Some writers tell us about things: pencils, coffee cups, bicycles, chairs, clouds. Other writers describe states of mind, the abstract thoughts and vague yearnings that flow or lurch or otherwise make their way across a character’s consciousness.
A rare few do both. They serve up the surface of the world with exuberant meticulousness — and also record with passionate exactitude the feelings and ideas that are regularly projected against the back of the mind like flickering shapes on a movie screen.
A.S. — the initials stand for “Antonia Susan” — Byatt is one of those few.
The renowned British novelist and critic is scheduled to visit Chicago this week for a series of workshops and lectures at the University of Chicago.
In her latest novel, “The Children’s Book” (2009), a finalist for Britain’s Man Booker Prize that was recently published in paperback, Byatt creates a detailed, sumptuous, completely plausible late-Victorian world, composed of equal parts frippery and earnestness. The characters include Olive Wellwood, a sort of J.K. Rowling of the late 1800s — she writes wildly popular children’s books — and her husband, Humphrey. Other personnel in “The Children’s Book” revolve around the Wellwoods in fitful orbits, from the shambling potter Benedict Fludd and his drug-addicted wife, Seraphita, to Philip, a penniless but talented young artist who becomes Fludd’s apprentice, to Tom, Olive’s son, whose fondest desire is to be invisible.
“The Children’s Book” is a wild, beautiful jumble of people and things. It is set in England during a time when people believed with all their hearts that the heart really mattered, that honest emotions and good intentions could keep catastrophe at bay. World War I was just around the corner, but these people did not know that, of course. They did their best, and their best led to disaster.
As it does in many of the author’s previous novels, including the bewitching literary thriller “Possession” (1990), which won that year’s Booker, an arch, sly humor lurks in the corners of “The Children’s Book.” And the bits of psychological acuity are piercing: A character named Julian “was clever and observant enough to see that love was at its most intense before it was reciprocated.” Dorothy, daughter of Olive and Humphrey, discovers “that knowing about lies that have been told is a form of power.”
Things and thoughts. Byatt keeps both in careful focus, in clever balance, while never sacrificing the golden thread of an enthralling — and finally heartbreaking — story. Listen as she describes Olive’s contemplation of her home, a rumination that begins in hard specifics but widens out to become dreamy filigree: “When she thought of it, it had always two aspects, its carved and crafted presence, doors, windows, chimneys, stairs, and … the imagined, interpenetrating world, with its secret doors into tunnels, and caverns, the otherworld under the green fairy hill.”
Again describing Olive, Byatt writes: “And the real world sprouted stories wherever she looked at it.” The same must be true for Byatt. Her world is a bumper crop of tales, tales that are serpentine and musical — and real, sometimes searingly so.
A.S. Byatt will speak at 4 p.m. Thursday at the University of Chicago’s Classics Building, 1010 E. 59th St., Room 110. Admission is free. She also will speak at 7:30 p.m. Friday at the U. of C.’s Mandel Hall, 1131 E. 57th St. Tickets are $20. Details at artspeaks.uchicago.edu.