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kestrellThe Children's Book by A. S. Byatt (2009, Reprint ed. Vintage International), 2010)
_The Children's Book_ is one of those increasingly unpopular sort of novels, the novel of ideas. The time period between the late 1890s and World War I and the Art nouveau movement are two subjects which I find fascinating, but I still had to look up numerous unfamiliar words, names, and phrases, so if that is something which, as a reader, you do not enjoy, you should skip this book. (I do not mention this to make myself seem more pretentiously intellectual, but because a number of reviewers complained that this book contained too many unfamiliar words and events.)
One reason I find the time period covered in this book so fascinating is that it provides such a mirror of our times. The years between 1895-1913 provide a parallell to the years 1995 to the present in that both experienced dizzying technological changes which completely transformed industry and culture, even the way people experienced the physical geography of their world. These technological changes also fueled political terrorism, both within nations and between nations. There were a number of ongoing wars which seemed to grind up nations's young people like so much meat through a meat grinder, while the reasons for those wars became increasingly more muddled--was it patriotism and the protection of democracy, or the manipulation of politicians and industrialists who only wished for more wealth and power?
Along with all of this technological, social, and political chaos, the arts were also reshaping the world, if on a smaller scale. First the Arts and Crafts movement, with it's emphasis on people creating their own goods and rejecting mass-produced consumer goods, and then the Art Nouveau movement, which sought to marry the new technological materials with traditional crafts, with each individual becoming an artisan. The current DIY, green, and minimalist movements of the early 21st century echo many of the same ideas that the Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau movements expressed, much of which can be summed up in the words of William Morris: "Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or consider to be beautiful."
The ideas of a handful of artists might seem to provide a restricted and artificial subject for such as sprawling epic as Byatt's _The Children's Book_, but Byatt demonstrates in vivid, if lengthy, prose what Tom Stoppard so succinctly expresses in the introduction to his play, "Rock 'N' Roll," "culture is politics." (p. xviii).
Another parallel between the early 20th and early 21st centuries is their preoccupation with fantasy and children's books, and it is from this connection that Byatt's book was most fascinating to me. Byatt mentioned in one of the interviews that she was partially inspired by Angela Carter's fairy tales and, similar to Carter, Byatt seems to find inspiration in the very darkest part of the wood. Byatt, like Carter, does not forget that what often proves to be the most powerful part of the fairy tale for children is the parts which adults find most discomforting, and would--indeed, often do--erase from the fairy tale: the grotesques, the monsters, the mutated forms, the blood and the violence and all the rest of the scary, shivery parts.
If anything, Byatt's book provides a detailed picture of how adults often use fantasy to rewrite childhood as a time of innocence spend in an idyllic garden, while children use fantasy to counter the fear, confusion, and powerlessness which adults so often wreak within the world of children and teenagers.
Byatt also creates a disturbing picture of how adults sometimes feed off the secret lives of children in a way which can only be described as vampiric. The image of a boy in a fairy tale whose shadow is stolen becomes a metaphor for how society expects children to be sunny superficial creatures. And yet to grow up is to recognize and learn to alternately control and channel one's shadow self, one's secret self. This dissection and ultimate destruction of the shadow self proves no less fatal for adults. As one character who is recovering from a mental breakdown expresses it:
"No man has a right to dictate another man's inner life-- the furniture inside his skull. They made me into someone else. An acolyte--you say acolyte?--good--of a new ancient religion. We were all dreaming the same dreams, because they were the dreams that excited Herr Jung and Herr Gross."
"They had invented me, do you see?" (p. 726)
It is probably this tension between the adults, who use fantasy to reshape the world as all superficial prettiness and the pretense of happy-ever-after, and the children, whose own versions of the fairy tales are darker, and often it is the children who must pay the penalty for the sins and secrets of the adults, which I found most fascinating, for it expresses something which I find frustrating about so much contemporary fantasy: the preoccupation and even glorification of surface, something which I think of as the gentrification of fantasy.
The fantasy genre has to some extent always had its contingent that stuck to pretty princesses and willowy elves, to long auburn hair and jewel-colored eyes, to traditional romance and magic consumer goods, but this obsessionw ith surface now seems to be the dominant theme to the detriment of the shadows and psychological depth. One of the criticisms in negative reviews of Byatt's book which I found amusing was the complaint that Byatt spends so much description on objects such as clothing, furniture, jewelry, food, not to mention ceramics, which provides a leitmotif for the novel. The fact that our own fantasy and mainstream novels are often stuffed with product placements for endless consumer goods or, in the case of modern fantasy, full of images of pretty vampires, witches and fairy folk who seem to be cut from the same cookie cutter of elegantly thin and eternally young and all having shopped at the same mysterious Salvation Army store (which must be packed to overflowing) with the fashions of bygone eras, does not seem to have struck anyone else as ironic.
And this is the ultimate moral, if there is one, of _The Children's Book_, how contemporary culture is inclined to rewrite childhood by declawing the wild things, cleaning up the monsters so that they can occupy the modern condo or family home, sweep the secrets like so much dust and cobwebs from the gothic house, and steal the shadow from the wild boy and tell him its all for his own good, so he can be a good boy, an eternal child, pretty on the outside, an empty shell on the inside, now that the adults have bled all his secrets from him. Pretty and empty is much more prized than unique and complicated by changing shadows, for secrets are not pretty, and mysteries require too much hard work too penetrate, and even words of real magic and conjuring are too difficult to pronounce any more.
