The Children's Book [Paperback]

Complex and many layered this book concentrates on two families and their friends. Olive is a children's author and lives with her sister Violet, husband Humphrey and their children at a country house called Todefright. They live an apparently idyllic Bohemian existence. Benedict Fludd a genius who makes pots lives, by contrast, in Bohemian squalor with his wife Seraphita and children Imogen, Pomona and Geraint. The families are friends and have friends in common - Prosper Cain, a curator at the new Victoria and Albert museum and his children Julian and Florence, and the Methleys who are very much involved with the Fabian Society and the suffragettes.

The book is about the relationships between these people and others but it is just as much about the age they live in from 1895 to 1919. Historical personages flit into and out of the story. The main characters are inluenced by the morals and manners of the age they live in. The background is lush and decadent as the Victorian age gives way to the Edwardian. Social class is an issue and the Labour movement is gathering supporters.

The relationships between the characters are convoluted and nothing is what it seems. The arts and crafts they produce are rich and somehow redolent of decay. All are affected by the Great War and few come through it unscathed. The writing, as one might expect from this author is at once lush and austere. Characters are taken apart with a scalpel and their thoughts and feelings dissected for our entertainment. Descriptions are full of symbolism and many layered meanings. Conversations are cryptic and issues go unresolved and unmentioned.

If I have a criticism of the book it is that the end seemed a little rushed as though the author felt she needed to have an ending - satisfactory or not - for everyone in a very few pages. It seemed unfinished. Maybe this is part of a series and we shall meet at least some of these characters in later volumes. That said this is a masterpiece and every bit as good as the Booker Prize winning 'Possession'.

This is the first Byatt I've read since her marvellous Possession, and I suppose the first point is that it's not remotely similar, except in terms of weight and intent. Make no mistake. This is not an easy read, and I am used to serious books. Certainly, in the first half of the book I found myself unsure as to why my progress was so slow, despite finding time spent with it richly fascinating, and finding myself at moments bowled over and deeply moved by the psychological perspicacity of her writing. For reasons I cannot give away the momentum somehow leaps forward at around the half way mark, to effect a transition between a richly erudite but somehow uphill beginning to an ending, so compelling, throughout which one's heart is rising ever further into one's mouth.

The book brings vividly to life the years between 1895 to the end of the Great War, which is an era I have had little sympathy with before now. The book is about so many things, following an unusually large numnber of characters, through an intricate maze of plot lines and relationships. It is perhaps this shear ambition that made the earlier parts of the book somehow hard to keep going with and to develop visually in the mind's eye.

Being an aging flower-child myself, trying to hang on to whatever threads of idealism life might deign to leave me with, I find I am ever more fascinated by how the radical impulse has manifested in other times, and I suppose that is a main theme of the book, if there is one. We follow a cast of characters that are focussed with more or less sympathy around a household which is connected to all the multifarious expressions of radicalism as it was in this still so innocent time. We encounter Fabianism, with some of its internal dissents, as the moderate path of social activism among the well meaning well to do, and the various brands of extremist currents that operated alongside. William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement, continental anarchism with more or less commitment to violence, labour movements and the suffragettes. Amongst it all are the ever recurring themes of free thought and, most dangerously, free love. Byatt weaves a fascinating tapestry from this forment of ideas, occasionally shifting context out from the characters to the broad historical context of the day. Her presentation of the Boer war as being as much, if not more, about gold and financial interests as about territorial considerations had, I'm guessing quite deliberately, big resonances with the current debate over Iraq, and served to render the period all the more contemporary.

The book is also about art and artifacts, several of the characters being focussed on the creation of artworks, or on their collection and curation. Part of this theme is the writing of Children's stories by the woman who is the central character of the book, insofar as their is one, and the web of contradictions that builds around devotion to such work in a world full of adult hypocrisy and dark secrets.

