A. S. Byatt: Critical Storytelling (review)

In this comprehensive and workmanlike study of A. S. Byatt’s fiction and literary criticism, Alfer and de Campos survey Byatt’s career from her first novel (The Shadow of the Sun, 1964) to her most recent one (The Children’s Book, 2009) and include many of her short stories and critical essays. As the editors say, they have tried to avoid biography per se, although they do include a useful biographical timeline, in order to concentrate on an “intellectual charting of A. S. Byatt’s career as a writer” (2). This charting is by and large quite successful. Alfer and de Campos have shown the many continuities in Byatt’s thought and the strong connections between her critical work and her fiction. They also stress her interest in and contributions to recent scientific and cultural exchanges; she is not only a novelist but also a “public intellectual,” someone who is deeply engaged in the issues of the day.

Alfer and de Campos’s study begins with a look at Byatt’s story “Sugar,” the title story in her first collection of short stories (1987). “Sugar” is really about memories as tangled mixtures of truth and myth or family fictions. Alfer and de Campos take the tale as representative of Byatt’s self-conscious, self-critical approach to storytelling, or “the necessary interplay between fiction and criticism, reading and writing, body and mind, tradition and transformation” (10). Throughout her oeuvre Byatt questions many of the assumptions about narrative, realism, and textuality that we tend to take for granted. She is indeed, as the subtitle suggests, a “critical storyteller.”

But readers of Marvels & Tales will primarily want to know about the role fairy tales and the fantastic have played in Byatt’s work. Here Alfer and de Campos seem to me to be less reliable. One basic difficulty throughout is their failure to distinguish between the fairy tale and fantasy; the terms are not interchangeable, as they seem to believe. It is a distinction that Byatt herself makes, particularly in her most recent novel, The Children’s Book. She criticizes early twentieth-century British fantasy—particularly the many versions of J. M. Barries’s Peter Pan, called by one character “a play for grown-ups who don’t want to grow up” (Children’s Book 512)—for the endorsement of the desire to remain a child forever. Byatt contrasts this kind of fantasy with the “old, deep tales that are twisted into our souls” (514). Many characters in The Children’s Book are involved with fairy tales, from Olive Wellwood, who invents dark modern fairy tales for her children and for publication; to Olive’s admirer, Toby Youlgreave, a fairy-tale scholar; to members of the younger generation: Griselda Wellwood, who is studying the Grimms at Cambridge, and Wolfgang Stern, who works with his father, Anselm, creating marionette plays in Munich. Byatt also continues to include embedded stories and tales, as she has often done in her fiction at least since Possession (1990). Fairy tales play a part not only in the thick thematic texture of The Children’s Book but also in its narrative structure.

Alfer and de Campos also claim that Byatt has become more concerned “with the ‘thinginess’ of human existence over and against the fantasy worlds afforded by the fairytale form” (8). This seems to me demonstrably untrue. The Children’s Book is indeed full of things, from Benedict Fludd’s and Philip Warren’s beautiful (and sometimes disturbing) pots to the horrible details of force-feeding suffragists and of the trenches of World War I. But the worlds of the fairy tale are not the hazy, nostalgic fantasy worlds of Peter Pan or the Wind in the Willows. Rather, as Byatt shows over and over again, fairy tales give us metaphorical entry into worlds that include darkness, death, and destruction. At one point, Alfer and de Campos call war “the inverted or perverted other side of the fairytale coin” (135), but I would...