The Children’s Book By A.S. Byatt, Chatto and Windus, £18.99

Antonia S. Byatt has been waiting for a long time to write this book, the logical culmination of the children’s stories so intricately woven into the fabric of her earlier novels. At the start of A Whistling Woman, the fourth novel in the Frederica Potter quartet, Agatha Mond concludes a story she has been telling assorted children for the past two years. The conclusion is unsatisfactory, and the children are appalled. But inset stories have formed so recurrent an element of Byatt’s fiction, and are so integral to her presentation of the writer’s craft, that it was inevitable that one day she would decide to build a novel around them. To do so, she has returned to a period some 50 years before the commencement of the Potter series, and to a figure more flamboyant and unconventional than the reclusive Agatha Mond.

At the centre of The Children’s Book are Olive Wellwood and her husband Humphry, thinly disguised versions of Edith Nesbit and Hubert Bland. Like Nesbit, Olive is a celebrated children’s writer, with an interest in magic. Like Bland, Humphry Wellwood is a member of the Fabian Society, and Todefright, their house in Kent, like Halstead Hall, regularly entertains “socialists, anarchists, Quakers, Fabians, artists, editors, freethinkers and writers”. They have five (later six) children and a large establishment which includes Olive’s sister, Violet. Although Olive is not the mother, nor Humphry the father, of all the children, she is writing a book for each child, books which are kept in a glass-fronted case and taken out to be further written, read, or cannibalized for Olive’s published tales. At the start of the novel in 1895, a boy called Philip Warren is discovered hiding in the South Kensington Museum and brought to this household, from where he is sent to live with the potter, Benedict Fludd, to learn his craft. By the novel’s end, just after the First World War, there is little left of the Wellwood and Fludd families and most of the male children in their circle are dead, though Philip Warren survives.

This densely-populated account of 25 years is Byatt’s tribute to the Edwardian era, a golden age when childhood was discovered and made into a fictional subject, a time of radical social experiments, affective communities, unconventional marriages, and alternative lifestyles. Relentlessly tutelary, Byatt’s novel ensures that even if we had known nothing about the Edwardians at the start, we know more or less everything by the end. If the book still manages to avert boredom, this is not simply because of Byatt’s writing skills, but because of our own, very Victorian, curiosity. Faced with this diverse assemblage of characters, we want, like the children, to know more about their relationships. It is this curiosity that takes us through Byatt’s intricate unravelling of sexual and moral entanglements, public and private lives. At the end, these intimate histories and their affective burdens are simply overweighed by the brutality and finality of the War, a supremely wasteful engagement sacrificing countless lives. Exhausted, Byatt shows no interest in the influenza epidemic that followed it.

But history as representation, the mere accumulation of mimetic detail, is surely not the sole point of this exercise. Byatt’s book is also a novel about childhood and its loss. The hero of this narrative is Olive Wellwood’s eldest son Tom, a boy brought up at home and in the countryside like Richard Jefferies’s Bevis, mercilessly bullied when he is sent belatedly to public school, and ultimately unable to adapt to the world outside Todefright. Like Milne’s son Christopher Robin, Tom is damaged by the publicizing of his private fictional world and breaks down when his mother allows his story, Tom Underground, to be made into a play, like Barrie’s Peter Pan. But Tom’s troubles are only part of a larger and more complex emotional and social history, where poverty, cruelty, incest, and abuse are everyday facts. An important figure in this larger canvas is the potter Benedict Fludd, loosely based on Eric Gill, and like him, both a prodigiously gifted artist-craftsman and a paraphiliac who appears to have sexually abused his daughters.

Rich, absorbing, endlessly complex and vivid in its evocation of a vanished England, Byatt’s book also raises some questions about the nature of representation itself, about what we might call the morality of description. The energy and inventiveness with which Byatt has given herself to the task of describing the past, allowing historical figures like Rupert Brooke, Oscar Wilde, Auguste Rodin, Marie Stopes and J.M. Barrie to rub shoulders with her barely disguised versions of real persons, such as the serial seducer Herbert Methley (H.G. Wells/ D.H. Lawrence), appear to suspend or defer moral questions. Benedict Fludd is neither exposed nor condemned, and though Olive, Humphry and the children suffer, the novel finds no space for anger, hatred, or jealousy. All strong emotion is dissipated by the endless capacity for talk, for introspection, for verbal re-presentation. Literary self-indulgence has been a constant feature of Byatt’s oeuvre, but in this, the most allusive and biographical of all her novels, it becomes, in a sense, anti-novelistic: a way of doing biography, not fiction.

The most appropriate term perhaps is cultural history, of a kind that seeks to replicate the aesthetic values it describes. Byatt’s book is as detailed as William Frith’s The Railway Station, with an undertext as surreal as Richard Dadd’s The Fairy-Feller’s Master-Stroke. It is thickly overlaid with descriptions of clothes, embroidery, designs, textures, art-objects, styles, events, speeches, a habit so ingrained that we must accept sentences such as: “Anselm Stern was wearing a soot-coloured, not-entirely-British Norfolk jacket over his dark drainpipe trousers. He stood with his teacup (Minton, Dresden shape, painted with pansies)”. There are wonderful accounts of the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris and the opening of the V & A, a fitting memorial to an age inspired by Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement. Yet Byatt’s anxiety to cram everything into the frame and her passion for historical accuracy are held in uneasy tension with her own literary obsessions, such as the Wündermarchen of the German Romanticists Ludwig Tieck and E.T.A. Hoffmann. So the Ugly-Wuglies, animated dummies of the children’s theatre performance in Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle, are frighteningly reprised in the German puppet-master Anselm Stern’s marionette shows of the Grimm Brothers’ Cinderella and Hoffmann’s The Sandman, and in the story of Dorothy Wellwood, Stern’s daughter. In the end, Byatt’s darkly terrifying version of a children’s book is unlike anything that Nesbit ever wrote. Her homage to Edwardian childhood, apparently so protective of its charm, bleakly destroys its myths.