Wolf Hall (1)

And so it begins...

From Nancy Mitford to Hilary Mantel - is it really so odd? My paperback - and therefore transportable, hence readable - copy arrived yesterday. I am disappointed to find it is written in present tense; I'm really rather averse to novels in the present tense. However, Wolf Hall has had such consistent praise that I am willing to overlook this fact and dive straight in. I cannot believe that I will prefer it to - or even like it as much as - The Children's Book, its Booker counterpart in volume if nothing else, but to enjoy it even half as much I shall consider a triumph. I may be gone some time...

The Children's Book (2)

I finished it today. And I find myself in a place I visit from time to time, a place known to all readers, a place that lies at the end of a perfect book; we wander around, picking up a novel or a biography that, when we bought it, we couldn't wait to start, but which now, in comparison with the book just finished, looks dull and two-dimensional. Put simply, no other book will now do. A bar has been raised, and I am frustrated at the lack of challengers to meet the new standard.

The Children's Book shifts, from its early arts-n-crafts idyll, into a darker, lonelier area. The children grow up. Events take hold. 1914 looms with bloody dramatic irony. Byatt gives us whole chapters as political instruction. The feel of the novel becomes altogether more charged, the last fifty pages or so reading almost as a textbook list of the names of those killed in the trenches. Ypres passes by and takes with it certain characters, then comes Passchendaele and the Somme, and more boys are lost; it is to Julian Cain that Byatt gives the voice with which to express this overwhelming pain. The final scene reminds me of Testament of Youth; I am left with the image of a post-war townhouse in which the remains of an extended family gropes its way towards a depleted future.

And yet, already when I think back over my month with this book - as I will do often, for it is that sort of book - I find it is within Olive's stories and the Wellwood gardens that my mind settles, or to Philip's pots and the marshland around Purchase House that my thoughts return. It is to that short Edwardian period in which the seeds of our modern world were sown that I (and I think many others, including Byatt herself) am drawn. It was a unique time amongst the privileged classes, and one which has come to define a certain England, and as I now pass over Anna Karenina and a new biography of Emily Dickinson in search of something in which I can live as I have lived inside The Children's Book, it is to that era that I long to turn again.

The Children's Book (1)

I had wanted to read all the 2009 Booker shortlist. Before the winner was announced, I managed only two, The Glass Room and The Little Stranger, both of which I loved. There was a stretch in the middle of the Sarah Waters' where I felt some tighter editing might have moved things along a little more pleasingly, but this minor fault was more than made up for by the novel's chilling last line. She is truly a mistress of storytelling - I still haven't forgiven her for the twist that comes halfway through Fingersmith, a shock so great that when I read it, I had to put the book down and lie silently for an hour before I was able to continue with my life!

The Children's Book was too large, as was Wolf Hall, to carry around, and with some misgiving I determined to leave them both until their paperback counterparts were available. Wolf Hall comes at the beginning of March, but I am delighted to say that I am now happily ensconced in the lightweight version of The Children's Book. And it was worth the wait.

Beginning in 1895, this vast opus, part novel, part social history, bridges for me a fascinating gap. Last summer's guilty pleasure was the watching of Desperate Romantics, and subsequent reading about the pre-Raphaelites and their influence on the Arts and Crafts movement and indeed, the social reform it spawned. In addition to this, I have long held a crush on Rupert Brooke, and find the late Edwardian era and First World War a compellingly interesting time. Class issues and the rights and standing of women were at the forefront of reform, and the budding of the world we now live in began in that bloodied soil. These two eras are joined by The Children's Book; one character is a Rossetti 'Stunner', others are related to major players in Brooke's short and turbulent life. It is immensely satisfying to be able to identify people and places as real, and to know already something of the world immediately preceding that of AS Byatt's creation, and the one that follows.

I would add that this is a book entirely suited to the title of this blog; I find myself curled up and reading by candlelight night after night, frustrated only that I am too exhausted during the week to dedicate more of my time to it. It is an enthralling story, filled with characters with whom I am already, after only 200 pages, very much in love. It is real, and yet part dark fairytale, and ultimately deeply satisfying; true literary porridge.