The Children's Book

June 8, 2009
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.

June 15, 2009
Byatt (A Whistling Woman, 2002, etc.) encompasses the paradigm shift from Victorian to modern England in a sweeping tale of four families.

The deeper subject, however, is the complex, not always benign bond that attaches children to adults. As the novel opens in 1895, Olive Wellwood seems the model New Woman: popular author of books that reinvent fairy tales for contemporary children, tolerant wife to Fabian Society stalwart Humphry, devoted mother pregnant with her seventh baby. She takes in Philip Warren, a working-class boy who longs to make art, and connects him with Benedict Fludd, a master potter whose family belongs to the Wellwoods' progressive, artistic circle. As the long, dense narrative unfolds, we see the dark side of these idealists' lives. Three of the children Olive is raising are not hers with Humphry; in another household, magnificent works of art reveal repellent acts of incest. The gothic sexual interconnections recall Bloomsbury, and Olive is clearly a gloss on E. Nesbit, but this is no mere romanà clef. Byatt's concern is the vast area where utopian visions collide with human nature. Her adult subjects, she writes,"saw, in a way that earlier generations had not, that children were people, with identities and desires and intelligences…But they saw this, so many of them, out of a desire of their own for perpetual childhood." World War I forces everyone to grow up. Only one son of this socialist set becomes a conscientious objector; the others serve and most of them die. The pace, positively stately in the novel's first half, speeds up and becomes unduly hasty in the final section. But Byatt has painted her large cast of characters so richly that we care about all of them even when their fates are summarized in a sentence. In the last chapter, the variously battered survivors reunite and dream once more:"They could make magical plays for a new generation of children."

Ambitious, accomplished and intelligent in the author's vintage manner.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from August 15, 2009
A girl places some diminutive folk she's discovered into her doll house, then is imprisoned by a giant child herself. A prince discovers that he alone has no shadow. No, these aren't plot points in this masterly new work by the author of "Possession" but children's stories written by one of its protagonists, Olive Wellwood. There are, or course, actual children in the bookOlive's, with blustery banker-turned-crusader husband Humphrey; the Wellwood cousins; Julian, son of a keeper at the South Kensington Museum; Philip, the wayward boy discovered living surreptitiously in the museum, whom Olive brings home to her country estate; the family of brilliant but selfish master potter Benedict Fludd, who takes in the talented Philip as an unpaid apprentice; and more. Like the children in Olive's stories, these children have their notions quietly disabused; one small instantsay, a parent's overheard commentand life is changed forever. It's the late 1800s, with new ideas in the airand it's all rushing toward World War I. VERDICT Pitch perfect, stately, told with breathtakingly matter-of-fact acuteness, this is another winner for Byatt. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 6/1/09.]Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2009
Byatt steps deeper into the realm of writing for special readers, forging onward in creating increasingly complicated fictional narratives. Her new novel can be labeled, at first call, as both historical fiction and a family saga; on second consideration, it can also be seen as a psychological study of social and economic privilege in the high tide of Britains power: the last decade of the Victorian age, the Edwardian period, and up to World War I. The theme of privilege is attended by subthemes on the nature of childhood, the meaning of parenthood, and utopianism. Two families occupy the core of the elaborate plot, with one mother-wife, Olive Wellwood, at the absolute epicenter; she is a childrens author and the familys breadwinner. The catalyst by which Byatt begins her detailed analysis of privilege is the early introduction into the story of a teenager named Phillip, who comes from a meager background and is more or less adopted into the Wellwood clan, to his benefit, for he is now allowed to give free rein to his talent in pottery making. An overlong but overall engaging evocation of time and place.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)