Product Description

Shortlisted



for the Man Booker Prize


A spellbinding novel, at once sweeping and intimate, from the Booker Prize–winning author of Possession, that spans the Victorian era through the World War I years, and centers around a famous children’s book author and the passions, betrayals, and secrets that tear apart the people she loves.

When Olive Wellwood’s oldest son discovers a runaway named Philip sketching in the basement of the new Victoria and Albert Museum—a talented working-class boy who could be a character out of one of Olive’s magical tales—she takes him into the storybook world of her family and friends.

But the joyful bacchanals Olive hosts at her rambling country house—and the separate, private books she writes for each of her seven children—conceal more treachery and darkness than Philip has ever imagined. As these lives—of adults and children alike—unfold, lies are revealed, hearts are broken, and the damaging truth about the Wellwoods slowly emerges. But their personal struggles, their hidden desires, will soon be eclipsed by far greater forces, as the tides turn across Europe and a golden era comes to an end.

Taking us from the cliff-lined shores of England to Paris, Munich, and the trenches of the Somme, The Children’s Book is a deeply affecting story of a singular family, played out against the great, rippling tides of the day. It is a masterly literary achievement by one of our most essential writers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #761 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-06
• Released on: 2009-10-06
• Format: Deckle Edge
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 688 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780307272096
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Byatt's overstuffed latest wanders from Victorian 1895 through the end of WWI, alighting on subjects as diverse as puppetry, socialism, women's suffrage and the Boer War, and suffers from an unaccountably large cast. The narrative centers on two deeply troubled families of the British artistic intelligentsia: the Fludds and the Wellwoods. Olive Wellwood, the matriarch, is an author of children's books, and their darkness hints at hidden family miseries. The Fludds' secrets are never completely exposed, but the suicidal fits of the father, a celebrated potter, and the disengaged sadness of the mother and children add up to a chilling family history. Byatt's interest in these artists lies with the pain their work indirectly causes their loved ones and the darkness their creations conceal and reveal. The other strongest thread in the story is sex; though the characters' social consciences tend toward the progressive, each of the characters' liaisons are damaging, turning high-minded talk into sinister predation. The novel's moments of magic and humanity, malignant as they may be, are too often interrupted by information dumps that show off Byatt's extensive research. Buried somewhere in here is a fine novel. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Keith Donohue In 1990, A.S. Byatt received the Booker Prize for "Possession," a postmodern masterpiece that is, in part, a historical romance set in the late Victorian era. "The Children's Book," her brilliant new novel, which has a good chance of winning the 2009 Booker Prize on Tuesday evening, takes a jump forward to fin de siècle Europe, from the end of the Victorian era to the beginning of the modern age. Bristling with life and invention, it is a seductive work by an extraordinarily gifted writer. Set primarily in the downs and marshes of the Kent countryside and the southeastern coast at Dungeness, the story also flings characters to London, Paris, Munich, the Italian Alps and the battlefields of Europe, where real historical figures such as J.M. Barrie and Emma Goldman mix with invented characters including layabout students, Fabian socialists, potters, puppeteers, randy novelists and poets in the trenches of France. In its encyclopedic form, "The Children's Book" is a kind of anatomy of the age in which the young men and women of the Edwardian era were confronted by a rapidly changing society and the grim reality of the Great War. But more compelling than the social and political history is the domestic drama among the dozen or more characters that Byatt draws in vivid detail. The novel spirals out from the families and social circle of the young writer Olive Wellwood, her sister Violet and husband, Humphry. They live in a charmed