Review - The Children's Book

As you may have heard, I am frantically trying to read half of the 1001 Books list before I turn 28. I had a cunning plan to steam through the list more quickly by reading the shortest books available to me.

Well, I got bored of that.

The Children's Book by A S Byatt may be part of the list, but it certainly is not short. At just over 600 pages it's beautifully chunky, and reading it reminded me that I really do like longer books. If it's done right, a big fat book gives you a satisfying sense of involvement in the world on offer, and you end up not only truly bothering about, but almost living alongside, the characters in it.

Last summer I read War and Peace (I enjoyed the Peace more than the War, and the beginning more than the end, and the whole thing an awful lot more than I thought I was going to), a Big Book if ever there was one. It took me almost a month, and I remember at one point feeling like I was just going to have to SET MYSELF ON FIRE if Nikolai didn't end up marrying Sonia. I'm still really bitter at Tolstoy about that one. But Tolstoy's dodgy romantic decisions aside, The Children's Book has that same sort of feeling about it - in it, Byatt has managed to create an English version of the big, all-engrossing, over-populated world of a Russian novel. Each one of the characters in The Children's Book - and there are many - have their own interesting, odd concerns and their own way of getting through life, and they're all a pleasure to spend time with.

I was put off reading this book for quite a while because my mother told me she hadn't really enjoyed it. the moral of this story is that I really need to learn to stop listening to my mother when she tells me she didn't like a book. Or rather, I need to remember to enquire whether or not the reason why she didn't like it had anything to do with the presence of myths, fairy tales, unrealistic creatures and/or any other fantasy elements, because my mother is a sensible woman with a generally very good taste in books, but things that are not real make her deeply nervous.

We don't really see eye to eye about this. In fact, I spent most of my childhood presenting her with fat bundles of paper and announcing, "I WROTE YOU A STORY! It's about this GIRL and she FALLS THROUGH A PORTAL INTO ANOTHER UNIVERSE and discovers an EVIL PLOT in a RUINED CASTLE and then she gets chased by VAMPIRE PRIESTS and they're just about to SHOOT HER IN THE FACE but she turns into a WERE-CAT so everything is all right in the end. Also there's a talking bear." It is to my mother's everlasting credit that she dutifully read every one of these stories and told me how lovely they were.

Anyway, I really do like fantasy in my literature, and (as always in these cases) the exact things that made my mother doubtful about The Children's Book made me completely fall in love with it. The Children's Book turns out to be all about the late-Victorian preoccupation with myth and fairy tale - the central character, Olive Wellwood, is an exceedingly E. Nesbit-y children's novelist who writes about little things hiding underground and people with animal heads and evil fairies at the bottom of the garden. I grew up with E. Nesbit's stories, although I was always a bit suspicious of them - I could never work out if they were meant to be twee or nasty - and it's obvious that Byatt did too, and felt the same way. Olive's stories are weird expressions of all the strange things lurking in the Victorian unconscious (my favourite), equal parts cute and horrible and of course, because this is A S Byatt, pitch-perfect reproductions of her chosen genre.

I deeply approve of the way A S Byatt has spent time thinking about fairy tales, and how they manage to affect the way people think about themselves, and even live their lives, no matter how grown-up and anchored in reality they think they are. Myths matter, to both individuals and countries, and that's what The Children's Book explores in a very interesting and non-intrusive way. At times it reads like a very nice political and cultural history lesson, but a history lesson told like a fairy tale ("And then the Fabians were born, and they were nice but hopeless, and they argued with the Imperialists and the Tories who meant well but were flawed"). I wish my highbrow cultural history books were like this, because then I might understand what they were getting at.

When it's not about stories, The Children's Book is about art, and particularly pots, which is something else that pleases me very much. My mother, when she wasn't reading my awful fantasy stories, was an art historian, and so I spent a lot of my childhood in various museums. I love it, therefore, when a writer takes the time to really look at and describe beautiful things.

And god, can A S Byatt describe beautiful things. She has a famously dirty literary feud going on with her sister Margaret Drabble (apparently they won't even appear at the same literary festival, so you have to pick one or the other), and after The Children's Book I sort of feel like I understand it from Margaret Drabble's point of view. If your sister was A S Byatt, wouldn't you want to just rip her head off out of sheer jealous spite? I know I would. I still sort of do and I'm not even related to her. How dare Byatt be able to use words like that? How can she be able to describe a pot so well that you want to reach out and touch it, and then on the same page write about a landscape so you feel like you've been there? That cow! She has too much talent and I want some of it.

This, for example, is Byatt's description of the first vase aspiring potter Philip sees when he arrives at the Wellwoods' house:

The light flowed round the surface, like clouds reflected in water. It was a watery pot. There was a vertical rhythm of rising stems, waterweeds, and a dashing horizontal rhythm of irregular clouds of black-brown wriggling commas, which turned out, inspected closely, to be lifelike tadpoles with translucent tails.... It rested on four dark green feet, which were coiled, scaled lizards. Or minor dragons, lying with closed eyes and resting snouts.

That's colour, movement, music, landscape, language and biological detail, all visually observed like she's making a scientific discovery, and it's all about a pot.

