I just finished reading The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt (2009). An unforgettable experience.
Byatt started writing the book with observing an "uneasy recurrence of unhappy fates for the children of writers". Writers of children's stories, like J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan. The story is placed at the end of the 19th Century. The short period between the Victorian Period and the First World War, marked by the rising of a new free, artistic and socially conscious way of living: the Fabians, the Art Nouveau, the Suffragettes' movement, the anarchism in England, in Europe and in America. The action is mostly in London and in the counties of Kent and East Sussex but it moves to the Exposition Universelle of Paris, to Munich, ...
The book follows the children from the golden childhood given to them by their enlightened parents, to the cruel ending of many dreams in the first world war. It is threaded with fragments of marvelous fairy tales that Byatt creates in the spirit of the time, and with the description of the new cultural and social themes that after more than a century are still vital and active nowadays. While reading the book I was constantly driven to consider what remains nowadays, and it is not little, of the struggles, of the injustices, of the discriminations, which dreams have become delusions, which are still dreams.
Byatt masters the art of description, and the dramatic construction. One would like to get closer to some of the many characters and identify with him or with her. But deliberately Byatt shifts the focus so that one is forced to perceive a wide, complex image of the time. When characters return in first plane they have grown some and new events and developments are there to catch the reader interest anew.
It is both an historical novel and a Bildungsroman. Actually, the children and their education is one of the central themes of the work.
Byatt lectured for 11 years at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design: she knows about art and artists. In this book it is mostly the wonderful pottery of the time that she describes in fascinating details. And the clothes, oh yes, the Edwardian fashion.
A friend gave me these brief interviews with A.S. Byatt, that give a useful idea.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsWQu...layer_embedded
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJc1B...eature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8xeo...eature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3sQU...eature=related