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It was easy enough, she conceded, to understand what children saw in the story of a boy wizard whose drab family existence concealed a more exotic lineage, a version of Freud’s family romance. Even Harry’s first date with a female wizard was “unbelievably limp,” Byatt sniffed, devoid of any good old-fashioned psychosexual oomph.
a nice book
Olive Wellwood, the beloved author at the center of The Children’s Book, is Byatt’s kind of tale-teller, an expert in traditional English fairy stories whose own versions come with a dark Germanic twist. A child of the South Yorkshire coal mines who has written her way to fame and respectability amid the cultural ferment of the late-19th-century Arts and Crafts movement, Olive lives in a cottage in Kent called Todefright with her husband, Humphry, and their seven children. To a visiting magazine writer, Olive is a “modern Mother Goose,” sitting by the fire in a velvet gown as children listen raptly to her stories about neglectful mothers and ratlike creatures who snatch babies’ shadows in the crib before retreating to the underground world.
But to Byatt, Olive is less a paragon of fairy-¬godmotherhood than an ambiguously empowered New Woman and a conflicted sage for an era when the entire culture had reverted to a kind of childishness. As dour Queen Victoria, who died in 1901, gave way to carefree King Edward “the Caresser,” Byatt writes, “people talked, and thought, earnestly and frivolously, about sex,” while showing “a paradoxical propensity to retreat into childhood, to read and write adventure stories, tales about furry animals, dramas about pre-pubertal children.”
Byatt explores the way adults try to define, preserve, celebrate and prolong childhood, even as they fail to see how their own children strain against the plot lines dreamed up for them.
Byatt herself is a prodigious, even compulsive, conjurer of worlds within worlds, and “The Children’s Book” bulges with descriptions of puppet shows, stage plays, art exhibitions and craft camps, as well as plenty of canny literary pastiche that will be familiar to readers of “Possession” and other previous Byatt works. We glimpse the premiere of J. M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan” (”Cardboard,” Olive’s Peter Pan-like son Tom mutters.
Byatt’s coda on the Great War, dispatched in scarcely more pages than the Exposition Universelle, is devastating in its restraint.
Byatt movingly portrays the drama of women’s self-fashioning, from decisions about clothes (Rational Dress, or flowing neo-medieval robes?) to more fateful choices about what goes on underneath them. But the novel’s encyclopedic ambition slows even the most absorbing story lines to a stutter. Looking at an unsatisfactory painting of a naked beauty sprawling corpselike in a puppeteer’s studio, Olive remarks that it’s “a pity more women didn’t paint allegories about the imagination.” You could find it here.