But Byatt isn't all delicate intricate descriptions. The Children's Book sweeps about, through  five different (but interlocking) families and several decades, which include some very unpleasant historical moments. When I reviewed Ragnarok I said that Byatt seems to enjoy writing about nastiness as much as she does beauty, and you can see the same thing in The Children's Book - it's Grimm's toothy, gory fairytales that she's most influenced by here, and when we get to World War I at the end, characters get shot in the face and drowned in the mud with gleeful abandon. You care about Byatt's characters, and you can tell that she does too, but she isn't afraid of bumping them off, and I think that's a mark of a really good writer.

And, in case you couldn't tell, I think that A S Byatt is a really good writer. She's clever, she's bold, she's beautiful and (most importantly) she's a pleasure to read. She doesn't rub how ridiculously smart she is in your face (which is not to say that you don't realise it. But at least she's not being rude about it). Ah, I loved this. And when I finished it I hit 17.78% completion of the 2010 list.

I've still got a way to go.

4.5 stars.

Review - Darkness Rising

So, the Booker Prize shortlist for this year has been announced. And there it is. It's a shortlist. Unmistakably a list, and a short one at that.

Goodness.

I'm really struggling to muster any emotion about this one. I feel... whelmed. Distinctly whelmed (because I am in Europe, and I can be). The Sisters Brothers has the best cover, and Sense of an Ending is, er, the thinnest (can you tell I haven't read any of these, or really been moved to?). If I had to pick a winner, though, I'd go for Pigeon English, since it's the only title that seemed to be generating any sort of low-level person-to-person buzz before it was nominated. I mean, I worked in a fairly literary, well-read bookshop for most of this year and I don't think I even sold a copy of any of the rest of them. I'm going to try to read some of them, and we shall see, but... hmm.

Anyway, review.

I spent most of last Wednesday sitting in a hospital waiting room. Which turned out very well for all concerned, so don't worry, but at the time was not exactly restful. We happened to be sitting next to a woman who kept calling people up and saying awful things like, "and then his lung collapsed, and then his OTHER lung collapsed, and then he lost sensation in his legs, and then his SPLEEN burst," while her child ran around in circles screaming "MUM I'm BORED I'm SICK THERE'S A STICKER MISSING FROM MY COLOURING BOOK!"

I had sort of guessed it might not be a place for my MA reading, and so I brought along a book that would be exceedingly restful. And then I read the whole thing. That day had a lot of time in it. I think they might have been slowing down the clocks. But Darkness Rising kept me calm, because there are two things that soothe me more than anything else in the world and those things are CAKES and MURDER. And that is all Frank Tallis's books are ever about.

There is an amazing amount of pastry in a Frank Tallis murder mystery. His excuse, I think, is that they are set in Vienna, where cake is a form of religion (I have been there. I know. French pastry wishes it was that delicious), but even so, his characters' relationship to pudding borders on the obsessional. You could make a very profitable Frank-Tallis-spot-the-foodstuff drinking game, and the last time my boyfriend read one I got a stream of delighted texts all along the lines of CAKE! CAKE SPOTTED IN CHAPTER FOURTEEN!

And this is not just any cake, either. These cakes all have mysterious and delicious names, like guglhupf and punschkrapfen, and whenever a character bites into one you are treated to an intricate and borderline erotic description of the taste sensations they are experiencing:

At once his mouth was suffused with a melee of flavours. The coolness of the shell contrasted with the warmth of the alcoholic sponge inside, and he was overwhelmed by an almost dizzying sweetness. After he had swallowed, his taste buds were still tingling with flavours: marzipan, nuts and jam.

I mean. Take off all your clothes, Frank Tallis is writing about food again.

Frank Tallis's background is nearly as bizarre as Anne Holt's. He's a practicing clinical psychologist who happens to write historical murder mysteries on the side - and, of course, because he's a clinical psychologist his chosen bit of history is Vienna at the turn of the last century, when Freud was getting everyone het up about children sucking their thumbs and people dreaming about wolves in a wardrobe. His main character, Dr Max Liebermann, is a disciple of Freud, and all the murders he investigates are conveniently to do with unconscious desires and sex mania. We also get treated to hilarious b-plot side cases as Dr Liebermann treats his patients - in Darkness Rising, for example, we get the case of a man who thinks he's pregnant. Which is totally brilliant.

What Frank Tallis is not, though, is a technically excellent writer. His policy seems to be that he knows a lot of words, and by god he is going to use all of them. People aren't unconscious, they're insensate, a carving of bears becomes eponymous ursine relief work, and image of someone's boobs in a low-cut dress is described as

She was wearing a tight silk dress, the intrepid neckline of which descended steeply, revealing a plenitude of bulging flesh.

You guys, she was stacked.

But all the same, it's not the sort of language-abusing writing that makes me want to tear out my hair in a rage. It's just gently silly, and the result is an awful lot of fun.

Darkness Rising's plot, such as it is, concerns a series of mysterious murders of notable anti-Semites, who all turn up beneath plague monuments with their heads ripped off. If you know your Jewish folklore you're going to get to the answer quite a bit before Liebermann and his policeman sidekick Inspector Rheinhardt do, but the point of this book is not cunning trickery. The point of this book is cakes and psychoanalysis. And the cakes are good.

I nearly forgot I was in a hospital waiting room.

3.5 stars.