A.S. Byatt: The Children's Book

Next week it's Frankfurt Book Fair time again, and I do so hope there will be no more spinelessness on the part of the organizers as there was in the advance events. As always I probably won't have much time to write but will report when I can on new books, interesting speeches and encounters.

But before the fair, a review:

A.S. Byatt: The Children's Book

A.S. Byatt is brilliant with period set pieces, literary ventriloquism and fairy tales, and this novel offers a lot of these; for example, the whole sequence taking place during the great world exhibition of 1900 in Paris is breathtaking, brings the ideas and passions of the era to life and makes the readers really see said exhibition, feel its impact on the characters. And the excerpts from fictional fairy tales and children's novels written by one of the main characters makes one wish these works would exist and could be read in their complete form.

What keeps me from loving the novel itself, though, is that the characters feel more like intellectual arguments than like people, and repetitive arguments at that. The Children's Book centres around three families, two of which are headed by artists - novelist Olive Wellwood (comes with a sister, husband and seven children), Arts and Crafts ceramicist Benedict Fludd (plus wife and three daughters), and Prosper Cain (plus daughter and son). In case you're missing Byatt's point that novelists of the Edwardian period ostensibly writing for children (and creating classic works of the genre) really wrote for themselves and managed to screw up real life children while they were at it, it's repeated in character thoughts, interviews, at least four or five times, in addition to being demonstrated through the plot. In case you're missing the point about how the start of sexual liberation post Victoria could also lead to sexual irresponsibility and criminality, and how the use of children in artistic work can be incredibly creepy, there are incesteous fathers all over the place - Fludd depicts his daughters in pornographic fashion, Olive's husband Humphrey makes a drunken pass at their eldest daughter Dorothy and tries to make it look better by telling her she's not his biological daughter (though she grew up believing she was, and he otherwise always treated her as his daughter), and even the most decent father of the novel, Prosper, rescues Fludd's daughter Imogen who is exactly the same age as his own daughter only to fall for her and marry her himself, going fluently from treating her as an additional daughter to courting her. And if you don't immediately feel a tingle of recognition when finding out that in the story Olive is writing for her favourite son Tom, the boy hero modelled on him has lost his shadow, don't worry. You'll also get the scene where Olive's family attends the premiere of Barrie's Peter Pan and Tom is the only one who dislikes the play before he follows the fate of Peter and Michael Llewelyn Davies, the brothers whose close relationship with J. M. Barrie inspired Peter Pan, and commits suicide. (Yes, that would be those boys from the movie Finding Neverland, where Barrie was Johnny Depp.)

It's not that I actually disagree with the individual arguments in question. A writer parent, no matter how wonderful he or she writes, can mess up their children spectacularly. (See also: Thomas Mann, Evelyn Waugh.) Angelica Garnett's (= daughter of Vanessa Bell) memoirs, Deceived with Kindness, are a good illustration of how being left in the dark about your biological parentage with belated revelations can leave you with life long resentments, even if the revelation in question doesn't come with a traumatic pass. And so forth. But I rarely feel the characters breathe outside of authorial intention, if you know what I mean, and I think Byatt would have achieved more if she had scaled down more. One of my favourite passages is Dorothy discovering her biological paternal family and Munich simultanously, where Byatt does. At this point, I was expecting the bio dad, who previously had shown up only in a cameo and a great homage to E.T.A. Hoffmann, as a puppeteer performing Der Sandman as a puppet play, to be yet another sinister father, but no, he was not, the half brothers were delightful, and the whole atmosphere of Munich at the start of the 20th century, when it was full of artists and joie de vivre, very well drawn. (Also, to give credit where due: Byatt is one of the few English authors who write German characters without using stereotypes. And who are well versed enough in the culture for a linguistic joke; Dorothy's not-really-aunt who is from Hamburg is horrified that she'll come back with a Bavarian accent before she travels to Munich.) Dorothy - who becomes one of the earliest female surgeons - in general is one of the characters who mostly escapes being used as a sledgehammer, except when she has to reflect on how her mother doesn't really write her children's stories for children.

You know, I can't help but compare this to what Neil Gaiman does in volume III of the Sandman saga, Dream Country. (Not least because all the Shakespearean names and repeated Midsummer Night's stages in The Children's Book are asking for it.) One of the stories in Dream Country deals with Shakespeare (not the first or the last time he shows up in Sandman.) It uses the framing narration of a staging of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It also uses the early death of Shakespeare's son Hamnet in a fictional way - in the story, Hamnet is travelling with his father. And there with a few lines of dialogue Gaiman makes Byatt's point about writers and their children, without needing several hundred pages complete with lectures on politics of the Edwardian age, not to mention triple father/daughter subplots. ("You must be very proud of your father, Hamnet," says one of the boy actors, to which Hamnet replies: "Proud? I suppose... He's very distant, Tommy. He doesn't seem like he's really there anymore. Not really. It's like he's somewhere else. Anything that happens he just makes stories out of it. (...) Judith - she's my twin sister - she once joked that if I died, he'd just write a play about it. Hamnet.")

So, all in all: an interesting novel that made me long for the books it is not - either Olive's fictional books, because the excerpts presented are so enticing, or a non-fiction treatise by Byatt on the Edwardian age and/or its literature.