Hard to believe, but A.S. Byatt's Possession: A Romance was published almost 20 years ago. And 20 years on, that fat novel – “a delicious fruitcake fiction” that pushed Dame Antonia Susan onto the international bestseller lists and won her the Booker Prize – remains her main claim to fame, certainly here.
Yet Byatt has not been content to rest her short, stout frame on these laurels, either at the home in London she shares with Peter Duffy, her husband of 40 years, or at her cottage in southern France.
In the two decades since Possession , Byatt has published more than a dozen books, works she either wrote, like the novella collection Angels and Insects and the novel A Whistling Woman (which concluded a tetralogy begun in 1978), or edited or co-edited, like 1998's Oxford Book of Short Stories . Last month in Montreal she was awarded the $10,000 Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prize for lifetime literary achievement.
Now she's just published a new novel, The Children's Book . Seven years in gestation, at 615 print-packed pages it's even fatter than Possession . But if initial reviews are any indication, it just could restore to Byatt the popularity she enjoyed in the fin de siècle.
Certainly no one's going to fault The Children's Book for a lack of ambition. As Byatt recently told an interviewer, she wanted to produce a novel that “connected all sorts of things [she] was interested in” – children's literature, pottery, the formation of the Fabian Society, fairy tales, puppetry, the struggle of women to win the vote, child-rearing in late-Victorian England, the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. Given such a range, you won't be surprised to learn that the novel has a cast of 20 or so major characters progressing from its beginning in 1895 to its end in 1919. Equally unsurprisingly, its author confesses to having used Excel spreadsheets to keep everything and everyone on track.
Byatt was 54 when Possession was published. Now she's rowing toward 73. Of course, she's no longer as spry as she once was – if one can use that term to describe someone severely asthmatic and bed-ridden as a child and later, as an adult, diagnosed with seasonal affective disorder. At the conclusion of a recent morning interview in her Canadian publisher's office in Toronto, it took her a couple of surges to get out of her chair.
But the mind, once sufficiently caffeinated, stands as a formidable, probing, book-lined thing. In person, she conveys a mixture of intellectual heft and self-effacement, friendliness and wariness. Eighteen years ago, a New York Times writer described her as a cross of British foreign secretary with school headmistress. That still seems about right.
The older I get, the more I think human beings have a deep need for something to go right
Byatt confesses to having a “naturally gloomy nature,” intensified surely by the death of her only son, at age 11, in the early 1970s. In fact, Byatt still believes that “tragedy is the highest from of literature.” Yet The Children's Book , for all its suicides, ghastly behaviour (incest included) and deaths in the trenches of First World War France, is a rather upbeat book, filled with acts of kindness, creativity and grace between men, women, adults, children and classes. Byatt calls it a “recording of those bits that fiction has tended to under-emphasize.
“As I get older, I lose that novel writer's compulsion to do damage to my characters,” she observed with a chuckle. “When I was young, one had the sense that the better the book, the more tragic the outcome. Yet Shakespeare took to comedy as he got old. While I wouldn't call The Children's Book a comedy because all sorts of terrible things happen, it's not remorseless. ... The older I get, the more I think human beings have a deep need for something to go right. And it's not true that nothing ever goes right in life: My own mother rose quite successfully from the working class ... and got to go to Cambridge, whereas in most novels, or at least too many of them, to be working class is, well, the end.”
