I first discovered A S Byatt about eight years ago when somebody gave me Possession to read. I was on holiday in Mexico at the time and remember picking it up one day and becoming totally absorbed in it and for three days was more or less incommunicado as I became engulfed in the 'life' of a Victorian poet who felt so real that I had to check that this was indeed a fictionalised character. The fact that A S Byatt created a whole slew of Victorian poetry as well gave it a further sense of reality. However, I remember vividly how I felt when I had finished this book - exhausted with my senses somewhat jaded - rather like eating too much chocolate and longing for a piece of cheese; too much Wagner and needing Mozart. An odd feeling, too much satiation.
I left her for a while and then tried another of her titles, The Virgin in the Garden, and half way through the book almost gave up as the same sense of exhaustion came over me. I felt I was being asked to work too hard. Does that sound silly? I am prepared to concentrate and give a book my full attention but somehow there was a feeling that I could not slack off, I was allowed no relaxation and I felt that the author was parading her full artillery of knowledge and intellect. I finished this book but felt that I did not want to read any more of this author.
But then along comes The Children's Book which sounded so fascinating and interesting from the reviews I had read and, shallow though this makes me appear, the cover was so beautiful it made me want to pick up the book and stroke it. Chatto & Windus sent me a copy and I looked at it and felt daunted and had to leave it until now before I could read it. When I receive a book by such a well known and appreciated writer such as A S Byatt, garlanded with praise and prizes, I feel very unworthy and slightly ashamed that I am even essaying a review (Margaret Atwood makes me feel the same way) and I do not flatter myself that any words of mine will make an iota of difference to sales, and so I shied away for awhile. But, when publishers are kind enough to send me review copies, I think it is a bit mean spirited and ungrateful not to have a crack at it at least.
My apologies for this long preamble, but I wanted to give you a sense of my feelings when I finally opened this up at page one. It starts promisingly - a young boy, Philip, is hiding in the depths of the new Victoria and Albert Museum, he has run away from the Potteries and poverty and is drawn to the Museum by the beauty of its treasures. Philip is discovered by the son of the curator and a friend of his, the son of Olive Wellwood a famous writer who sweeps down on him and takes him into her home.
So far so good. But then I felt the weariness of spirit come over me once more when we reach the family home in Romney Marsh where a midsummer party is taking place. Suddenly I was assaulted on all sides by an overwhelming picture of beauty, colour, fantasy and the feeling that all the action is fey and feverish. I found myself almost reeling under the impact of the prose:
"Philip's lantern with its painted flame and smoke and elegant sinister forms, had been given a place of honour in a herbaceous border standing on a terracotta pillar. As its candle burned down, it wavered and flared then it had fallen into the surrounding vegetation which was a mixture of ferns, bracken, fennel and poppies, both the great silky Shirley poppies and self sown wild ones. It was a very English piece of semi-wildness, at the centre of which was a clump of pampas grass including last year's growth which was dry and burned fiercely, with crackle. Poppies shrivelled in the heat, there was a smell of roasting fennel. Sparks rose against the curtain of the dark and tiny floating tissues of blackened leaves and seeds."
and so on and so on paragraph after paragraph, page after page. I began to feel overwhelmed by the bombardment of information about German puppeteers, potters, painters and artists on all side in this, to me, tenuous and gaudy world. Half way through, I just wearied and started skipping wanting to know where the narrative was leading and when some shape to the plot would appear.
I managed to stagger through to the end, stagger being the operative word and by the time I had read the last page and closed the book, the same feeling of claustrophobia that I felt after Possession had taken hold of me and I felt restless and slightly headachey. I really do not know why A S Byatt affects me this way and have been trying to puzzle it out but cannot come to any reasonable conclusion.
I feel this is a somewhat inadequate response to a book which seems to have been heaped with superlatives on all sides, so I am putting some links to other reviews here - those of the Great and the Good, the heavy weight reviewers so you can see what they say. So check out the Telegraph, the New Statesman and the Guardian.
To sum up, I feel both overwhelmed and underwhelmed by The Children's Book, if that is possible, and can only say that you must read it and make up your own mind. I don't think, sadly, that I will try any more books by this author. Sometimes you just have to know when you're beaten...
