The Children's Book

I really liked this book----it was big and old fashioned stuffed with plot and characters. Maybe too many characters? By page 50 I think she had introduced as many characters as pages. I didn't know who I was supposed to remember who I could forget...well actually it turned out she wanted me to remember all of them since she drags them all on through the next 600 pages. It's not an interior sort of book, it can't be with so many people to keep track of, it's too crammed full for that.

It's the story of some loosely interwoven bohemian families set at the end of the Victorian age in England, right into the Edwardian age. It's a story of the time as well as the characters. It reminds me of the Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao where you learn all about the history of the Dominican Republic in the margins. I know a lot about the intellectual artistic life late 1800's early 1900's in Britain now. Less brutal than the Dominicans by the way.

It's also about fairy tales which A.S. Byatt has a lot of opinions on. Like Possession where you had to read quite a bit of poetry supposedly written by the characters, here you read a lot of fairy tales written or told or acted out by the characters. The grown ups are writers, artists, potters and thinkers, but the story is more focused on the children. The pivotal character, if there is just one, would be Olive Wellwood, a children's book writer, who is loosely based on E. Nesbit.

I remember seeing A.S.Byatt at the Brattle right after she won the Booker and her talking about the satisfaction of the ending of Possession and how it tied in to our primitive need for 'closure' in our stories. Closure wasn't such a overused term in those days and I like that about her books. She gives good closure. The only problem this time is that I expected 50 points of closure rather than the neatly tied knot in Possession. There were so many characters that it didn't have the omphh of just one big knot; it was more of a Fisherman Knit Sweater.

Note: I ordered this edition from Canada since it won't be printed in the U.S. until the Fall. Canada is on a British printing schedule.