The Children’s Book by A.S. Byatt (2009)

The Children's Book is not without flaws, but I loved it. I was pulled deeply into the world Byatt describes, which takes place over the historical period that most fascinates me, the transition from Victorian to the Edwardian age.

Especially interesting to me was Byatt’s exploration of this era’s rich ferment of cultural interest in fairy tales and folklore. One of the characters wants to study folklore, and you can see the upsurge of academic interest that led to great works of scholarship like The Golden Bough, first published when this novel begins, in 1890, and later the famous Stith Thompson Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, the first volume being published in the early 30s.

Many elements of these motifs pop up in Tolkein, of course, but in lots of other writers as well, besides all the ones Byatt name-checks. It was interesting to see Hope Mirrlees pop up, whose Lud-in-the-Mist is very much in this tradition as well, but published after the novel ends.

Of course, these motifs are important not just because they’re culturally relevant; they are very much germane to the book itself. Some recurring images and themes with fairy-tale connections include:

• Tunnels, mines, trenches, underground routes
• Gold, silver, and other precious metals
• Puppets, marionettes, people under enchantment, addicts
• Clay, mud, earth
• Performance, stages, costumes, acting, exhibition, display
• Writing, making art, making fiction, transforming reality with art
• Children abducted, enslaved, used
• Natural history, fossils, lizards, dragonflies, fish
• Identity true and false, illegitimate birth, changelings, changing one's class or status

To take just one example, the first listed: tunnels appear as the mines that Olive's family works in and are destroyed by. They appear in many of Olive's tales, especially in Tom Underground. There's Alice's Adventures Underground. The London Underground. The Paris Metro. The name Philip Warren. And so on.

I really enjoyed the inventive way that Byatt keeps ringing the changes on these themes. The horror of the mining tunnel becomes the horror of Tom Underground's endless searching that becomes the very real horror of the Great War trenches...which also links to clay, and the themes of enslavement. But mines also produce wealth, and clay can make exquisitely beautiful objects, and going underground can tap into deeply meaningful images. Or you can go too far underground, like the unfortunate analysand Gabriel Goldwasser, and go crazy.

The fairy-tale theme might suggest that children are important here, but the adults in this novel titled The Children’s Book tend to see their actual sons and daughters as material for art, ignoring their reality. Fludd's is the darkest version, for sure, but not the only one. Many times in the novel, we see Olive react to a situation by going to write. Given how she grew up, it's understandable—art is life-saving for her. But it also puts a scrim between her and reality, including the reality of what her children need. There's many kinds of make-believe in this novel.

This troubles Tom in particular. His parents, especially Olive, were too good at creating an idyllic fairytale childhood—and then sent him to school without a thought in the world for how rude the awakening would be. He can't stand to grow up and find out that the fairy tale doesn't exist. When he goes to see Peter Pan, with its obvious strings and wires and girls dressed as boys, being asked to clap and affirm his belief in fairies agonizes him. He passionately wants the real make-believe of his childhood, not this cardboard make-believe, but he can never have what he wants.

Tom’s parents, and the Fludds too (even more so) seem to live in a perpetual fancy-dress party, and that's one of the ways art can harm us, I think Byatt is saying: by creating seductive make-believe worlds that blind us to harsh reality. In a way, that's what happened to a whole society, who went from the golden Edwardian summer (with a long, long Victorian epoch of empire and greatness behind it) to the supreme horror of WWI.

Speaking of the perpetual fancy-dress party, I was uncomfortable reading all the many descriptions of pre-Raphaelite dress and William Morris design. Now, I love this style, and have a couple of Morris tapestry reproductions hanging on the wall, and would have carpets and so on if I could afford it. But my goodness, after awhile the faux medievalism all starts to seem so silly! And yet Byatt's descriptions make me fairly salivate with the yumminess:

• Pomona . . . had brought a home-woven gown, embroidered with crocus, daffodils and bluebells.
• Olive wore pleated olive silk over pleated white linen, with a gauze overcloak, veined like insect wings. Her hair was dressed with honeysuckle and roses.
• Violet . . . wore a dress stitched with ivy-leaves on satin.
• It was sea-green pleated silk over a grass-green underskirt, with a gilded girdle.
• She wore white muslin decorated with violets, and a violet shawl. The muslin flowed from a high yoke: she was uncorseted, with a simple violet sash.
• She was looking lovely, in a tea-gown of cream Liberty lawn, covered with field flowers, cornflowers, poppies and marguerites.

Slurp.

In general, Byatt's descriptions are delicious. I could quote any number of examples, but I like this list especially. It's not describing anything intrinsically that delicious--it's not a museum or an Arts and Crafts house or a beautiful gown, it's a list of trade goods that are the actual reality of that abstraction, money: "coconuts, carpets, sugar cane, glass beads, ingots, wheels with spokes, light bulbs, oranges, apples, wine and honey." Again, slurp.

But again, as with the fairy tales, despite all this deliciousness is the real, often ugly, adult world, and that’s the great irony of The Children’s Book.