home in the countryside with their seven children, though we follow most closely the older two, Tom, who is a sort of "lost" child more at home in the woods, and his more practical and determined sister Dorothy. Olive is a famous writer of children's books, in the golden age of fiction about children, inventing fairy tales drawn from her reading of folk tales and fantasy, observation of her children's lives, the magic of the Kent landscape and pieces of her own childhood. After her husband resigns his position with a bank, Olive becomes the chief breadwinner for the family. In addition to her published work, she creates for each child a private story, bound in a special journal. Byatt describes several of those books, but she unlocks the one for Tom, Olive's oldest son, with devastating effect. The story -- about a boy who loses his shadow and must search for it underground -- closely mirrors Tom's internal and psychological life. When she mines her son's story for a new play, "Tom Underground," a darker take on the motifs of Peter Pan, her son becomes truly lost. When asked by a journalist to explain the private children's books, Olive says: " 'Well, I sometimes feel, stories are the inner life of this house. A kind of spinning of energy. I am this spinning fairy in the attic, I am Mother Goose quacking away what sounds like comforting chatter but is really -- is really what holds it all together.' She gave a little laugh, and said 'Well, it makes money, it does hold it all together.' " This story about the nature of art and commerce and the private influences on public performance is at the core of the book, but it is only one of several interlinked story lines. Behind the public story of Olive and Humphry's marriage is a series of private indiscretions, including some revelations as startling as those in Byatt's novella "Angels and Insects." On the surface, middle-class Victorian and Edwardian England may have been obsessed with appearances and propriety, but as with every age, all-too-human desires lurk just underground. Secret passions electrify the stories of the other families, too, in this multilayered novel. There's an investment banker and his German wife and their anarchist son; the mercurial Arts and Crafts ceramicist Benedict Fludd and his addled family; and a widowed military man whose Cambridge Apostle son is struggling with his homosexuality. Add to this heady mix a true lost boy who escaped from a pottery factory and is discovered hiding below the Victoria and Albert Museum. All those characters connect in a tangled web, often erotic and frequently just this side of madness. Through these complex personal tales, Byatt shows the aesthetics of the age, which, in response to the tremendous changes wrought by the rise of industrialism, emphasized the work of individual craftsmen. "The Children's Book" holds a mirror to the new middle class during an era of growing appreciation for children and greater sexual freedom for women and for the love that dares not speak its name. That Byatt marries this novel of ideas with such compelling characters testifies to her remarkable spinning energy.
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Review
“Sweeping . . . At the center of this epic are the Wellwoods and their many offspring. Olive, the matriarch, is the author of children’s books, vivid tales of fairies and demons, little people and spirits. . . . Along with other families, they weave in and out of one another’s lives, building an edifice of domestic tranquility that increasingly becomes a house of cards. . . . Byatt rewards [the reader] by serving a literary feast, telling the story not only of these characters but of their world. She sprinkles in cameos by major figures of this era [and] sets elaborate stages for her characters in historical events . . . And she creates an alternate universe, the frightening fantasy world from which Olive draws as she writes of children who are lured away from their parents to live with magical beings, or who must descend into the depths of hidden worlds to save themselves. In the fictional world of these stories and the real world of the Wellwoods, deceptions shape young lives that grow to adulthood in a world on fire. Byatt fills a huge canvas with the political and social changes that swept the world in those years, and the devastation of war that swept its families. She elicits great compassion for the individual beings caught in that tableau. It’s not a tale you’ll soon forget.”
 —Susan Kelly, USA Today 

