers.

The Washington Post - Keith Donohue

Bristling with life and invention, it is a seductive work by an extraordinarily gifted writer…more compelling than the social and political history is the domestic drama among the dozen or more characters that Byatt draws in vivid detail…The Children's Book holds a mirror to the new middle class during an era of growing appreciation for children and greater sexual freedom for women and for the love that dares not speak its name. That Byatt marries this novel of ideas with such compelling characters testifies to her remarkable spinning energy.

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. (Oct.)

Library Journal

A girl places some diminutive folk she's discovered into her doll house, then is imprisoned by a giant child herself. A prince discovers that he alone has no shadow. No, these aren't plot points in this masterly new work by the author of Possession but children's stories written by one of its protagonists, Olive Wellwood. There are, or course, actual children in the book—Olive's, with blustery banker-turned-crusader husband Humphrey; the Wellwood cousins; Julian, son of a keeper at the South Kensington Museum; Philip, the wayward boy discovered living surreptitiously in the museum, whom Olive brings home to her country estate; the family of brilliant but selfish master potter Benedict Fludd, who takes in the talented Philip as an unpaid apprentice; and more. Like the children in Olive's stories, these children have their notions quietly disabused; one small instant—say, a parent's overheard comment—and life is changed forever. It's the late 1800s, with new ideas in the air—and it's all rushing toward World War I. VERDICT Pitch perfect, stately, told with breathtakingly matter-of-fact acuteness, this is another winner for Byatt. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/09.]—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews

Byatt (A Whistling Woman, 2002, etc.) encompasses the paradigm shift from Victorian to modern England in a sweeping tale of four families. The deeper subject, however, is the complex, not always benign bond that attaches children to adults. As the novel opens in 1895, Olive Wellwood seems the model New Woman: popular author of books that reinvent fairy tales for contemporary children, tolerant wife to Fabian Society stalwart Humphry, devoted mother pregnant with her seventh baby. She takes in Philip Warren, a working-class boy who longs to make art, and connects him with Benedict Fludd, a master potter whose family belongs to the Wellwoods' progressive, artistic circle. As the long, dense narrative unfolds, we see the dark side of these idealists' lives. Three of the children Olive is raising are not hers with Humphry; in another household, magnificent works of art reveal repellent acts of incest. The gothic sexual interconnections recall Bloomsbury, and Olive is clearly a gloss on E. Nesbit, but this is no mere roman a clef. Byatt's concern is the vast area where utopian visions collide 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." World War I forces everyone to grow up. Only one son of this socialist set becomes a conscientious objector; the others serve and most of them die. The pace, positively stately in the novel's first half, speeds up and becomes unduly hasty in the final section. But Byatt has painted her large cast of characters so richly that we care aboutall of them even when their fates are summarized in a sentence. In the last chapter, the variously battered survivors reunite and dream once more: "They could make magical plays for a new generation of children."Ambitious, accomplished and intelligent in the author's vintage manner. First printing of 75,000

Product Details

• Reading Group Guide
• Forewords & Introductions
• Read an Excerpt

Reading Group Guide

1. Why is this novel called The Children's Book? Discuss the many possible meanings this title suggests.

2. How are fairy tales important to the novel—both to the story and to the characters themselves? Byatt has said in interviews that fairy tales and the children's books of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as E. Nesbit's magical stories and The Wind in the Willows, inspired her to write the novel; do you see echoes of any of your favorite children's stories here?

3. We follow a huge cast of characters for nearly three decades over the course of the novel; whom did you care about most at the end? Many of the characters are not who they seem; how did your feelings about these characters change as the story developed?

4. What secrets are the many families in the novel—the Todefright Wellwoods, the Basil Wellwoods, the Cains, the Fludds, and even Elsie and Philip—hiding from each other and from outsiders? Which of the characters' betrayals did you find most shocking?

5. How does class constrain the characters in the novel? Olive and Elsie both marry outside their class—are they similar in any other ways? Which is the greater divide for them and the other characters in the novel: class or sex? How does Philip's absorption into the Wellwood circle differ from his sister's?

6. From the opening scene, pottery—the craft of it, its history, the contrast between fine art and factory-made pieces—is a recurring presence throughout the novel. Does Olive do the right thing in apprenticing Philip to Benedict Fludd? How does Byatt use the metaphor of clay to enrich the story?

7. A German puppeteer is asurprise guest at the Wellwoods' Midsummer party at the beginning of the novel. What role do puppets play in the novel, and what do they represent? How does the relationship between the German and British characters change as the novel unfolds?

8. What is the significance of the Tree House? What does it mean to Tom—and to his siblings?

9. Motherhood is a crucial part of the novel, and of Olive's stories; Olive herself is something of a "Mother Goose," as in her story "The Shrubbery" on pages 105–114. But is Olive a good mother? What about Violet, and the other mothers in the story?

10. How does the notion of lineage—of knowing who one's real parents are—affect the children in the novel? Does knowing "the truth" ultimately make much difference to the adults the children grow into—or do the people who actually raise them, and the way they are raised, make more of an impact?

11. A number of the adult characters are artists in one way or another; many of them—through their art or their actions—cause damage to the other people in their lives. Discuss how the artists in the novel both create and destroy.

12. Discuss the Fludd family. Why do you think Byatt chose not to divulge the specifics of Benedict's acts? What do you think he did?

13. In an essay she wrote for the London Times, Byatt wrote, "There is a strong case to be made that the Edwardians enjoyed school stories, magical tales, and tales of children alone in landscapes—woodland camps, secret expeditions—because they were themselves reluctant to grow up." How do the adults in the novel reflect this idea? What distinction do the characters make between childhood and adulthood? What distinction is Byatt making through the novel?

14. Several characters embrace the notion of free love, or of sex outside marriage. What is the result? Is it good for any of them? How do these attitudes resemble, or not, those of the 1960s in the United States?

15. How is Dorothy—who doesn't share her mother's love of stories, who is the serious daughter, and who becomes a doctor—different from her siblings? How does Humphry's revelation, and his betrayal, change her?

16. Several characters undergo transformations. Is Charles/Karl's the most obvious, or the least?

17. Olive writes stories for each of her seven children, which are bound into their own private books. As the novel unfolds, the story written for her oldest and most beloved son, Tom—"Tom Underground"—becomes more and more important. Why does he cling so tightly to this fairy tale? What does the metaphor of shadow signify? Why does he see the play his mother writes as a betrayal?

18. On page 562, Dorothy tells Tom that he's responsible for Philip's success. Is this accurate? Why or why not?

19. What is the significance of the stone with a hole that Tom picks up on page 586?

20. Why does Hedda try to destroy the Gloucester Candlestick? Is it a coincidence that she chose this item? How does the suffragette movement affect her and the other women in the story?

21. Reread Julian's poetry. How does it reflect upon the novel itself?

22. The Children's Book is a historical panorama that encompasses many political and social movements of the early twentieth century. Were you familiar with the figures and movements Byatt discusses: the Fabian Society, British socialists, women's rights, etc.? What is your understanding of their purpose in the novel?

23. The acknowledgments give a glimpse of the research that went into the novel; what subjects did you most enjoy learning about? How does Byatt's erudition enrich her storytelling?

24. The Great War seems to take nearly all of the characters by surprise; were you surprised by the scope of the damage it inflicted? Which character is most changed by the war? Did it change the way you saw the characters' sexual and personal secrets—and how they themselves saw their own lives?

25. Reread page 675, the last page of the novel. Is it a happy ending? What emotions are conjured by this reunion, which takes place in a far different setting than that which opens the novel—and around a bowl of soup?

Forewords & Introductions

Read an Excerpt