The Children's Book
AS Byatt
The Children's Book
Olive Wellwood is a famous writer, interviewed with her children gathered at her knee. For each of them she writes a separate private book, bound in different colours and placed on a shelf. In their rambling house near Romney Marsh they play in a story-book world - but their lives, and those of their rich cousins, children of a city stockbroker, and their friends, the son and daughter of a curator at the new Victoria and Albert Museum, are already inscribed with mystery. Each family carries its own secrets. Into their world comes a young stranger, a working-class boy from the potteries, drawn by the beauty of the Museum's treasures. And in midsummer a German puppeteer arrives, bringing dark dramas. The world seems full of promise but the calm is already rocked by political differences, by Fabian arguments about class and free love, by the idealism of anarchists from Russia and Germany. The sons rebel against their parents' plans; the girls dream of independent futures, becoming doctors or fighting for the vote. This vivid, rich and moving saga is played out against the great, rippling tides of the day, taking us from the Kent marshes to Paris and Munich and the trenches of the Somme.
4.4 out of 5 based on 9 reviews
|
Omniscore:
|
| Classification |
Fiction |
| Genre |
General Fiction |
| Format |
Hardback |
| Pages |
624 |
| RRP |
£18.99 |
| Date of Publication |
May 2009 |
| ISBN |
978-0701183899 |
| Publisher |
Chatto & Windus |
| |
Olive Wellwood is a famous writer, interviewed with her children gathered at her knee. For each of them she writes a separate private book, bound in different colours and placed on a shelf. In their rambling house near Romney Marsh they play in a story-book world - but their lives, and those of their rich cousins, children of a city stockbroker, and their friends, the son and daughter of a curator at the new Victoria and Albert Museum, are already inscribed with mystery. Each family carries its own secrets. Into their world comes a young stranger, a working-class boy from the potteries, drawn by the beauty of the Museum's treasures. And in midsummer a German puppeteer arrives, bringing dark dramas. The world seems full of promise but the calm is already rocked by political differences, by Fabian arguments about class and free love, by the idealism of anarchists from Russia and Germany. The sons rebel against their parents' plans; the girls dream of independent futures, becoming doctors or fighting for the vote. This vivid, rich and moving saga is played out against the great, rippling tides of the day, taking us from the Kent marshes to Paris and Munich and the trenches of the Somme.
Reviews
The Daily Mail
Stephanie Cross
"Fans of Possession will be delighted: this new novel is nothing less than magnificent. Like clay on a wheel, A. S. Byatt's story steadily revolves and is slowly raised up, as the years pass, grief encroaches and World War I looms. Light and lustrous, commanding and transporting, The Children's Book is superb."
12/05/2009
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The Spectator
Caroline Moore
"Compulsively readable... Every character in this extraordinarily rich book is superbly embedded in the thoughts and beliefs and feelings of the period — and indeed in its interior decor... At times, the impulse toward comprehensiveness does lack balance... But this is ungrateful. We are given characters that live through, without being merely defined by, their times; and engrossing narrative arcs that draw in the reader."
29/04/2009
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The Daily Telegraph
Lorna Bradbury
"For all of its more than 600 pages it is rarely less than totally absorbing – and often very moving... The reason the reader stays with Byatt through some of the novel’s more languid interludes is that she has succeeded in creating a vivid soap opera of sorts out of the lives of close to 20 children. We remember who they all are (an impressive achievement in itself), we care what happens to them and are often moved by the twists and turns of their lives."
08/05/2009
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The Sunday Times
Peter Kemp
"Easily the best thing AS Byatt has written since her Booker-winning masterpiece, Possession... Brilliantly following the trajectory that brought a civilisation and a generation to this catastrophe [WWI], The Children’s Book is a work that superlatively displays both enormous reach and tremendous grip."
26/04/2009
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The Daily Telegraph
Jane Shilling
"The narrative vigour and passionate engagement with the human condition that has always informed Byatt’s writing ensures that one can approach The Children’s Book in perfect ignorance of Nesbit, Gill or any of the social, political and artistic convulsions of the Edwardian era and still miss nothing of its astonishing power and resonance. Besides, the novel is punctuated with brisk historical digressions for the really ignorant."
23/04/2009
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The Times
Helen Dunmore
"The panoramic quality of The Children's Book is achieved at some cost to brilliance of characterisation and narrative drive. Its success is as a novel of ideas, forcefully and often memorably expressed, while the story follows darkening fortunes into a chastened postwar world."
24/04/2009
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The Financial Times
Sophie Gee
"It’s the sort of high-concept rarefied intellectual fiction we’d expect from, well, AS Byatt. Possession: the next generation. This time around, though, Byatt’s writing is propelled by a new vexation – the current fad for young adult fantasy."
02/05/2009
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The Literary Review
Pamela Norris
"In its magnificent loquacity, The Children’s Book calls attention to the debate initiated by the Victorians regarding the value of decoration. The human stories are gripping and often deeply affecting, but they become submerged beneath a tidal wave of happenings and commentary. Prodigious as it is, the effect, like A S Byatt’s descriptions of the Paris Exposition, is to glut the reader with a superfluity of wonders."
01/05/2009
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The Observer
Adam Mars-Jones
"A teacherly element is undoubtedly part of Byatt's literary personality and gradually it becomes dominant in The Children's Book. There is a potentially fatal unwillingness to trust the reader to get the point or the full range of reference... [The book] contains magnificent things, but readers are entitled to feel short-changed when a family drama slowly turns into a history lesson."
03/05/2009
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