The 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).
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