Friday, September 27, 2013

A.S. Byatt, 'The Children's Book'

First posted on GoodReads, but I'd better get into the habit of xposting here, especially if they start yanking stuff that has cursing in it (I'm doomed)....


(Including some status updates material in this - )

Not even at the halfway point yet, but I am so baffled and dismayed. I love Byatt (loved Possession like everyone else, but I schooled myself to love the Frederica Potter quartet and other novels too), this book is all about topics I love, and so it totally should be my jam, as the kids say, and....instead it's like the dire moment in Little Women when Meg wails about how the jelly won't jell.

I think the biggest problem is the characters - some critics compared this to Middlemarch, but Middlemarch is all _about_ its characters, who leap immediately to mind -- the idealistic Dorothea, the vulnerable Lydgate, wild Will, vengeful Causabon, each face and personality rendered distinct. The relative flatness of people in Possession didn't matter because it was a satire, and the amount of satire in the Frederica Quartet -- contrasted with some real tragedies, like Jude Mason's -- carried those people fairly well. (Frederica was that very odd thing, a self-portrait intended to provoke dislike: Byatt seems to specialize in that.)

Also, there were a LOT FEWER people in even the Quartet books. It's not so much that there are too many people in this novel -- although there are -- but they're really not differentiated. If I have to keep reminding myself Phyllis is not Dorothy (Phyllis is the pretty shallow one, Dorothy is the studious friend of Tom, Tom is his mother's favourite, Julian is....Geraint? no no) that is not a good thing. Byatt is, like Lawrence ('whom I cannot escape, and cannot love'), Murdoch (Byatt's moral and aesthetic ideal), even, dare I say, Drabble, and certainly Lessing, one of those most frustrating writers -- a naturally gifted novelist who keeps wrenching Story around to serve Theme.

This is especially bad in Byatt because when she includes bits of retold myths, or children's stories, or pastiche poetry, you at once relax into what she's telling you -- it feels free and unstrained in a way all that carefully glossy worked-over prose doesn't. In Possession, which was a story about people entranced by stories, and had much less of that "writing is bad for families and especially mothers and really especially children" crap in it, it all worked. But as she herself said, she knew people would love Possession; she considers it lesser. She loves writing these long strenuous brain-taxing half-nonfiction catalogues. But they are impossible to love as Stories.

She really is like Lawrence -- her gift plays free in short stories, devastating and wonderful, but she puts it into harness and blinders writing anything at length.


-- To top it off, neither the potted history, which should provide the epic dark-and-gold-illuminated backdrop for the (flat) people, nor the close-ups on the richly decorated plates, embroidered dresses and kimonos, building ornaments and so on, are distinct enough for me to picture, so it all winds up being a kind of grand-sounding blur. Possession had the anchor of the actual poetry and academic papers and fairytales and letters; they were the backbone of the story. Here, the interludes of Olive's children's tales serve mainly to remind what a good writer Byatt is when she isn't dragging us by the hand on  her own whistle-stop tour of Cultural History. (I remember vaguely learning in grad school about the Morris wallpapers and chairs and carpets and tapestries and hangings and whatever else the Pre-Raphs churned out like medieval factories, but I know nothing about pottery and can't visualize it, and so don't really care. This is disastrous, as pottery is one of the main Themes of the book.)