Re-reading A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book
One of the great decisions readers must make, often by default, is whether to re-read books. Perhaps thanks to Ann Fadiman, the carnal vs courtly lover of books controversy is widely recognized. You may already guess my approach to that controversy by my interest in the question of re-reading: Is re-reading a waste of time?
I’m not referring to re-reading a book for study, which is necessary and obviously a done thing. No. I’m thinking here about rereading as a luxury.
Our inevitable mortality, as Wordsworth doesn’t quite put it (which I remember because a couple of lines from his Ode: Intimations of Immortality popped into my head three days ago, so I re-read the poem) makes unjustified re-reading a luxury. Or that’s how I’ve come to think about it. Maybe it’s some kind of guilt at being unproductive. Even being high-minded and abstract enough to see reading as worthwhile and reading for a job as meaningful is not, apparently, enough to justify reading a book for pleasure alone when there are endless new books to be read for pleasure.
And why did Wordsworth’d aforementioned ode come to mind? I could answer that several ways, and I’m not sure which is the most complete, but here’s one thing I am sure of: I thought of that quintessential Romantic poem not because I read it once, but because I’ve read it many times, here and there, for one reason or another. For this class or that, or for fun, or when I want to re-remember Romanticism, or when it’s referenced elsewhere and I take another look. That’s one of the answers here: I’m re-reading AS Byatt’s The Children’s book for several obscure reasons and one straightforward one: that book captures beautifully the feeling of decadence and then disaster that seems inevitable in retrospect because it’s a narrative we relate to but don’t, somehow, quite expect to crash around us. Or we do expect it, with a sense of its inevitability. Either way, there is nothing we can do, nothing that could have been done. Boom. The economic corruption and inequity and instability preceding WWI, the sense of changing times, the mines in the North as a specter, the World’s Fair in Paris, art nouveau, suffrage, the end of the Victorian Era—this is what, among other things, the Children’s Book is made of. And one of those other things is poetry and Romanticism, which while not openly critiqued in this nothing if not pretending to be even-handed compendium, is certainly not as appreciated as nature itself.
In short, I’m re-reading this particular book because it’s cataloguing and contrast and time period and sense of narrative and detachment appealed at the moment. My usual re-reads are shorter and give me either a plot with some action or characters I want to hang out with. This one does not.
What it managed to do is stick in my head as an unusual read, in let because it is in its way unusual and in let because I tend to feel frustrated and alienated by epic novels detached from character and plot and stuffed beyond the gills with an excess of description and fact and lecture. So for me, to finish such a book (yes—I’ll quit a book. More on that another time) makes it memorable. For example, I have checked out Pachinko from the virtual library three times and read a bit each time, and I’d say it’s 50/50 whether I’ll check it out again or whether I’ll ever finish.
What re-reading this sort of book has done, as re-reading always does in some way, is serve as a mirror for my interests and mood at the moment. One aspect of this re-reading is that I’m enjoying the overwhelming amount of descriptive detail more than usual. It feels like reading Walt Whitman. Which I should maybe re-read.