“Engaging and rewarding . . . Spanning the two and a half decades before the First World War, [The Children’s Book] centers on the Wellwood family, led by a banker with radical inclinations and his wife, the author of best-selling fairy tales. At their country estate, they preside over a motley brood of children and host midsummer parties for fellow-Fabians, exiled Russian anarchists, and German puppeteers. But the idyll contains dark secrets, as a potter whom the family takes in for a time discovers. Byatt is concerned with the complex, often sinister relationship between parent and child, which she explores through various works of art, using them to refract and illuminate the larger narrative.”
 —The New Yorker
 
“Rich, expansive . . . a portrait of a time of imminent change—the years [in England] when the Victorian golden age depreciated into Edwardian silver and then, with World War I, into an ‘age of lead.’ The novel’s early sections take us to the country home of the Wellwoods, who welcome a lost youth into their midst. . . . These scenes contain everything any reader could ever dream of: a romantic country house; neighboring woods containing treehouses and other surprises; garden parties; puppet shows; leisurely intellectual discussions—all meticulously imagined by one of our very best contemporary writers. . . . Byatt captures the modern world’s uneasy crawl from its cocoon with a commanding section on the Paris Expo of 1900 . . .[Byatt’s] observation of the minutiae of moments in her characters’ lives is intense. . . . If she hadn’t been a writer, Byatt should have been a naturalist or a painter. At times she captures the natural world with the precision and neutrality of Constable . . . at others, you get the feeling details have been assembled with the cunning of Poussin. . . . ‘Cunning’ also applies to the novel’s stories within stories. . . . Byatt is a spinner of multiple tales, adding gorgeous layers and dimensions to this fictional world. Splendid in themselves, these stories comment on the novel at large. [One of these stories] says the most, I think, about what Byatt achieves in The Children’s Book. Whom does this title refer to? Olive’s story ‘The People in the House in the House’ is a sly, irony-steeped tale of a little girl who captures fairies and imprisons them in her dollhouse, only to be captured herself and imprisoned by a giant child. In watching Byatt’s characters, especially parents who insist on clear paths for their young though their own lives are anything but clear, the simple message of that story—that no one is ever in total control—shows The Children’s Book is a title that applies to everyone.”
 —Nick Owchar, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Majestic . . . Dazzling . . . Wonderful . . . A fascinating tour d’horizon of a society in flux . . . It has become commonplace when praising a writer’s craft to pose the question: How many other writers could do what he or she has done? But in the case of A. S. Byatt, she is so amazingly talented and so prodigiously and fearlessly imaginative, that the question really becomes more: Is there any other writer today who can pull off the kind of artistic feat that she can? . . . By [The Children’s Book’s] conclusion, the characters—and the enthralled readers—have hurtled through the new century’s tumultuous first two decades, including the devastation and carnage of World War I. And here at the novel’s end is where Byatt again demonstrates her audacity—and the artistry to match—by actually writing poems in the voice of one of the characters she has created, authentic poetry of the prewar years giving way to coruscating verse typical of the great war poets . . . What you see here, as you do throughout the novel, is the strength and fire of Byatt’s imagination. Whether she is summoning up the mud and blood of Flanders fields, the dissecting room at a fledgling medical school for women, the brutality of life at a school for privileged young boys—and countless other places, such are the protean splendors of this novel—her touch is sure. Children’s literature in that poem and the book’s very title stem from the protagonist Olive Wellwood, a celebrated author of fairy tales and such books for young people. And of course Byatt being Byatt, she treats us to some marvelous tales from Olive’s (and of course her own) pen. . . . Olive is a marvelously original creation, full-blooded and magnificently realized in these pages, no pale imitation of anyone else. . . . In its enormous range and depth, [The Children’s Book] resembles those great Victorian novels in which the author is clearly steeped. Her learning is matched by an imaginative capacity to transmogrify what she has studied into something truly felt. There is a great deal in this novel about enthusiasm and disillusion and about gusto for life tempered by loss. Readers will learn a lot from The Children’s Book, but despite its being the product of all that learning, it is never didactic. Such is the power of the book that they will feel all that is packed into it, because Byatt has succeeded in her own literary quest ‘to go back to, to retrieve, and to reinhabit’ an important part of our past.”
—Martin Rubin, San Francisco Chronicle 
 
“Fascinating . . . An exhilarating panorama . . . Passionate, intelligent . . . The Children’s Book will undoubtedly be compared most often with Possession because of the scale of the enterprise, the historical setting, and the deft intertwining of fabricated texts. . . . One of the significant pleasures of The Children’s Book is also what makes it hardest to summarize: The novel has no main character, no hero or heroine. Instead, Byatt follows four families and numerous minor characters from the summer of 1895 to the summer of 1919. . . . The result is a richly peopled narrative that encompasses an unusual breadth of artistic, intellectual, social, and political concerns . . . Byatt manages her large cast and many plots by using a magisterially omniscient point of view capable of giving us the broad facts of history and geography and also of creating considerable intimacy. [She is] a master builder, laying each brick of her tower with consummate skill. Here is a novel in which everything matters.”
—Margot Livesey, Boston Sunday Globe

"If you buried The Children's Book under a few inches of leafy much, it might begin to sprout—that's how alive it is, how potent. David Copperfield, Prospero, Jane Eyre, and others haunt this novel, poised on the cusp of the 20th century, in which a raggedy kiln worker's son crosses class boundaries to practice pottery; a lovely matriarch writes dark fairy tales; children waste away from toxic family secrets; and ambitious women strain against tradition. Byatt is a master storyteller, but even more spellbinding than this novel's descriptions of nature and the supernatural is its intensely personal narrative of the Great War, where dreams of justice and mercy die hard."
 —Cathleen Medwick, O, The Oprah Magazine 
 
"A complete and complex world, a gorgeous bolt of fiction . . . The central character, a writer of children's books, lives with her prodigious family on a romantically meadowed and wooded piece of Kentish property. Of course, real life is more complicated and less child-friendly than the fairy tale she struggles to maintain, and, as in a fairy tale, the characters' true identities can be a surprise. A tangle of secondary families ranging over rich historical territory provides plenty of meaty story. But the magic is in the way Byatt suffuses her novel with details, from the shimmery sets of a marionette show to clay mixtures and pottery glazes."
 —The Atlantic Monthly 
 
“Magnificent . . . Inspired . . . Starts as an idyll and ends in hell. It is like one of those vast canvases by Fragonard depicting figures in silk and lace playing lawn games, oblivious to the huge, menacing clouds looming behind them. [The Children’s Book] is an ensemble piece. Each character has a story, and while those stories may intersect from time to time, as characters’ stories must, each remains separate and distinct. To accommodate them, the novel takes on the quality of a mansion with many rooms and passageways...

