'An illusion is a complicated thing, and an audience is a complicated creature. Both need to be brought from flyaway parts to a smooth composite whole.'
Forgive me for ever saying that I have struggled with the writing of A.S.Byatt because I knew the minute I read this line in The Children's Book that we are now going to be friends for ever, not Twittering on Facebook or ringing each other up or doing birthdays or anything, but I am that 'complicated creature' for whom the A.S.Byatt reading moment has arrived at long last.
Yes, I am now part of that 'smooth composite whole.'I did once struggle it's true and the encounter had left its indelible mark, a fear of repeated failure even. I can actually pin it down to my first assault on an A.S.Byatt novel in 1988, but that's when my brain was reduced to a mushed up bowl of Milupa Oat & Apple cereal. It did me no favours in my quest to become well-read. I can cite mitigating circumstances, my powers of concentration would have been sapped, decidedly compromised by the previous seven years existing on about three hours sleep a week and all that repetitive Harrington terry towelling nappy-folding and Lego building whilst reading Topsy and Tim.
So back in 1988 as the government was kindly paying me money for the privilege of donating my body to gravity I'd at least spend the Child Benefit on Literary Fiction and try and pull up my reading socks. I mashed the double buggy and the walking child in through the door of the bookshop, parked up and bought a load of books that looked 'improving' without the first clue about what that might be. Mary Wesley (all of them) Ian McEwan (The Child In Time) Alice Walker (The Colour Purple). I'd snuck in The Shell Seekers by Rosamund Pilcher for some normality and balance to the project and then rashly added in The Game by A.S.Byatt which obviously looked very improving at the time,
'Cassandra is an Oxford don, Julia her sister, a best-selling novelist. They share a set of disturbing memories, memories of strange childhood game and of Simon...years later Simon re-enters their lives via a television programme on snakes..'
I might be sagging in all directions but I could only be a better person after reading that surely?
I'd also signed up for an English Literature evening class and the set book was The Secret Self, that anthology of short stories by women and I could see new reading vistas beckoning. Had I been able to stay awake who knows what further benefits may have accrued.
I remember reading The Game and thinking 'well I wonder what that was all about then' followed by a brief but failed encounter with Possession in 1990 and again in 2007 and I felt sure A.S.Byatt and I were never going to be friends.
That's until The Children's Book.
I feel as if I'm wading through delicious reading honey at the moment, I have to keep pinching myself, there's Wolf Hall and The Little Stranger waiting, I've just read The Glass Room, Hearts and Minds and The Taste of Sorrow, all fabulous reads, have we ever had a better year for great books. I'm trying not to think about next year being a bit of a reading anti-climax after these heady days of May 2009.
I'm snail's pacing through The Children's Book, I can't bear to gorge on this, it's a feast to be savoured and will take several weeks of careful deliberate reading but it's quite awesome so far. I can't wait to pick it up and get back to the lives of the Arts & Crafts families living in rural Sussex at the turn of the century and that dragonfly cover is immaculate. I was just bound to love it surrounded as I am by all my dragonfly images here.
Just In case you are wondering, the jug is one of Scotland-based Maureen Minchin's treasures, the picture is by Nicky Dillerstone of Grimsby and the tile is by the matchless Penny Simpson of Moretonhampstead.
So The Children's Book is creating and surrounding me with something quite extraordinary, above and beyond the average reading experience. It's all such pitch perfect atmosphere and characterization and though I often find the embedded fairytale in fiction quite problematic, purely because I see the italics and groan because I'm warm and comfortable and reluctant to embark on the diversion, yet here we are loving it. A.S.Byatt has me eating out of her hand...oh good, more italics, because the diversions are exquisitely written and I can revel in their essential nature to the whole.
There was no trouble with the bookmark either, in fact I was spoilt for choice but opted for C.F.A. Voysey's wallpaper design 'Owls'. As A.S.Byatt says 'words have their own life' and in this instance a profound imagery of their own too, The Children's Book is a book that is making me see as much as read, goodness yes, what a rich and satisfying 'life' this one is proving to be.
Friends for ever now, me and A.S.Byatt and I.
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