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Poor beggars! Victoria's sons
On the whole, I liked A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book (2009) very much.1 It has not displaced Angels & Insects (1992), which for whatever set of reasons seems to be holding as my favorite, but it's definitely ahead of The Virgin in the Garden (1978) and possibly The Biographer's Tale (2000), with which it shares some of the same commenting breakdown of narrative. Most of the name-checks did not bother me, because of the circles the characters move in; I liked the shifting panorama of the cast, which is no more fixed than the attention spent on any one year between 1895 and 1919; the language is at once highly wrought and conversational. They are not identical in either aim or focus, but it might be fun to read The Children's Book against Elizabeth Hand's Mortal Love (2004) and see what the combination says about muses.
1. The major exception can probably be fixed by paperclipping pages 391—396 together and ignoring them; otherwise they restate as an essay the novel's thesis about the Edwardian attitude toward children and its consequences, which is already perceptible from the characters and their behavior, and therefore add nothing to the discourse beyond the impression that the author has no confidence in her audience's ability to come up with conclusions on its own. Jane Gardam's Old Filth (2004) suffers from a similar problem in the form of a late-stage, superfluous letter whose contents the reader already has all the clues to divine, unread. It is not book-breaking, but it annoys me.
1. The major exception can probably be fixed by paperclipping pages 391—396 together and ignoring them; otherwise they restate as an essay the novel's thesis about the Edwardian attitude toward children and its consequences, which is already perceptible from the characters and their behavior, and therefore add nothing to the discourse beyond the impression that the author has no confidence in her audience's ability to come up with conclusions on its own. Jane Gardam's Old Filth (2004) suffers from a similar problem in the form of a late-stage, superfluous letter whose contents the reader already has all the clues to divine, unread. It is not book-breaking, but it annoys me.
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Fortunately, it just came out in this country! I will be curious to see what you think.