_The Children's Book_ is one of those increasingly unpopular sort of novels, the novel of ideas. The time period between the late 1890s and World War I and the Art nouveau movement are two subjects which I find fascinating, but I still had to look up numerous unfamiliar words, names, and phrases, so if that is something which, as a reader, you do not enjoy, you should skip this book. (I do not mention this to make myself seem more pretentiously intellectual, but because a number of reviewers complained that this book contained too many unfamiliar words and events.)
One reason I find the time period covered in this book so fascinating is that it provides such a mirror of our times. The years between 1895-1913 provide a parallell to the years 1995 to the present in that both experienced dizzying technological changes which completely transformed industry and culture, even the way people experienced the physical geography of their world. These technological changes also fueled political terrorism, both within nations and between nations. There were a number of ongoing wars which seemed to grind up nations's young people like so much meat through a meat grinder, while the reasons for those wars became increasingly more muddled--was it patriotism and the protection of democracy, or the manipulation of politicians and industrialists who only wished for more wealth and power?
Along with all of this technological, social, and political chaos, the arts were also reshaping the world, if on a smaller scale. First the Arts and Crafts movement, with it's emphasis on people creating their own goods and rejecting mass-produced consumer goods, and then the Art Nouveau movement, which sought to marry the new technological materials with traditional crafts, with each individual becoming an artisan. The current DIY, green, and minimalist movements of the early 21st century echo many of the same ideas that the Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau movements expressed, much of which can be summed up in the words of William Morris: "Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or consider to be beautiful."
The ideas of a handful of artists might seem to provide a restricted and artificial subject for such as sprawling epic as Byatt's _The Children's Book_, but Byatt demonstrates in vivid, if lengthy, prose what Tom Stoppard so succinctly expresses in the introduction to his play, "Rock 'N' Roll," "culture is politics." (p. xviii).
Another parallel between the early 20th and early 21st centuries is their preoccupation with fantasy and children's books, and it is from this connection that Byatt's book was most fascinating to me. Byatt mentioned in one of the interviews that she was partially inspired by Angela Carter's fairy tales and, similar to Carter, Byatt seems to find inspiration in the very darkest part of the wood. Byatt, like Carter, does not forget that what often proves to be the most powerful part of the fairy tale for children is the parts which adults find most discomforting, and would--indeed, often do--erase from the fairy tale: the grotesques, the monsters, the mutated forms, the blood and the violence and all the rest of the scary, shivery parts.
If anything, Byatt's book provides a detailed picture of how adults often use fantasy to rewrite childhood as a time of innocence spend in an idyllic garden, while children use fantasy to counter the fear, confusion, and powerlessness which adults so often wreak within the world of children and teenagers.
Byatt also creates a disturbing picture of how adults sometimes feed off the secret lives of children in a way which can only be described as vampiric. The image of a boy in a fairy tale whose shadow is stolen becomes a metaphor for how society expects children to be sunny superficial creatures. And yet to grow up is to recognize and learn to alternately control and channel one's shadow self, one's secret self. This dissection and ultimate destruction of the shadow self proves no less fatal for adults. As one character who is recovering from a mental breakdown expresses it:
"No man has a right to dictate another man's inner life-- the furniture inside his skull. They made me into someone else. An acolyte--you say acolyte?--good--of a new ancient religion. We were all dreaming the same dreams, because they were the dreams that excited Herr Jung and Herr Gross."
"They had invented me, do you see?" (p. 726)
It is probably this tension between the adults, who use fantasy to reshape the world as all superficial prettiness and the pretense of happy-ever-after, and the children, whose own versions of the fairy tales are darker, and often it is the children who must pay the penalty for the sins and secrets of the adults, which I found most fascinating, for it expresses something which I find frustrating about so much contemporary fantasy: the preoccupation and even glorification of surface, something which I think of as the gentrification of fantasy.
The fantasy genre has to some extent always had its contingent that stuck to pretty princesses and willowy elves, to long auburn hair and jewel-colored eyes, to traditional romance and magic consumer goods, but this obsessionw ith surface now seems to be the dominant theme to the detriment of the shadows and psychological depth. One of the criticisms in negative reviews of Byatt's book which I found amusing was the complaint that Byatt spends so much description on objects such as clothing, furniture, jewelry, food, not to mention ceramics, which provides a leitmotif for the novel. The fact that our own fantasy and mainstream novels are often stuffed with product placements for endless consumer goods or, in the case of modern fantasy, full of images of pretty vampires, witches and fairy folk who seem to be cut from the same cookie cutter of elegantly thin and eternally young and all having shopped at the same mysterious Salvation Army store (which must be packed to overflowing) with the fashions of bygone eras, does not seem to have struck anyone else as ironic.
And this is the ultimate moral, if there is one, of _The Children's Book_, how contemporary culture is inclined to rewrite childhood by declawing the wild things, cleaning up the monsters so that they can occupy the modern condo or family home, sweep the secrets like so much dust and cobwebs from the gothic house, and steal the shadow from the wild boy and tell him its all for his own good, so he can be a good boy, an eternal child, pretty on the outside, an empty shell on the inside, now that the adults have bled all his secrets from him. Pretty and empty is much more prized than unique and complicated by changing shadows, for secrets are not pretty, and mysteries require too much hard work too penetrate, and even words of real magic and conjuring are too difficult to pronounce any more.
