A.S.Byatt review

I am going to try and get all these amazon reviews up here eventually. Here's A.S. Byatt and how not to write a historical novel. Something's buggered up the formatting here.

A.S. Byatt – The Children’s Book 

It might be a little unkind, but turning to the ‘Acknowledgements’ listed at the back, and a certain amusement can be had from the way seemingly everyone is thanked for having ‘sent books’. Can it be that the reason this large, compendious novel ultimately feels slightly unsatisfactory lie with the fact that it owes far more to books than it does to life? This is of course one of the perennial problems for any author of historical fiction. The reading of history and documentary evidence is surely necessary simply in order to get the facts right? But when it starts to swamp the fiction, it risks choking the life out of the story, whatever the writer’s gifts. Here the novel’s narrative voice repeatedly steps back in order to narrate the historical events surrounding the lives of its many characters, or simply to indulge in luscious description of the many beautiful art objects with which the narrative is studded. A.S. Byatt has always had a powerful descriptive gift. But amidst all this description, all this history, it can sometimes feel as if the characters are getting a little lost, especially when there are so many of them.

The novel takes us from June 19th 1895 through to May 1919, following the intertwined lives of two artistic families and their many acquaintances. The chapter titles – ‘The Golden Age’ is naturally followed by ‘The Silver Age’ which of course gives way to ‘The Iron Age’ – run the risk of making the history feel retrospective. We already know how this story ends. The Edwardian age dies in the carnage of the First World War, and an era of history which was actually riven by social discontent acquires a golden haze. But of course, nobody ever knows they’re living in a golden age, and moreover those who do think they are often seem to be deluding themselves, a point which the novel’s narrative voice at one point attempts to make explicit. But the narrative drive often seems to undermine such insights, and the book is occasionally guilty of such sillinesses as for example when one character assures another that of course Peter Pan will be beloved for generations. 

The First World War, the history we already know, looms over everything. It’s a period of history that was not only been much written about at the time, but also revisited by many later writers of fiction, so that it can come to seem over familiar. We’ve seen so many of the tropes of mud and disillusionment so many times by this point. Here though the relatively brief final section in which we see so many of the character whom we have been following over the novel’s course quickly dispatched amidst the horrors of the Great War remakes these cliches. The length of the novel actually works in its favour here, because by that point we feel we know these characters so well.

And it can start to feel churlish to be criticising a book for being its length and ambitions. Minor failings can surely be forgiven when there are so many riches on offer. The large cast deftly handled. The powerful sense of place(s). A.S. Byatt’s typically wonderful descriptive gifts and facility for pastiche. The juggling of ideas. This is a novel with a thesis, about the potential hazards of art, about childhood and the changing ways in which it was understood in the Edwardian period, which is of course our culture’s inheritance. But really there’s just too much stuff here, so that it can occasionally feel somewhat disjointed. The material on the Suffragettes for instance which comes late in the narrative is as powerfully and effectively written as everything else in the book, but it feels disconnected from much of the rest of the book’s narrative, as if it’s been included only because presumably it ought to be addressed in a fiction about the Edwardian period. Too often the novel devolves into a kind of high class soap opera, with endless talk from characters whom seem ever slightly too self conscious about who they are and their personal beliefs.  Too many of these characters feel too well defined, too easily fitting into a type or a social class. It’s all deeply felt, yet curiously, there’s too little life and too little respect for the way in which people are often mysterious, not only to other people, but also to themselves.

Which is a real shame. Ambition is to be applauded, and A.S. Byatt can be so good. This feels like it could have been such a great novel, and at times it is, but as ultimately it feels as if her ambition has gotten the better of her here.

I started this review, and then substantially rewrote it, and I still didn't feel like I said everything I wanted to. A bit like the novel I was trying to review, I had too much to say perhaps. I also find something a little snide, even pompous, about my tone of voice. It's really not a wholly successful book, but still, I can't deny that I had a lot of pleasure in reading it. As I said, the length of the novel does sometimes work in it's favour. I particularly remember the scene where a group of the younger characters go for a weekend trip in the countryside. They do it twice. The first time is an idyll. The sun shines, everyone gets on with each other, they go swimming, it's a lovely moment of happiness. Then, a few pages later, they're returning the next year, and of course it's completely different. It rains, everyone's miserable, they fail to recapture that golden moment. It speaks to some of the novel's major themes but I'm also glad that she put it the scenes in because of how well she captures that feeling of a simultaneous disappointment at one's failure to recapture a particular moment and the embarrassment of the knowledge that it was probably foolish to think you could.

Something else I noticed was the presence of a 'Lawrentian' artist figure, actually modelled on Eric Gill I think. This is a recurrent figure in her early fiction. I'm thinking of the father in her first novel The Shadow of the Sun, and Frederica and Stephanie's father in the Quartet.* In my head it connects with something about Angela Carter, I was interested to read here that they became friends after a rather combatative first encounter. They must be near contemporaries, with similar interests in history and fairytales, although despite the similarities, in many ways occupying very different literary spaces. Both clearly had a complex relationship with the work and ideas of D. H. Lawrence. In Angela Carter's case that comes through most clearly not in her fiction but in several of her essays. I suspect any writer of that generation who went through an English degree at a British University. The influence of F.R. Leavis. I sometimes wonder if every writer of that generation isn't in some way reacting against the influence of Lawrence. Just look at Ian McEwan's early work. And then you've got a more recent writer like Geoff Dyer, who's younger, but who still I'd place at the tail end of the post war period because of his education (getting to Oxbridge thanks to the 11-plus), and who reveres Lawrence as one of his literary idols.

I recently finished The Game, another early novel. Two sisters, one an Oxford Don, the other a popular novelist, trapped in a destructive relationship based on events of their childhood. Literalist critics might try and related this to the supposedly fractious relationship between Byatt and her sister Margaret Drabble, but it's clear from one of the epigraphs and sereval references throughout the text that it's really about the Brontes' joint imagination. I was interested to see her describe this as 'absolutely appalling' in that interview. Like most people I suspect, when I first encountered the Bronte's and the story of their childhood I found it incredibly romantic, desirable even, although again like most people I hardly think myself and my siblings could have sustained such a joint imagination. Which is perhaps just as well. It is a romantic story, but it's also appalling.

I read a lot of A.S. Byatt's fiction in my mid-twenties. I found a stack of her books in Oxfam a while back, ones I didn't read back then, and will gradually get around to them. She's another writer I feel that I appreciate more now that I'm older and on the other side of a very difficult period of my own life. Anthony Burgess said about Still Life that it conveyed an 'extraordinary compassion', and I don't think I could improve on such a description.

*And thinking about it, there is here again an example of the advantage of a large canvas in the way the rather frightening and domineering figure in The Virgin in the Garden becomes more sympathetic, even pathetic, later on. His children are older and no longer so intimidated by him, he's been left behind by the flow of history. Just as I suppose D.H. Lawrence has by this point.