The Children's Book by A.S.Byatt 879 pg.
This is my third book for Chunkster Challenge and it is a chunky at 879 pages but it covers an immense amount of ground. I'm a big fan of Possession and so when I saw this new book (2009) I just had to read it immediately. It's a sweeping tale, covering the end of the Victorian age, thru the Edwardian, and up to the First World War. The starting point is the finding of a young boy hiding in the storage rooms of the forerunner to the Royal Victoria and Albert Museum. He's escaped from the Potteries, where porcelain is made under horrible working conditions. He's taken to a director of the museum where he meets Olive Wellwood, a sucessful children's book author. She takes him home with her to Todefright, the home in the country of her large family. Because the boy, Philip, has ambition to make pots, he ends up being taken to Purchase House, the home of a well known but difficult potter. It seems at first that Olive or Philip must be main characters and they are, but different characters dominate in their respective parts of the book. It ends up being a large number of characters, more than I can discuss. Byatt weaves together the stories of several families who become interdependent and through those stories she tells many other stories that reflect the times during which these people live. So, the Arts and Crafts Movement is discussed in detail as well as the art of pottery, social justice movements, socialism, anarchism, communism, the women's suffrage movement, German puppetry, English and German folk tales, children's literature, and the Great War. There is a tremendous amount of research on display here and overall I liked it but at times it can be distracting from the characters. Byatt sometimes almost forgets her characters in all the discussions but not quite. So along the way there are also various family secrets revealed as well as plot twists and turns. The book ends with the bloodbath of the first world war and many of the charming children who have grown up in the book, become cannon fodder for the war. I found that very touching and I think Byatt handled familiar material and made it fresh and wounding again. Overall, I enjoyed the book although I didn't enjoy every single thing about it.
