Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

A.S. BYATT – THE CHILDREN’S BOOK – 2010

This is a book for very long winter nights and you should cut it up in sections of four or five chapters and distribute the sectionS among as many people as necessary and then bring the readers all together and let them try to rebuild the whole book. You just forgot on purpose by accident to give them the real page numbers and hence the real order of the sections.

For one it is too long and it gets lost in too much detail. For two there are too many characters who are all treated equal and very fast you do not know who is who any more. For three the period covered is by far too long and with these many characters you cannot really follow each one of them because then the book is too short and there are never enough detail about each one at each time. And the author jumps lumps of time and you end up having the various characters’ lives sounding and looking like dotted lines and the dots are at times far apart.

It is this lack of centeredness and one-pointed-ness that makes the book difficult to read. Too long and slow to read and yet with so many characters and jumps in the time line that we never remember what happened before to this or that person. Hence you get lost. Since the supposedly main character is a children’s story writer, Olive, the author should have written this story the way a children’s story is written, clearly following one path with one or two main characters and no break in the time line, otherwise you have to summarize what was said before some time ago, etc., all the time.

It is slightly regrettable because of some of the themes, the Russian anarchists, the Fabian society people, the First World War, the creativity of some craftsmen who are close to art and yet still craftsmen, the horror of lead poisoning in the pot-making industry and of industrial pollution as a whole, the squalor of working class living conditions, and many other subjects. Too many subjects actually for any one to be focused on.  Concentrate your tale please.

If you start reading this book, be sure to have something more dynamic next to you to cut this humdrum slow moving multi-tiered and multistoried tale into digestible slices and thus if you take notes to remember what is happening to some characters you may make it last over three or four weeks and eventually reach the end without jumping one or two hundred pages.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU