Reviews
"Ambitious, accomplished and intelligent . . . Byatt encompasses the paradigm shift from Victorian to modern England in a sweeping tale of four families. The deeper subject, however, is the complex, not always benign bond that attaches children to adults. As the novel opens in 1895, Olive Wellwood seems the model New Woman: popular author of books that reinvent fairy tales for contemporary children, tolerant wife to Fabian Society stalwart Humphry, devoted mother pregnant with her seventh baby. She takes in a working-class boy who longs to make art, and connects him with a master potter whose family belongs to the Wellwoods' progressive, artistic circle. As the narrative unfolds, we see the dark side of these idealists' lives. . . . The gothic sexual interconnections [among the characters] recall Bloomsbury, and Olive is clearly a gloss on E. Nesbit, but this is no mere roman à clef. Byatt's concern is the vast area where utopian visions collide with human nature. . . . Her adult subjects, she writes, 'saw, in a way that earlier generations had not, that children were people, with identities and desires….but they saw this out of a desire of their own for perpetual childhood.' World War I forces everyone to grow up. Byatt has painted her large cast of characters so richly that we care about all of them. In the last chapter, the survivors reunite and dream once more: 'They could make magical plays for a new generation of children.'" Kirkus Reviews "Easily the best thing A. S. Byatt has written since her Booker-winning masterpiece,Possession. . . A panoramic cavalcade of a novel [and] a work that superlatively displays both enormous reach and tremendous grip." Peter Kemp,The Sunday Times(London) "Insistently readable . . . Brimming with intelligence and sensuality." Claire Allfree,Metro(UK) (Four stars) "Devastating." Helen Dunmore,The Times(London) "Marvelous . . . [A] sweeping yet intricate account of three middle-class English families navigating the blind turn from the 19th to the 20th centuries. . . . Rapturously immediate and vivid. . . . Substantial and superb . . . Here is Byatt at her historical-novelist best." Geoff Pevere,Toronto Star "Gripping and often deeply affecting . . . Magnificent . . . Lavish . . . A narrative tour de force." Pamela Norris,Literary Review "The sort of high-concept intellectual fiction we'd expect from, well, A. S. Byatt.Possession:the next generation. . . . There is enormous personal sadness in Byatt's novel, which becomes a collective, historical sadness as the novel moves ineluctably towards 1914." Sophie Gee,Financial Times "Brilliant . . . Clear-eyed . . . A staggeringly charged, slyly comic re-creation of the period between the end of the 19th century and the first world war." Alex Clark,The Guardian "Intricately worked and sumptuously inlaid . . .The Children's Bookseethes and pulses with an entangled life, of the mind and the senses alike." Boyd Tonkin,The Independent "An engrossing saga. . . . Byatt captures the innocence of childhood in the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras before the onset of the First World War. It is a world of half-hidden secrets, set against a backdrop of social change. A rich historical stew." Sebastian Shakespeare,Tatler "This is [Byatt's]Middlemarch."Sam Leith,The Guardian
