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The Children’s Book
Soon, the reading urge wells up and then no distraction is brooked. With the last word of Byatt’s book comes a strange feeling of anger first and then of joy. Anger at the crass conjugal infidelities of men and women with enormous societal reputations who mindlessly wreck the equilibrium of lives and fabric of families, and joy at the courage of the victims to break free from the entrapments and recommence regulated lives. Olive Wellwood, the wife of a country squire, is an authority on fairy lore and a gifted writer. She chose to write one book for each of her seven children. The book under review was for Tom, her second son and the fourth child, and was woven around the unique, Gloucester Candlestick, the most guarded exhibit in the Precious Metals Gallery of the Victoria and Prince Albert Museum. Ansem Steryn, a puppeteer par excellence based at Munich, enacts the book on a London stage through his inimitable puppets to a rapturous applause. Hedda, an adolescent Wellwood girl, is disturbed one mid morning when she hears Violet, their senior housemaid, sobbing and their father consoling her with endearments, such as "my precious flower", etc., so the siblings naturally begin to ponder privately which parent shows more tenderness or indifference to which progeny and who their genetic parents might be? Dorthory who was home from Newnhem College, Cambridge, was the first to establish the truth of her paternity but at a terrible, emotional cost. Dorothy remembered how much and so often her mother had spoken to her endearingly of the German puppeteer that the daughter now wondered whether there had been more than just friendship between the two. So in the company of Griselda (half-sister) she sets out for Munich for higher education in medicine and in the process discovers her true father, his ebullient family and ultimately, an other worldly happiness. But all too soon, the gathering clouds and thunder of WW I sets up friends and families on a course of chaotic death and destruction. When in a single battle over 18 hours, the British and French lost 40,000 (dead, wounded or presumed dead), Field Marshal Lord Haig’s statement, that "it is a small number considering the total pitched in that battle", did startle the world’s conscience with this elevated threshold of human insensibility. Dorthy had moved to the Carlton Hotel, Paris, which was converted into a hospital, performing life-saving surgeries while Griselda provided nursing care. Charles, their eldest sibling, chose to hitch to one end of a stretcher, transporting the dead and the wounded from the battlefield. Each human being learnt to keep going while coping with grief and emotional turbulence during moments of snatched solitude. And there were strange moments of human triumph too (as is the case in any cataclysm) at the personal level. When one mangled body began to respond to medicare and became a live entity once again, Dorothy found herself face to face with Wolfgang Steryn, her German half-brother. In due course, he would marry her half-sister, the nurse Griselda. So much for the British and the German having been at war, just the day before as it were. There is not a single dull
moment in the entire narrative, brilliantly conceived and packed with
diverse characters and events; in fact, far too many for comfort of the
reader. A pity that Byatt did not emerge the joint winner of the Man
Booker 2010. There has been such a precedence since 1992 when both Sacred
Hunger and The English Patient were joint winners. Of course,
Byatt is on familiar turf having won the Booker in 1990 and now
short-listed for the third time around.
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THERE
is always that certain magnetism in an imaginatively designed book cover
which instantly wins over even the most, discriminating fiction reader.
Just one look at The Children’s Book on the latest arrivals
display-shelf in the bookshop and the next movement it will be inside
the shopping bag of the reader. Now, the excitement mounts to get home
fast, drop on the cushioned reading chair and turn the pages. But then,
there are book jackets so charming that the reader fears to turn pages
lest the spell be broken!