What else is the book about? So we spend a lot of time in the Romney Marshes and out towards Dungeness, which despite being adjacent to the metropolis is rendered almost another country by its geography. It's about men and about women, and men and women together. Byatt has an insight into male psychology that is almost uncomfortable at times. It is also about sex being the first stumbling block to all utopian schemes, especially in an age without reliable contraception.

The book is beautifully researched and she has a superb eye for the little known details that render aspects of the time that we think we know about in new and arresting lights; the aftermath of the Titanic, Anglo-German relations in the years leading to the Great War, the extremity of the suffragette struggle, the social impact of Peter Pan and the technical wizardry that went into its theatrical production, and so on.

There is much I am not saying about the book because I do not want to spoil the dynamic for prospective readers. In what I have written I have tried to give an idea of the book's themes and goals, that will hopefully help people to decide whether it is suited to their tastes and interests, but at the timeless human level all I wish to say is in the title I have given this to this review.

Few books have left me with such mixed reactions. The first half seemed to lack momentum, and it wasn't difficult to pin down why. Too much emphasis on the interior life of the eternally self-absorbed Olive Wellwood and her ceaseless and rather dull fairy tales. Rather too much fanciful description of the artistic impulse and, more specifically, much repetitive detail on pottery making. Plot often played second fiddle to didactic social historical analysis. And with such a large cast of characters, many are given rather short shrift and potentially dramatic situations bypassed in a sentence or two - for instance, Humphry's ongoing affair with Olive's sister, Violet.

By the second half things began to pick up. We leave the older characters behind, which is a blessing since most of them were frankly odious - only Prosper Cain and Anselm Stern offering a counterbalance to the glut of conscienceless, philandering males. As the Victorian era gives way to the Edwardian, we move into a period of restless social change and emerging feminism that gives an added dynamism to the lives of the younger generation, and generally they acquit themselves with far more wisdom and integrity than their parents. Of course, you can see where it's all going to end - in the mud and trenches of the Great War - but this adds poignancy to their youthful idealism and their struggles to establish themselves in a rapidly changing world. History, as we know, is about to overtake them. And the inevitable denouement was indeed moving, with its rash of dreaded letters and longed-for reunions.

Byatt demonstrates many qualities of a great novelist. She is a consummate social historian, and a master of characterisation - you never fail to believe in her creations as real people. She is an able wordsmith, and a profound thinker in this hugely ambitious, panoramic novel, lingering on larger themes like love and compromise, maturity, selfishness and loss.

But though moved to tears towards the end, I felt this was a deeply flawed book. On reflection, what was really lacking was not a good writer, but a good - and brave - editor. There is a great deal of repetition - we are frequently told the same thing several times, as if Byatt had forgotten that she'd said it already, or had thought that we needed reminding. (For instance, we are told no less than three times throughout the book that Olive was not particularly engaged with the suffrage movement.) Then there are the recurring and somewhat inexplicable mentions of the `beautiful' Rupert Brookes, which along with the frequent references to Oscar Wilde and William Morris gives a feel of some kind of historical name-dropping. While it's perhaps understandable, with a work of this size, that Byatt might lose track of what she has written before and replicate some of it, it is much less forgivable that her editor failed to pick it up and ask her to revise.

Also a more ruthless editor might also have persuaded Byatt to excise those tedious fairy tales. This is not actually a children's book. We don't really want page after page about lost shadows or little people or loblollies or whatever. When the repellent Olive herself describes them as `interminable worms,' I had to laugh at the aptness of her description.

I also agree with other reviewers that the end was rather badly done. After so much focus on Olive at the beginning of the novel, she is all but forgotten at the end. Ditto Philip Warren - interest in him just seems to peter out - though at least he is allowed to survive. Characters are abandoned as if their role in the novel had merely been a cameo. In life, loose ends are a fact; in literature they are something far more unsatisfying. It all feels as if Byatt had simply run out of steam, or finally exceeded her own word count.

I left the book feeling both admiring and a little sad. Admiring, because there is so much here that is truly wonderful. Sad because the novel, allowed to hit the bookstands without the judicious editing it needed, fell just short of the greatness it deserved.