Letting the cats out of the bag

She had a sense, when she thought about it, which she tried not to do, that everything unseen in her household had shifted its invisible place. Things had always been behind thick, felted, invisible curtains, or closed into heavy, locked, invisible boxes. She herself had hung the curtains, held the keys to the boxes, made sure that the knowable was kept from the unknown, in the minds of her children, most of all. And now she knew that grey, invisible cats had crept from their bags and were dancing and spitting on stair-corners, that curtains had been shaken, lifted, peeped behind by curious eyes, and her rooms were full of visible and invisible inhabitants dust and strange smells. She was rather pleased with all these metaphors and began to plan a story in which the gentle and innocent inhabitants of a house became aware that a dark, invisible, dangerous house stood on exactly the same plot of land, and was interwoven, interleaved with their own.

This, in a nutshell, is the essence of The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt. The "she" in the above passage is Olive Wellwood, whose expertise at stashing away the unknown keeps her burgeoning family together--and when the cats get loose and the secrets come rushing out, she responds by turning her family's chaos into metaphors and stories.

Byatt displays a remarkable ability to create a convincing world that masterfully mingles fact and fiction. The novel relies heavily on historical information about, for instance, reform movements in England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but it is never weighed down by that information. Further, Byatt avoids the chief flaw of historical fiction: creating characters who live in a previous era while thinking as if they live in the present. Byatt's characters belong in their era and bring to vivid life thought processes and ideas very different from those of today but still recognizable.

Creating such an immense cast of characters, however, occasionally leads to problems as some characters are less developed than others and some are lost to view for long stretches of time. However, Byatt succeeds in making these characters believable and making me care about what happens to them.

And what happens to them is pretty interesting. They get caught up in events small and large, from private theatricals to the theater of war, without always being aware of the significance of these events. Readers, though, read about a small boy's wish to become a fox living in a foxhole and know that World War I is in the offing, so the child's innocent comment mingles in the reader's mind with the horrors of trench warfare, creating a rich and complex reading experience.

Most of all, though, the book is just fun. Byatt plays with literary forms and ideas, evoking echoes of Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, J.M. Barrie, and other literary figures while also reflecting images from folk and fairy tales. Life and art intermingle in ways sometimes amusing and sometimes tragic but always interesting. The novel moves from innocence to experience, from above board to underground, through the looking-glass and back again, a long journey (675 pages!) that I would happily make again. It's a rare spectacle but well worth seeing when Byatt lets the cats out of the bag.