A Month's Worth of Books, pt. 4

Next I read The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt*; honestly, I don't know why. It's been on my "list" since December 2009, I think: I'm pretty sure I had noted it down (pretty cover) around the time of my melanoma surgery, but, honestly, I am glad I never got around to picking it up - probably because I never was that taken by Possession, so I've been skeptical of the Byatt hype. I was so out of it, half the time with pain and half the time with sleepiness (thanks a lot, pain meds), and I would have been bored to death. Actually, maybe that would have been a good idea, because sleeping was the only time I wasn't hurting, and the medication was only useful for making me sleepier faster...

The book was wasn't all that bad, I guess, or even really bad, but it was sloooow. The book was set in the Victorian years through World War I, and focuses on a loose association (at times tight, at times vaguely incestuous) of families, mainly liberal and artsy, in England, and I enjoyed the basic premise and setting, but some of the characters were really annoying (Olive!) and Byatt would go off on these page-long digressions about what was happening in the theater or literature or politics at any given moment in the book.

Context is fantastic, and I can see where she was going with all the information, but it was like chapters from an encyclopedia got dropped down inside a novel. At one point she starts talking about the general nature of the Edwardian English on page 391 and keeps going, listing books published, theories propounded, and social behavior, until 397. That's seven pages of nothing directly related (or all even, really, related more than slightly) to any of the characters or plot points.

The thing is, I almost don't even blame Byatt. I totally get it - you do a ton of research, you learn a lot of cool stuff (and, of course, it seems extra cool to you, because you've been working for it, and immersed in it, even if it's not that cool to other people), and you can't bear not to use it. I've been there. But someone needs to edit that sh*t. So I mostly blame her editors, because it's their f***ing job, but she needs to take some of the blame. Because, yeah, sometimes you would rather lose flesh than a fascinating bit of trivia you've dug up, or even a (to you at least) marvelously well-crafted passage, but sometimes you just have to. That's life.

There's a better example of what I think she was aiming for on page 480, when she inserts just a brief paragraph about some books that were being published at a certain time; the type of literature hitting the English market is clearly related to the public sentiment and actions of her characters that she is describing, and it's mildly valuable context that's not intrusive. Or a hundred pages later:

"Wolfgang Stern was already on the battlefield, in the German Sixth Army, under Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria. He was on the left of the Schlieffen scythe, retreating deliberately towards Germany to draw the French Army outwards, away from Paris. The French soldiers wore a uniform from the past, with red trousers, a long great-coat, broadcloth tunic, flannel shirt and long underpants, winter and summer. Their boots were known as 'Brodequins' which was the name of an instrument of torture. They carried a rifle, a kit weighing sixty-six pounds, and a regulation bundle of kindling wood."

Did we need all this information? No. Could it have been presented in a more organic way? Yes. Is it even accurate? I have no idea, and don't care enough to look it up (I should ask my brother; I don't think WWI is his bag, but he does military more than I do, and goodness knows, for some bizarre reason he seems to enjoy French history - stupid Napoleon). But it works. And she picks things up with the next line/paragraph:

"The French soldiers believed in attack, and then attack, and then again attack. They believed they had been defeated in 1870 because of a lack of firmness and elan [what is up with everything I want to cite tonight needing accents??]. They charged, heavily, drums beating, bugles sounding, their long bayonets held in their guns before them. They were very brave, and the German machine-gunners, including Wolfgang, mowed them like fields of grass."

MUCH better. Same tone and pacing, more or less, but so much better. Pretty d*mn good, actually.

There were also awkward points throughout the book when she would follow the trail of one of her digressions to a date, and then have to move back in time when she finally returned to the actual storyline. Sometimes this happened even within the story itself; Byatt would focus a lot on certain episodes in the characters' lives, and then advance the plot forward with a jump to a more interesting period. Fair enough, but it got awkward in places. For example, on page 408 we read,

"In 1904 Major Cain travelled [sic/B] with the Director, Sir Casper Purdon Clarke, and Arthur Skinner, who was to succeed Clarke, to the opening of the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Berlin: they went also to the Kunstgewerbemuseum, and Cain went on to Munich, where the display impressed him. They went in 1901 to the opening in Paris, in the Louvre, of the Musee [sorry, can't make the accent happen] des Arts Decoratifs [ditto]..."


So we've traveled from 1904 back in time to 1901, and learned some not-so-pertinent information about the leadership structure of the Victoria & Albert. But time resumes its usual forward momentum - assuming we're sticking with 1901 as the starting point - because on the very next page,

"He [Cain] had his worries about her, also. In 1902 she was twenty-three..."

Really? I'm sorry, but this is a prize-winning author, and she couldn't come up with a less clumsy way of advancing the narrative through time? Then again, as far as I could tell at least two women wound up pregnant as the result of a single sexual encounter (for one woman it was her first time), and while I realize that can happen, honestly, what are the odds of two women, in the same circle, both getting knocked up so easily? Well, what are the odds, I mean, when the author doesn't need some surprise babies to shake up the narrative a bit... Lazy, is all I'm saying - this isn't General Hospital (which I watched two hours of today, because I was home and felt terrible and just sat around feeling bad for myself - anyhow, they ALSO love a random pregnancy to spice things up).

I feel bad that I am being so negative - that I came away from the book feeling so negative - because I thought it started out really strongly, and there were certainly a lot of elements that I really liked. Some of the characters were interesting and finely drawn (although she really let down the reader with Tom, I think, and let down Tom, for that matter, towards the end) - and she moved back and forth between different threads of the story competently. Maybe the bitterness is because I was disappointed...it's like the book and I had a bad breakup. And I had had such high hopes - because Byatt lured me in with early passages, like the one where she describes a complex, magical, macabre puppet show:

"An illusion is a complicated thing, and an audience is a complicated creature. Both need to be brought from flyaway parts to a smooth, composite whole. The world inside the box, a world made from silk, satin, china mouldings, wires, hinges, painted backcloths, moving lights and musical notes, must come alive with its own laws of movement, its own rules of story. And the watchers, wide-eyed and greedy, distracted and supercilious, preoccupied, uncomfortable, tense, must become one, as a shoal of fishes with huge eyes and flickering fins becomes one, wheeling this way and that in response to messages of hunger, fear or delight." [72]

In some ways it can be the same thing for a book. Obviously each reader brings his/her own background and experiences to a book, and every reading (even different readings by the same reader) is of a somewhat different book, because to read a book is an experience as much as an act, and there's so much more than just the words on the page. But the author still needs to control the reader somewhat, make the reader follow along, and if we, the audience, are the fishes, Byatt had me hooked initially, but lost me.

*I don't anticipate it really mattering, but the edition I read was the Chatto & Windus (London - obviously, the British punctuation was driving me nuts at first until my brain adjusted) 2009.