The
Children's Book by AS Byatt is a vast, almost rambling novel about several
families and multiple lives. It is the kind of novel where a review must
concentrate on the context and setting and leave out any detail, for there is
far too much of that to do any of it justice. The detail is so extensive that
to include anything in particular would elevate it above its relevance in the
overall scenario. In the end it all hangs together beautifully and the
contrasting, yet similar lives of its characters serve to illustrate the social
mores and concerns of its setting. Multiple characters live through more than
twenty years of their lives and descriptions of specific events happen on every
page. No review could do justice to any part of this veritable tangle of
history and stories. And, more than that, it is the detail of these events and
interrelationships that form the very currency of this work. What happens, and
to whom is happens is important and should not be revealed.
But the setting and the context are important and, since these are part
of a history we all share, then there is no reason not to set them out in some
detail. It is the context, both cultural and political, that this shared
history inhabits that informs what we understand when we read a novel as
complex and profound as this.
We begin in the mid-eighteen-nineties. We are generally among the
professional upper middle classes and bi-locate between London and Kent, with
much more happening out of the city. But it is the then modern Victoria and
Albert Museum where the tale begins with the discovery of a lad called Philip
camping out in the already dusty cellars, where the already massive collection
of objects that cannot be displayed are in storage. Philip seems to have
talent, but then he is a working-class lad from the Potteries, so whatever his
abilities he is unlikely to be taken seriously. He has run away from a poor
home and the bowels of the museum have become a rough home. Until he is
discovered. Luckily, he is embraced by people who would like to help.
Many families inhabit this tale, but crucially it is a woman called
Olive who repeatedly takes centre stage. She is a writer and regularly invents
stories for her children. Ostensibly, these are the children's stories of the
title but, as the book progresses, we realise that the meat of the novel is the
real-life stories that the young people in this assemblage of families enact.
As ever, reality proves to be far more immediate and unpredictable than
imagination, which tends to resort to received worlds that can only exist in an
abstract or ideal form or reconstruct the real thing via fantasy. And it is
fantasy that is so often used to obscure the raw and often inadmissible truth
of real lives.
When Olive writes these stories, her imagined worlds fit the fashions of
the time. And in the 1890s there is much of human life that is only ever
discussed euphemistically, despite its being lived in the flesh. Consequences
are all around but admitting their existence in any explicit way is rarely
possible. They exist only in allusion, even when reality pokes its nose into
the bubble. This particular late Victorian world is that of a liberal middle
class, gently socialist of the Fabian variety, but also imbued with the
conservatism of their social class and their upbringing. One really does not
want to maltreat the lower classes, but really one does get such little
opportunity to demonstrate one's true values. One is conscious, of course, of
the obvious difference in standards of dress, with our polite society ever
conscious of material, colour, accessory, decoration and ensemble. And, of
course, it's never dirty... but one must not judge. One must reform.
But this is also a world where women have become hungry for
emancipation. At the start of this shared history that spans over twenty years,
there are murmurings of desired independence, imaginings of opportunity, dreams
of fulfillment outside the home, the bed and the cradle. The link between the
latter two would only be made in the imagination, of course. Except in reality,
which only rarely obtrudes into discourse, there are skeletons in cupboards,
past excesses that have been denied, encounters that perhaps have been
intimated only in the imagination. But these people are not prepared for the
emotions they feel, nor the natural drives that overtake them. They succumb,
knowing they should not, and then invent fiction and euphemism to explain away
the reality that just occasionally arrests them.
A greater reality is about to absorb them all, however. By the end of
The Children's Story, there have been suffragettes and suffragists, protest,
sabotage, imprisonment and death, all in furtherance of a cause soon to be won.
Ironically, it was perhaps World War One, which also grinds to its grim
conclusion before the end the novel, that brings so much death to the generation
of the children at the start of the book, that guarantees these women will
receive their emancipation, if only to fill a labor shortage.
The majority of The Children's Book describes what might be termed a
family saga involving multiple families either side of an Anglo-German
relationship. The book concerns itself with identity, gender politics and
roles, denied sexuality and eventually passionate reality. There are helpings
of Fabian socialism, arts and crafts and little touches of class difference.
There is always sexual repression married to moments of excess, with its
physical consequences, both social and personal. These are characters who
really do populate the story, and thus make the story in their own terms. None
of these people act out events just so that they can be listed in the book's
experience.
But at the same time, these people remain distant. They never really let
out their feelings, except when they overstate them. Thus, they are of the era
that made them. and we become convinced of their reality, their credibility and
their dilemmas.
The Children's Book is perhaps a little difficult to start. It
introduces many characters and settings in its early chapters. But we do get to
know these people and the process is both gradual and convincing. By the end of
the work, beyond the end of World War One, their lives have been transformed,
though probably not in any way that their safe attitudes at the start might
have imagined. The Children's Book is not a historical novel. It is not a family
saga. It is not a love story or a tragedy. It aspires to no genre. Neither, it
must be stressed, is it general fiction, whatever that might be. It is a novel
that takes its reader into a different time, a different environment and a
different set of social values. And a truly great novel, because, by the end,
we not only feel we have visited different places, but also we have lived in
them.
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