The Children's Book by AS Byatt

This is a hugely complex, long and incredibly detailed book set during the period that spans the end of the Victorian era and the beginning of World War I. It is about the lives of several families, the Humphry Wellwoods, the Basil Wellwoods , the Benedict Fludds and the Prosper Cains largely, and the huge group of people connected with them. Olive Wellwood is a writer of fairy tales and she is creating a book for each of her seven children and it’s that that strings the story together. It begins with a boy Phillip who has run away from the potteries and is found and quasi-adopted by the Wellwood Cain group and apprenticed to master potter Benedict Fludd. The saga flows from there.

It’s a dark sort of story as the individuals wrestle with their own failings, some of them very grim indeed, and the ideas of responsibility at a time of enormous social change in England and Europe. There’s a mass of detail about the Fabian society, about the intellectuals and philosophers of the time, about concepts like free love, about the new ideas of psychoanalysis, and of course about the craft movement in England. The book is littered with appearances by people like Oscar Wilde, Emmeline Pankhurst, Kenneth Graham, Rupert Brooke and George Bernard Shaw which adds a sense of reality but leaves you reeling as you try to grapple with all their 'stuff' – suffrage, homosexuality, censorship and so on.

The writing is strange, often very simple as if narrated by a child who lists the chronology of events without going into any kind of analysis. So it reads ‘and then this happened and then that and then that and then so forth..’ At times I found this style quite annoying, adding unnecessary length – this book is over 600 pages long. It’s densely packed with references to events of the time but these references are almost in passing, listed not explained, sketchy, so only the most avid historian of the period would really understand the significance of them, either as real events or in terms of the novel. You feel you must stop and look up chapters and chapters of history to get a sense of what it is all about.

I came away feeling a bit overwhelmed and quite exhausted by this book but glad to have learned a bit more about the Fabians and ready to look into this period of history in greater depth. 31/2 stars