Prosper, the patriarch of the Cains, regrets his widowerhood most because his daughter Florence doesn’t have a maternal presence to guide her the Fludds are an absolute nightmare - a household of sleepwalkers and timid personalities, everyone at the mercy of Benedict’s wild moods, though Philip’s earnestness helps him to fit in as Benedict’s apprentice. The London Wellwoods are a smaller unit than their country cousins but just as fragile. Olive manages her brood with the help of her sister Violet, but there are other reasons, aside from helpfulness, why Violet is there. We follow Olive’s efforts to keep her family intact through financial and marital crises we see the sexual stirrings, confusions, embarrassments of the young and the stark differences between families. For Olive, though, these cracks reveal a subterranean world of elves and fairies - now the stories she writes turn into a vital source of family income. Writing work isn’t as steady as he thought, however - soon the ground beneath their feet fissures as the bills start piling up. As Olive writes, in one of her tales, “there are ratholes everywhere, even in palaces.”Įven in Todefright: Olive’s husband, Humphry, gives up a secure bank job to be a writer, freelancing for any and every cause.
Do not misunderstand this golden glow, Byatt warns. Martin’s summer - gilded but short-lived. These scenes contain everything Philip - or any reader, for that matter - could ever dream of: a romantic country house “full of smells of cooking” neighboring woods containing treehouses and other surprises garden parties with “trestle tables on the lawn” and “little cosy, or conspiratorial, groups of chairs in picturesque places” puppet shows leisurely intellectual discussions - all meticulously imagined by one of our very best contemporary writers. Philip’s circumstances so affect Olive Wellwood, a successful writer of fairy tale stories (he seems, to her, to embody the lonely children in such stories), that she invites him to celebrate Midsummer’s Eve with them. That youth, Philip Warren, is a child of the factories who dreams of being a potter like the temperamental artist Benedict Fludd who lives not far from Todefright. “The Children’s Book” is another portrait of a time of imminent change - in this case, the years when the Victorian golden age depreciated into Edwardian silver and then, with World War I, into an “age of lead.” The novel’s early sections take us to Todefright in 1895, the country home of the Wellwoods, who welcome a lost youth into their midst.
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