calimac

If an interesting author travels six thousand miles to speak and read at a nearby bookstore, why not go? Thus I came to be listening to Antonia Byatt on her new novel, The Children's Book.

Byatt said that this novel was the result of the concurrence of several interests related to children. One was the observation that the children of famous children's authors, the ones whom the books were supposedly written for, often have very unhappy lives. (She didn't say whom specifically she was referring to. Alastair Grahame certainly counts. Christopher Milne, despite popular impression, actually doesn't, as his books make clear.) Another was noting the discovery by upper-class British adults at the very end of the 19th century that children were real human beings you could interact with, instead of the decorative objects they'd been treated as in previous decades. Third was an interest in the sibling and child-parent relationship dynamics in very large families. (Byatt herself was one of four: not as large a family as she had in mind.)

The central character, at least of the section read, is a woman of that time who writes children's fiction - dark fairy tales, judging from the excerpt we heard. This character combines, Byatt suggested, the personal and social circumstances and interests of E. Nesbit with the more lower-class background of D.H. Lawrence.

So it's a firmly adult novel about children's literature. Byatt has no romantic or nostalgic feelings about childhood. She said: "I intensely disliked being a child. I thought it would be much better being an adult. And it is."