Customer Reviews

"Anyone Would Think I Was A Changeling..."
This is an immensely difficult book to review, simply because the vast majority of casual readers probably *won't* automatically enjoy "The Children's Book." It is a dense, complex, ambitious, challenging novel that is not so much a story as it is a detailed portrait of a family, a community and an era. Stretching from 1895 to 1919 and set predominantly in the Kent countryside, A.S. Byatt's saga contains no central character or predominant plotline; instead it chronicles the historical, cultural and social context of the Victorian/Edwardian period and the effect it has on three families and their assorted associates.

Humphrey and Olive Wellwood live in an idyllic cottage called Todefright, where they host midsummer parties and watch as their brood of children (with special emphasis on their two eldest Tom and Dorothy) play in the sun. Olive is a successful children's writer, seeking new inspiration from Prosper Cain, a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, who in turn has two children: Julian and Florence. Connecting these two families with the third is Philip Warren, a lower-class runaway hiding in the museum, who is discovered by Tom and Julian and sent to become an apprentice to Benedict Fludd, a manic potter who lives with his vague, inert daughters, Imogen and Pomona. Secrets abound in each household: infidelities, political agendas, hidden pasts, simmering hatreds and changeling children.

At the book's core are the various relationships between parents and children; whether they be foster parents, illegitimate children, unwanted pregnancies, secret parentages, or even a play on the term that artists often use in referring to their work as "their children." In most cases, it is this need to *create* that drives the characters, and how that which is created can be exploited, betrayed or destroyed. Olive tries to reach her children through personalized fairytales, whilst simultaneously drawing on them for inspiration; in a much darker version of this somewhat parasitical relationship, Fludd pulls creativity out of his daughters in a horrific way, and is forced to conceal the finished products. Creativity seems to have a destructive force, both on the artist and the muse, just as the parent neglects or preys on the lives of the younger generation.

The consequences are dire: Tom is caught in stasis between childhood and adulthood; Imogen and Pomona are reduced to listless, lifeless shells. In their turn, all the children of the novel grow from the innocence of childhood into gradual disillusionment and frustration as they experience their awakening to the world; most having been emotionally, mentally and physically sapped by the older generation. The inevitability of the WWI on the horizon comes almost (and oddly) as a relief.

As always, Byatt's distinctive prose is beautifully rendered, and used to its best effect when dealing with the thoughts and ideas of the extensive cast. The sentences are short and somewhat choppy, lending them an immediacy and spontaneity that initially feels too abrupt, but soon becomes natural. The narrative flows in and out of different minds, and point of views switch from character to character mid-paragraph, and sometimes even mid-sentence. It all gives off the impression that the reader is an intimate and yet distant observer to these people's lives; privy to their day-to-day occurrences and yet cut off from several of the darkest secrets which are eluded to, but never elaborated on in their entirety. We are given glimpses into their secret worlds, but no clear answers.

Although the sheer number of characters is rather overwhelming at first, I felt a slow but steady pull into their lives, regarding who they are and what shaped them: be it other family members, the art that they create, or the period of history they live in. I've seen this book described as a "cultural study" and that's a fairly succinct way of putting it. An author of historical fiction has the task of making the past come alive, and I think Byatt succeeds in making her characters relatable to a contemporary audience, whilst still keeping them products of their time in terms of their expectations, thought-patterns and behaviour. The Victorian era was a period of stifling repression and the inevitable uprising that followed, as movements of the anarchists and suffragettes stir things up, and the ideologies of sexuality and class differences up-heave the social norms.

Byatt examines how this political backdrop of the artistic and political life of Europe can affect a single individual, and in this effort she certainly shows her research. There are huge blocks of information and exposition that detail the historical context that the characters inhabit, with extensive commentary on political issues, vast tracts of dialogue from speeches on various ideologies, and short appearances from the likes of J.M. Barrie and Oscar Wilde.

This is where "The Children's Book" will divide viewers. It is a slow-paced, meandering read, told in excessive detail. There is not an outfit, a meal, a puppet show, or a work of art that goes by without it being described down to the last nuance. To be honest: yes, it *does* detract from the story. In order for the reader not to miss the contextual symbolism and thematic depth, Byatt makes sure to list ALL of it, and much of the detail on clothing and architecture is simply superfluous. Many unprepared readers might find themselves rushing through the details in order to get to a plot that simply isn't coming. For better or worse, the details ARE the plot, linked inextricably with the character studies and the overarching subject matter.

Needless to say, some readers will be more patient than others. The family drama is infinitely more interesting than the history lesson, but toward the end of the novel, both aspects start to tally up to the same page-count. I have to admit, I skimmed at times.

