Tuesday 25th May 2010
Present: Mark, Jen, Nic, Shubha, Gill, Alex
Literary Marmite. The only thing we all agreed on was the beer (even that's poetic licence, actually as Shubha had wine).
Mark and Jane loved, loved, loved this book. Jen, Shubha, and Alex hated it. Gill pulled extraordinary faces of disapproval during Mark's protestations of love (for the book, not Gill - it goes without saying that we all love Gill).
The male characters were odious and the female characters, on the most part, were lame. There were some notable exceptions (esp Karl/Charles, Phillip and Elsie), which probably sums up the era rather well. The book was dense with historical facts and, whether you loved this or hated it, this was just one of the factors dividing our opinions.
For my part, I wondered where the editor was. It seems Byatt did laudable amounts of research for this book but, instead of using that information to drop in subtle hints as to the nature of the time, she formed the facts into a sledge hammer which she used to ram home her superior knowledge driving, at the same time, a sledgehammer through my enjoyment of the compelling 300-page tale that, instead, covered 615 pages.
I did, however, find that the strength of the story telling and the power of the ultimate story, eventually, permeated the dense text. For me, the Bird-Song-style ending redeemed everything that went before and gave it new perspective: to see that so many of these children, of whose lives we knew such intimate detail, whose trials and tribulations had seemed so important, could be wiped out by WW1 and to know that that happened not just to these few but to so many, to a generation, was heart breaking. Despite my early difficulties with the novel, I ended in tears not of frustration but of wonder, some for the characters and some for the end of a marvellous book.
Carl's Review:
