A.S.Byatt is one of the establishment figures in the literary world so it was no surprise that her latest book. The Children’s Book, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize this year. Byatt and I haven’t gelled in the past – I found her Booker winning Possession dull and abandoned it halfway. Would The Children’s Book fare any better?
Set in London in 1895, the novel is based around the life of a successful children’s authoress called Olive Wellwood who, together with her banker husband Humphry, is a socially conscious altrusit and engaged in what in those days might have been termed ‘good works’. The Oxford-educated Humphry is an ex teacher of the poor and met miner’s daughter Olive at one of his lectures. Both are members of the Fabian Society, liberal, and believe in helping the poor. They live with their many children on a country estate. The story starts when Olive, on a visit to a curator in the new Victoria and Albert Museum, is introduced to a boy, Philip Warren, who has run away from his life of grinding poverty in the north country. Phillip wants to be a potter and shows aptitude for art, and Olive takes him under her wing, first putting him up at her own home and then with a local potter named Benedict Fludd and his family.
I’m afraid I had to give up after 165 pages. There are aspects of the novel that I found interesting, but so much more that was like wading through waist-deep sticky tar. Byatt employs an omniscient narrator’s voice which seems like a cop-out – we don’t find out facts through the story or dialogue but because Byatt informs us, eg ‘Philip followed Ada who was the cook’ ; or ‘Seraphita had once said…’; or ‘in winter it all disappeared’.
Worse, Byatt frequently launches into lectures about the historical era : ‘Children in these families at the end of the nineteenth century were different from children before or after. They were neither dolls nor miniature adults. They were not hidden away in nurseries but present at family meals…’
These asides could potentially be informative and interesting if they were kept to a minimum, but the all-knowing narrator butts in at every opportunity, and her lectures boom on and on for pages at a time. They seem obtrusive; they don’t melt seamlessly into the text but loom large like a party bore insistent on turning the conversation to a particular topic so he can interject an unfunny anecdote. Thus, while telling the reader about how Olive and Humphry met and the major events from their life together so far, Byatt pauses at the mention of the year 1881 when Humphry’s brother Basil finds the newly married Humphry a job in the Bank of England, and launches into a monologue about the historical events of the year: ‘The year 1881 was a year of beginnings. A number of idealists, millenarian projects and groups were founded. There were the Democratic Federation, the Society for Psychical Research, the Theosophical Society, the Anti-Vivisection movement…’
or:
‘The next day, Dec 29th, was the Feast of St Thomas a Becket, the turbulent priest and wilful politician, bloodily cut down before his own altar. Another proud and wilful politician, Joseph Chamberlain, was Colonial Secretary in the New Conservative Government. He secretly encouraged Cecil Rhodes, Prime Minister of the Cape Colony in South Africa, to send his friend, Dr Starr Jameson, with 500 men to invade the Boer republic of the Transvaal…’ And on and on it goes, like a driverless train, relentlessly surging on, oblivious to all around (in this case, stunned and bored silence ).
This background information would have been enlightening to come across naturally in the story, for example by way of a character joining some of the movements or being involved in the Boer invasion, but a dry exposition that drags on for over a page every few minutes becomes grindingly hard work, like swotting for a history exam at school where facts and dates are listed out of any context where they may be applied to real life.
The other major part of the novel which induced tedium was the frequent quoting from Olive Wellwood’s children’s books. She is writing individual books for all her children, and these are often transcribed at length. Perhaps children of the era did find tales of secret worlds beneath the ground peopled by strange minature beings enchanting, but having been brought up on the entertaining, irreverent child’s fare of the likes of Roald Dahl and Clement Freud, these tales grew wearying, especially as they sometimes ploughed on for eight pages of close-packed text at a time. With such dull, moralistic, teacherly tomes, I’m surprised the children of the era didn’t all queue up to hang themselves. Of course Byatt is making her stories representative of the times and kids’ books then were very different to today, but I couldn’t help thinking that she wouldn’t include such long screeds of these faux Victorian/Edwardian stories unless she actually thought they were entertaining.
Even as far as the prose is concerned, for such a respected figure Byatt’s text is often repetitive and clumsy. ‘He stepped down…pointy elegant toes…elegant moustache’ or ‘ ‘like charmed snakes’ Martin laughed, and Dobbin was charmed’ or ‘yesterday’s events had also transmuted themselves into story-matter… the half visible strings, like spider-silk, had transmuted themselves into other figures.’ Why this use of the same words so close together? Isn’t variation of language a fairly elementary step writers take to avoid boredom?
This is a great shame because Byatt is certainly someone who can write well, and there are sections which are actually almost engrossing, like when we find out that Olive and Humphry aren’t the perfect couple we think and that Humphry has had an affair. The section where Olive finds out about this affair and the fact that his mistress is pregnant leads to an almighty row which is actually convincingly conveyed.
I sometimes wonder whether some authors who have somehow become stalwarts of the literary world may stagnate; stop reading newer authors and so stop developing. Curiously, (and I say this as a woman who loves books by women), I find this more with established female authors of a certain age – Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer, Penelope Lively, Byatt – even their more recent novels seem strangely old-fashioned both in structure and style. Yet there are so many sharp, witty, clever female writers out there – the likes of Rachel Cusk, Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, Zoe Heller, Rose Tremain, Hilary Mantel (who won this year’s Man Booker for Wolf Hall) - some of whom have been around awhile themselves but show no signs of becoming stale.
So, on balance, I would give The Children’s Book a wide berth unless you have a deep interest in the social history of the era or are a devoted Byatt fan.
2 Responses to The Children’s Book – A.S.Byatt
Editors have been pretty much aced out of the publishing process, and this shows what happens in their absence. A friend reviewed a book for the Telegraph a while back, and showed me sentences from it which were incomprehensible jumbles. No one had proof-read, let alone edited it! The publisher was Harper Collins.
Hi Ian. I think with some very well established authors, like Byatt, sub-editors/editors may be nervous of incurring their wrath by suggesting cuts. I recently read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and while I enjoyed it as a lightweight, non literary thriller, there were whole screeds that could have been cut but possibly weren’t out of a misplaced reverence to the dead author.
Fiction publishing seems to veer between the two extremes: on the one hand, publishers are very reluctant to take on unknown authors, yet on the other, they waste whole forests of wood by not editing famous writers’ work much.
The Children’s Book might have been more enjoyable if someone had been firm enough to take a red biro and cut out long sections. The actual story parts were OK – it was the baggage of the history lessons that weighed it down.