The Children's Book / A.S. Byatt 675 p.

Definitely not a novel which lends itself to pithy summaries, The Children's Book tells the stories of many loosely interlocked characters in late Victorian and Edwardian England. The pivot family in this saga-like work are the Wellwoods: comfortable, educated, artistic, liberal residents of Todefright, a charming pastoral compound which is superficially delightful. Olive, the matriarch, writes fairy tales full of enchantment which largely pay the family's bills. And in Todefright, as in most fairy tales, there are dark nasty crawling things under the rocks of even the prettiest woods.

A.S. Byatt commands a staggering amount of knowledge of, well, many things, a lot of which she shares with the reader. They include, in no particular order, Fabians, suffragists, anarchists, pottery, puppetry, the eccentricities of Kaiser Wilhelm, labour unrest in the early 20th century, German myth, the causes of the 1st World War, et al. Most prominently, the reader learns that ideas of free love in an era before birth control were a real disaster. Like you wouldn't believe.

I don't want to sound sarcastic here. Byatt has so much to say about women of the era which resonates deeply today, in particular the tension between work and family. Her erudition is almost terrifying. And I loved her earlier works Possession and Angels & Insects. As a narrative, though, this just didn't work for me. It felt out of focus, as we move from character to character with, often, poor or non-existent transitions. There is far too much (for me) exposition on the above-mentioned topics with too little 'meat' holding the plot together. To the very end, it's hardly clear who Byatt regards as her central characters in a cast of many.