The Globe and Mail

A reader's relationship with books is seldom governed by reason or logic. You can take a book home from the shop, full of plans for your future together, only to call the whole thing off before the end of the first evening.

Among my irrational deal-breakers, the most shameful is an antipathy toward historical novels, even – or perhaps especially – literary ones.

But there are other turn-offs; some of you will share them. Multiple narratives or threads of story following multiple characters. Long sections entirely in italics. Fairy tales. Lengthy descriptions of real and imagined works of art or plays.

The discovery of just one of these features is generally sufficient to trigger my life's-too-short alarm; A.S. Byatt's new novel hit the phobia jackpot.

Thank goodness, then, for the moral obligation to see the job through. Before I was even a 10th of the way through the book's 600-plus pages, I was converted. This book made me thirsty: Whenever I put it down, it nagged me to pick it up again.

It's hard to imagine that a literary agent or publisher bombarded with manuscripts would have given more than a cursory glance at The Children's Book had it been written by a new author. The opening premise – a runaway boy hiding out in what later became the Victoria and Albert Museum in London – seems to squander its intrigue through a lack of pace and a lucidity of writing that approaches dullness.

Indeed, the writing style is one of the book's biggest mysteries. There are no intellectual flourishes, no flashes of genius wordsmithery, no dazzling riffs. At first sight, each sentence is as nothing: clear, like water, simple, without any craft or elegance. The words just are: baldly stated, sometimes a little repetitive, straightforward, no sparkling fizz. Yet by a slow process of accretion, the writing takes on the majesty of a glacier: monumental, pure, beautiful.

The women, in contrast to the men, are portrayed with unusual and refreshing warmth and subtlety

The Children's Book tells the story of the lives of a group of Fabian families from the closing years of the 19th century to the end of the First World War. Olive Wellwood is the character from whom the novel springs. A writer of fairy tales and a mother of seven living children, she has left behind (and keeps quiet about) her humble origins and family tragedy in order to marry. Her husband, Humphry, resigns from his job at the Bank of England for reasons of conscience, devoting himself thenceforth to publishing criticism of the financial world, which his brother Basil inhabits without moral trouble.

The children's lives seem idyllic, at first, with the socialist consciences of their parents not precluding big houses and expensive schools for their own children. But Tom, the eldest Wellwood, is broken after being sent away to school, and his sister Dorothy has to struggle against parental ambivalence and social constraint to get the education she needs to become a doctor. Byatt is very good at depicting the subtleties of how hypocrisy can co-exist with a genuine desire to do good, hinting that the Fabians' obsession with fantasy childhood and an English utopia is more for themselves than anyone else, their children included.

So we soon see that beneath the light and play of this seeming golden age, darkness lurks. The men cast long secret shadows over other lives, with at least three of the main characters turning out to be sexual predators. Illegitimate children litter the pages, and by the end of the novel many people turn out to be not quite who they thought they were.

The women, in contrast to the men, are portrayed with unusual and refreshing warmth and subtlety. When Elsie Warren, whose brother Philip works as an unpaid apprentice to a great potter, finds herself pregnant, the women – even those who might, in another novel, be gently mocked stereotypes (the spinster bluestocking, the serial philanderer's long-suffering wife) – rally round with kindness and care to help.

Almost all the girls are conflicted about the life that awaits them once they are married, and seek some kind of compromise between marriage and thinking. The novel is a great counterbalance to the imagined schisms between women today. Byatt rejects the rivalries, the jealousies, the supposed feminine spite, all the while making sure that the women's relationships – the help, the trust, the affection – exist well outside the twee sphere of sentimental sisterhood. No helpless fairy-tale princesses here.

The structure of the novel, though, does resemble a complex fairy tale, with many of the characters pairing up, predictably, unexpectedly, farcically, movingly, often more than once, in the style of A Midsummer Night's Dream (another recurring theme and inspiration). The enchanted story – at least the ones the adults believe in; the children have understood the reality for years – comes to an abrupt end with the First World War.

At this point, the novel picks up rather too much speed in an attempt to encompass the whole war; I could happily have read about Dorothy's medical studies or Hedda's imprisonment under the Cat and Mouse Act for several more volumes. The war brings tragedy to many, including the Wellwood family, but also brings about dramatic social changes that leave many of the characters – the survivors – with some tender green shoots of postwar happy-ish ever after.

Byatt need not share the concerns of her sister, novelist Margaret Drabble, who this week announced her decision to stop writing for fear of repeating herself. After more than 40 years of writing, Byatt can still breathe magical life into historical fiction, giving her abiding interests new relevance with each work. Beguiling me out of my prejudices, The Children's Book turned out to be an intelligent, erudite and charming companion. I should have expected no less.

J.C. Sutcliffe, a writer, editor and translator, is planning a history of utopian communities.