The Children's Book by AS Byatt

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.  

Two Lives by William Trevor

In Two Lives William Trevor offers two stories – Reading Turgenev and My House In Umbria. They are not mere stories, however, and read like substantial novellas. Both have women as central characters. Reading Turgenev features Mary Louise Dallon, an Irish Protestant whose parents support her decision to marry, though on the surface at least the match may be less than perfect. In My House In Umbria someone who claims to be called Emily Delahunty relates her chequered personal history against a backdrop of wholly unpredicted events that change the lives of all she invites to her house. In both stories, William Trevor examines a gap that might exist between reality lived, reality recalled and reality imagined. Writers create apparently fictitious worlds which, when embraced by characters who themselves are also fictitious, approach desired realities much closer than reality, itself.

Mary Louise Dallon is a young woman in an almost frighteningly normal Irish Protestant household. There are visits to the cinema and suitors of various ages and types, and work which will always be local and probably predictable. Predictable, that is, until someone does something rather unexpected. Mary Louise Dallon does do the unexpected. Reading Turgenev thus examines the consequences, predictable and otherwise, of this departure from the expected norm. And, of course, the Turgenev that gets read is itself fiction. But, for Mary Louise its imagined world becomes perhaps more important than the strange reality that surrounds her. People who share her life ignore the reality or, when it does not suit their bias, they recreate it almost as their own fiction. The effect on Mary Louise is devastating, or perhaps the consequences were inevitable, products of her own mis-interpretations or mis-understanding of reality. As a result, Reading Turgenev becomes an almost viscerally moving experience, where real violence is done to the central character without a finger ever being raised in threat. It-s all done with words. And eventually, those words are themselves a fiction.

My House In Umbria features a writer who is known as Emily Delahunty. The name might be unlikely. Perhaps much of what she relates about herself is of the same ilk. She has been here and there – Idaho, Africa, Umbria, English towns. She has suffered parental confusion and probably abuse, has been exploited in the USA and has been in business in Africa. But then, she is also a creator of romantic, perhaps sentimental fiction.  An apparently random event brings about equally chance encounters when people who seem to need one another congregate in Emily’s house in Umbria. Throughout she confuses real events with those of her own fiction. There is no denying reality, but this can also be created. She is clearly presenting to others her own version of reality that is far from the frame of a confident older woman in which she casts herself. Which version of reality will provoke belief?

Throughout William Trevor’s book the real joy is the author’s resplendent prose.  It surprises. It decorates, it twists, turns and celebrates. These fictional characters become completely real. Utterly credible, despite their propensity to live in imagined worlds. The overall concept is stunning. The detail is devilish, the consequences of these fictions apparently real.

Family Album by Penelope Lively.

One comment that is often made about many writers - usually women - is that all too often the material does not venture beyond the garden gate. Domesticity rules, reigns and all too often stifles. Except, of course, when it falls into the grasp of a truly expert writer, when these self-imposed limits open up a veritable universe of experience.

In Family Album, Penelope Lively often gets far beyond the garden gate, but strangely, she convinces us that in the minds of her characters, that limit is a permanent horizon, the crossing of which will never be possible. The garden gate in question gives us open access to Allersmead, a sprawling three story Victorian middle class dwelling, perfect for a large family with live-in staff. And, on opening the front door to be greeted by the ubiquitous smell of fine family cooking, it is this arrangement that we encounter. Charles, aloof, bookish, perhaps a snob and utterly dedicated to the pursuit of pseudo-academic, self-defined literary explorations in his study, is married to Alison, the wife and mother. They have uncountable children -  is it five, is it six? - and also host a Scandinavian maid-cum-nanny-cum-home-help-cum-whatever-else, as we will learn.

Allersmead, the Victorian pile, is witness to the myriad of events, games, meals, relationships, disputes, treaties, failures, successes and accommodations that family life inevitably entails. Penelope Lively seems not to claim that these people are anything special, though they clearly are. By virtue of their individuality and personality, they are unique, both as individuals and as a family. They are nothing special. But then everything about them is special. Just how does Charles manage to keep writing books that sell? What is he actually doing behind that closed sturdy door? And what do the children get up to when they disappear to play in the cellar? And from where does Alison draw her inspiration for all those delectable table treats? It is, perhaps, a mystery.

Do not expect a plot. There is none. But who needs a plot when lives are drawn as perfectly as this? The lives themselves, the family life indeed as a character in its own right become the plot. We are drawn in as a guest and observer, possibly even participant. And it is the accuracy, poignancy and precision of observation and expression at which we marvel. This is writing of the utmost beauty and skill. Every word seems crafted to supply a detail that would be lacking in a thousand pictures. Genius at work.

At least that's how Charles might see it. Ingrid, the Scandinavian maid, moves out for a while and family hiatus ensues. She returns and lives are picked up where they were left off. Except that perhaps some family members have picked up more than they knew. Lives diverge. Children grow up  and start to assert their individuality, their personal priorities. Where will it lead than? And will it be where they wanted to go. Only time will tell.

Family Album is one of the most beautiful, most moving books it is possible to imagine. Be drawn along with these lives, and there will be no consequences, for there perhaps never are. We become what we are, we aspire to what we imagine, and we achieve precisely what we achieve. Our goal is to be human, though not all of us achieves that particular end. We err. We lie, perhaps. We deceive, do we? In Penelope Lively's Family Album we will find all the snapshots, all the pictures that tell the story, but it's the words that count, so few, saying so much, each one worth a thousand pictures.

Another Part Of The Wood by Beryl Bainbridge

Another Part Of The Wood by Beryl Bainbridge first appeared in 1968. It was a significant year. The book’s vintage shows through via passing reference to recognisable ephemera. Characters rejoice in wearing flared trousers, for instance, and remark when P J Proby sings on the car radio. Quaint, wasn’t it? There’s a holiday retreat in the north Wales hills. There are some cabins in the wood. They offer what would sound like very basic accommodation in today’s terms. But back in the 1960s, when foreign package holidays were still not the norm and no more likely encountered than a week in a caravan at Flamborough, the holiday-makers in the book no doubt looked forward to the experience. It was then, as now, a trip back to nature. Beryl Bainbridge’s forté is the presentation and juxtaposition of characters. In many ways, the discovery of their relationships is the plot. So it does not help the prospective reader if I give a detailed description of them in a review. But a cursory glance at them reveals how, after more than forty years, their identities and their concerns have remained remarkably modern. There’s a couple of families. There’s marriage and not marriage. There are children, both vulnerable and exploitative. There are flashbacks to a wartime experience that still makes everyday life hard to bear long before the term “post-combat stress disorder” had passed a campaigner’s lips. There is both pride and fear wrapped together. There are others who can’t cope with who they are. Someone is overweight. How modern can you get? Someone else stammers when over-wrought. There is someone who is easily led, and someone who wants to lead. There are people getting away from it all, and other who actively want to seek out experience. There are those who regard the rural area as a threat because of its lack of urban familiarity, and then there are those for whom it is a liberation. While a family argues over a game of Monopoly, someone almost burns down the real estate. There’s even more going on under the surface. A contemporary reader might find the obvious lack of linear plot somewhat confusing. Reading Beryl Bainbridge is a bit like sitting on the sea. Waves come with regularity. They are all different, but eventually a pattern emerges. And it’s a pattern where all the usual – and remarkable – human traits can be found. The final act may be over-played, but the experience is lasting, just as long as it lasts. It’s a bit like life, actually. View this book on amazon Another Part of the Wood (Penguin Decades)