Word: novelized
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4.FM: You’ve pretty much built your reputation writing short stories. What do you like best about this genre? Why do you prefer it to the novel or longer pieces...
5.FM: Have you ever considered writing a novel...
...progressive, prolific Wellwoods - prolific in both writing and childbearing, Olive and Humphry have a brood of seven - and their artsy friends and acolytes form the core of Byatt's novel, and they are an invigorating bunch. Fin de siècle England was bursting with new ideas and beliefs (socialism, suffragism, anarchism, free love), and Byatt's characters are exuberant participants, joining, lecturing, writing, rebelling, and navigating the fallout when their experiments (particularly in the free-love category) come to grief...
...most of the other creative types portrayed here), a life in the arts has psychic costs. Often it's the next generation that pays. Eventually the children, in particular Olive's daughter Dorothy, eclipse their parents in both the plot and our sympathies. This makes sense in a novel about a transitional era, but it also makes for a disorienting reading experience. For several hundred pages, it's hard to know which characters most deserve our attention...
...times the period details elbow out Byatt's story (parts of the novel read like notes for a cultural history), those details are never less than fascinating. Some English soldiers, we learn, named trenches for beloved works of literature - children's books, no less. But by the end of The Children's Book, it's hard to imagine the young men who christened Peter Pan Trench as harboring any illusions about not growing up or sharing Peter's view that "to die will be an awfully big adventure...