Book review: The Children's Book, by A.S. Byatt

[effani]

As far as I can tell, there are exactly two good things about this book:

1. The cover
2. The fact that it's written in standard English with correct punctuation.

Comments

[effani]

I thought you might disagree with me on this one. I'd be curious to hear your take, especially since my book club was unanimous on it.

I actually only got 250 pages into it. Essentially, I didn't care about it. I found the characters flat and the plot essentially nonexistent. I thought there were too many characters to keep straight, and nothing particularly distinguishing about most of them.

I felt like if a giant meteorite had hit the English countryside on page 251 and everyone had died suddenly, I would have closed the book with as much satisfaction as I would have gotten from finishing it. (Book club members who did bother to finish it report that that was essentially how it felt when characters started dying suddenly and with little description in the war, after we spent pages and pages and pages on their clothing, masturbation habits, and other description that didn't go anywhere. I can't speak to that personally, of course.)

Essentially, our most charitable guess was that the seeming pointlessness of the whole book was meant to make some sort of statement about the pointlessness and meaninglessness of life in the era.

I also thought it displayed a distressingly unpleasant and negative view of sexuality.

And given that Stephen found on the internet that it was based on the life of E. Nesbit, I would argue that it was borderline libelous, if not more than borderline.

So what did you like about it?

[effani]

I guess I'm just looking for different things in literature than you are. (I guess we knew that already.) I can see its appeal through your eyes, but for me, it has to clear the hurdle of getting me to care about the characters and what happens to them before I want to pay attention to those things. This book didn't at all.

Out of curiosity, have you read Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett? We read it for book club a couple of months ago, and I really enjoyed it and thought that it did some of the things you're describing well. Not all--the timeline is relatively short, and the historical context obscured and not fully described. But it does have a large ensemble cast, and part of the joy is watching them interact over the course of the book. Without both books in front of me, I can't say what made me care about one set of characters and not the other, but I did.

And yes, although I have met a few "adults idealizing child-like behavior," I wouldn't describe that as a particularly salient characteristic of the baby boomers that I've known, although I understand how that fits into broader societal trends. But I'm not entirely certain that I understand where you see that in the book. (Although again, I didn't finish it.) The adult characters put on plays and puppet shows and wrote children's books, but I wouldn't describe any of that as idealizing childlike behavior, exactly. Most of what we actually see them doing is lusting after each other, and feeling guilty about it, and heavy-handed foreshadowing about people's parents not being who they think they are--none of which strikes me as particularly childlike.

I apologize if my discussion of this book comes off as overly snarky. I don't think there's really any chance that I'm going to change my mind about it, or read the rest, but I am genuinely curious what you see in it and how our view of literature differs.

[effani]

You thought that the characters in Bel Canto were not well fleshed out, but the ones in The Children's Book were? I am flabbergasted.