Another aspect worth mentioning is that the blurb is somewhat misleading in its mention of WWI, accidentally giving off the impression that the war is a significant part of the book. In actuality, the war begins when the story is about to close: although several closing chapters provide details on the fates of various characters during the fighting, it swiftly skips ahead to a post-war coda. That is not to say that the war segment is mishandled (it is tragically appropriate given the way the "children" of the title meet their futures), only that the book description gives the war more attention than it probably should. Rest assured, this is *not* a war story.

There also seems to be a growing tendency to compare this book favourably with Byatt's most famous novel: Possession: A Romance, with the general assertion being: "if you liked "Possession", you'll love "The Children's Book!" This advertising gimmick is another misnomer. It does not necessarily follow that if you enjoyed the previous, you'll like the latter. Though it is written in the same delicate style and with the same reliance on fairytales and myths to provide thematic resonance, "Possession" was essentially a romance and a historical mystery. "The Children's Book" is quite different, with vastly different aims in mind, and whereas "Possession" closed on hope and bittersweetness, this book is markedly more subdued and desultory.

I feel as though I haven't given this a "good" review when in actuality I immensely enjoyed this novel. I was moved by the characters, fascinated by the style and intrigued by much (though not all) of the detail. It is however, most certainly not for everyone; it demands your full attention, as well as a heck of a lot of patience that some may feel is tested on a novel that not only takes its time, but which concludes on a rather open, indecisive note. Hopefully this review will help you decide whether or not it's for *you*.

675 wondrous pages
Reading A.S. Byatt's "The Children's Book" is much like reading a 19th century novel; you read it the way you lose yourself in a densely plotted story by Trollope or Hardy. The first three sections ("Beginnings, "The Age of Gold," "The Age of Silver") span the period from around 1895 to just before World War I, from the end of Victoria's reign through the Edwardian era. The shorter last section ("The Age of Lead") includes the war itself, although from the moment the novel opens you know, just by looking at the birth dates, that all the boys growing into young men will come to suffer terribly. "The Children's Book" is historical fiction, and many real life characters pass through its pages, including Oscar Wilde, Emma Goldman, and G.B. Shaw. One of the central characters, the children's writer Olive Wellwood, whose idyllic home "Todefright" is where much of the "Age of Gold" is set, is based (according to an interview Byatt gave to "New York Times" reporter Charles McGrath) on the writer E. Nesbit, and other characters are also loosely based on real lives.

However, it is not just the characters that make this novel compelling. Byatt wants you to feel how different this time period is from our own, although it's hardly distant. Olive's children run free through a kind of children's paradise. Their elders attend earnest lectures on the "Woman Question" and on the plight of the poor. Time moves slowly, before the invention of the motorcar. Female dress (described in lush detail by Byatt) dazzles, even as it conceals the ankles. Literature for children becomes an art form. Byatt's attention to detail is astonishing: the world of pottery, the world of folklore, the worldview of the Fabians. At the same time, glimmers of the twentieth century worlds to come are visible in this novel: the concentration camps of the Boer War; anarchism and socialism; suffrage; Freud and the unconscious; new ideas about sexuality. Olive's daughter Dorothy pushes through one obstacle after another to become a physician; her cousin Griselda seeks out the attenuated university education, with its absurd and rigid social rules, that is the only form of higher learning available to her; her brother Charles/Karl is drawn to radical politics.

Many reviews, including published ones, have mentioned the book's length. By that standard, if Dickens were alive, he'd have to re-invent himself as a blogger in order to be read at all. Another concern seems to be the novel's prodigious presentation of information on everything from pottery glazes to the Grande Exposition Universelle de Paris. I'd argue that it's all that information that allows you to feel, as a reader, transported--truly transported-- to a different time. When you put down these densely packed pages, you feel like you've inhabited the same space as the characters, at least for a bit.

Thus, to read "The Children's Book" is to be carried off into a world that is unfamiliar, a complicated world that looks backward to a pre-industrial world of beautiful pots and glazes, of secret treehouses and marionettes, even as it looks forward to new lives for women and the poor and to a different understanding of sexuality. In Byatt's telling, the years of "The Children's Book" seem like a kind of dress rehearsal for the twentieth century. Opening night, however, takes place on the Somme.

Wonderful
This is a wonderful sprawling novel that takes readers from the pastoral innocence of children to the deep dismay and destruction of war. It tells the story of a number of families in Britain from the end of the Victorian era through to the first world war and encompasses the yearnings of youth for lives outside that previously dictated by class and gender. It's not a novel of love, it's a novel of change and through that change, love is lost and found. Characters are beautifully rendered and the reader weeps when so many promising lives are squandered in the killing fields of the war. It's an elegy to art, to involvement and to family.