August 20 Book Blog

AS Byatt read an extract from her latest novel, The Children’s Book, in which the adults at a summer garden party question the children about what they want to be when they grow up. This represented the book well, as it is largely concerned with the process of moving from childhood to adulthood. 

Byatt said that the idea for the book originated from her interest in the connection between the flourishing of children’s literature at times of political idealism. The novel is set in the decades at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. When Stuart Kelly, the literary editor of the Scotsman on Sunday, asked if she had chosen that period of history because it reflects the concerns and preoccupations of our own, she said: “I was amazed by the parallels.” 

She spoke candidly about the process of writing, describing her partial synaesthesia which causes her to see sentences “in patterns of colour” as she writes. Kelly spoke about the representation of writing and authorship in her works, and observed that writing is presented as a potentially dangerous act. “That question comes close to the the centre of me,” replied Byatt. Her deeply moral approach to writing, and the responsibility of the writer, was evident throughout her talk. 

“However well you write about friends and family, you diminish them,” she said, describing her attitude towards creating characters as a “profoundly ethical stance.”  Byatt said that she never bases a character solely on one person. So the character of Herbert Methley, a serial seducer and self-styled progressive type, is based on a combination of DH Lawrence and HG Wells. She denied that this is satire, but admitted: “I’m taking a real run at them. [Herbert Methley] is possibly the most dishonest character I’ve ever created.”  

Her Booker-winning novel, Possession, had a central female poet and The Children’s Book features a female children’s author. Byatt observed that some reviewers implicitly criticise female authors who write “thinking” novels, rather than books which are largely based on emotion. She describes the Orange prize, which is only open to female authors, as “sexist” for implying that female authors cannot be considered alongside their male counterparts. 

Finally, she was unapologetic for writing novels set in the past. “You don’t have to describe the world as it is,” she said, firmly. Her fiction is an attempt to “describe people as they are or life as it is” - which most would agree she achieves.