Many thanks everybody for a lovely celebration last night!
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Sunday, July 3, 2011
The Guardian's review on our midsummer read: The Children's book
Extracts from "Her dark materials. AS Byatt's charged account of the perils of artistic creation chills Alex Clark."
The moral seriousness of AS Byatt's fiction derives much from her concept of responsibility; and responsibility, for her, is most importantly the business of marshalling and applying one's intellect to every area of one's life. Her new novel, a staggeringly detailed and charged re-creation of the period between the end of the 19th century and the first world war, overflows with people attempting to define their responsibilities, whether to fulfil them or to evade them; with those in pursuit of enlightenment or seeking to manipulate it; and with some simply attempting to unearth who they are and what they should do to survive.
.....
Humphry and Olive's rambling farmhouse on the Kentish Weald, named Todefright, is a wonderfully achieved emblem of the particular slice of late 19th-century society Byatt wishes to show in all its precariously utopian varieties: swarming with children who are allowed to speak not only when spoken to, with rebels ranging from politely insistent Fabians to fugitive Russian anarchists, with unstable artists, with ideas and projects and determination. Its inhabitants pride themselves on their ability to speak their minds freely and to arrange their affairs according to progressive and humane values rather than in the service of unblinking Victorian stricture; Byatt is slyly comic on the extent to which these ideals are allied to the profusion of decorative earthenware plates and bountiful mid-summer parties. Beneath the house's surface, though, secrets multiply: infidelities that have made a mess of lines of paternity and maternity; expedient accommodations of truth and finance; lapses of thought or care for the consequences of one's actions. For Todefright's children, given terrifyingly partial glimpses into the adults' muddied affairs, the family home shifts from idyll to prison and back, their parents - or who they think their parents are - from beneficent protectors to child-like incompetents.
For each of the household's children, Olive has created a book, revealing her allegiances and, indeed, her actual biological connection by the differing amounts of time and creative energy she bestows. "The stories in the books were, in their nature, endless," we are told. "They were like segmented worms, with hooks and eyes to fit on to the next moving and coiling section. Every closure of plot had to contain a new beginning." Outstripping the others by far is Tom, Olive's eldest son, a boy who loathes the pretence of Peter Pan ("It's make-believe make-believe make-believe") and who decides to mimic an animal's non-attachment to the material world in order to protect himself. Eventually brought to grief by his mother's inability to separate him from his fictional alter ego, he is perhaps the novel's saddest and most significant casualty.
But casualties abound among the dizzyingly extensive cast of this novel, one that is powered by unexpected doublings, sudden appearances, disappearances and couplings, individual histories - and, for that matter, history itself - rapidly and uncompromisingly deployed. ...Byatt's cleverness, in the dual figures of Olive and Fludd, is to keep the reader in thrall to their talents while showing the sinuous stealth of their neglect; and to underline that neither artist is left undamaged themselves.
One could say, in the survivors' parade that forms the very final pages of The Children's Book, that Byatt provides us with glimmers of hope; connections are reforged, tiny instances of justice done, gestures towards continuity sketched.... Byatt reminds us in chilling fashion of the perils of artistic creation, and the duties of its exponents to find out the difference between what is real and what is not.
The moral seriousness of AS Byatt's fiction derives much from her concept of responsibility; and responsibility, for her, is most importantly the business of marshalling and applying one's intellect to every area of one's life. Her new novel, a staggeringly detailed and charged re-creation of the period between the end of the 19th century and the first world war, overflows with people attempting to define their responsibilities, whether to fulfil them or to evade them; with those in pursuit of enlightenment or seeking to manipulate it; and with some simply attempting to unearth who they are and what they should do to survive.
.....
Humphry and Olive's rambling farmhouse on the Kentish Weald, named Todefright, is a wonderfully achieved emblem of the particular slice of late 19th-century society Byatt wishes to show in all its precariously utopian varieties: swarming with children who are allowed to speak not only when spoken to, with rebels ranging from politely insistent Fabians to fugitive Russian anarchists, with unstable artists, with ideas and projects and determination. Its inhabitants pride themselves on their ability to speak their minds freely and to arrange their affairs according to progressive and humane values rather than in the service of unblinking Victorian stricture; Byatt is slyly comic on the extent to which these ideals are allied to the profusion of decorative earthenware plates and bountiful mid-summer parties. Beneath the house's surface, though, secrets multiply: infidelities that have made a mess of lines of paternity and maternity; expedient accommodations of truth and finance; lapses of thought or care for the consequences of one's actions. For Todefright's children, given terrifyingly partial glimpses into the adults' muddied affairs, the family home shifts from idyll to prison and back, their parents - or who they think their parents are - from beneficent protectors to child-like incompetents.
For each of the household's children, Olive has created a book, revealing her allegiances and, indeed, her actual biological connection by the differing amounts of time and creative energy she bestows. "The stories in the books were, in their nature, endless," we are told. "They were like segmented worms, with hooks and eyes to fit on to the next moving and coiling section. Every closure of plot had to contain a new beginning." Outstripping the others by far is Tom, Olive's eldest son, a boy who loathes the pretence of Peter Pan ("It's make-believe make-believe make-believe") and who decides to mimic an animal's non-attachment to the material world in order to protect himself. Eventually brought to grief by his mother's inability to separate him from his fictional alter ego, he is perhaps the novel's saddest and most significant casualty.
But casualties abound among the dizzyingly extensive cast of this novel, one that is powered by unexpected doublings, sudden appearances, disappearances and couplings, individual histories - and, for that matter, history itself - rapidly and uncompromisingly deployed. ...Byatt's cleverness, in the dual figures of Olive and Fludd, is to keep the reader in thrall to their talents while showing the sinuous stealth of their neglect; and to underline that neither artist is left undamaged themselves.
One could say, in the survivors' parade that forms the very final pages of The Children's Book, that Byatt provides us with glimmers of hope; connections are reforged, tiny instances of justice done, gestures towards continuity sketched.... Byatt reminds us in chilling fashion of the perils of artistic creation, and the duties of its exponents to find out the difference between what is real and what is not.
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