First of all, Happy Easter everybody! I hope you’ve all had a lovely Sunday.

Coming up to the lovely long weekend, I’ve been enjoying A.S. Byatt’s latest, The Children’s Book.

I really enjoyed this. It spans a goodly time period, as the children grow up into adulthood, and covers a lot of ground. What made this book stand out, for me, were the characterisations. There are some beautifully drawn characters in here, full of depth and subtlety. (And some less so, but the main characters are very well done.) As I also found with Possession, the use of language is fantastic; Byatt certainly writes extremely well, with intelligence and understanding. I love the complexities in her writing. Nothing is easy, or obvious, and I do like a good bit of ambivalence and ambiguity in my fiction.

Particularly in this book, the characters are also incredibly interesting. They range from the artistic – and there are some wonderful passages touching on art, and especially ceramics – to the political to characters who are actually quite conventional. Although there aren’t that many of those.

This kind of goes hand in hand with my earlier point about complexity and ambivalence. I really don’t want to spoiler this book for anybody, but while some parts are perhaps predictable (not a criticism, I don’t think it was a real flaw) the broader structure of the narrative… not so much. Certainly, the grouping at the end of the novel is very interesting. It didn’t peg with me straight away, but when I went away and thought about it I realised how different it was from expectations and from where it would have been natural and easy for the novel to go, but just works so well.

The only criticism I’d make of this book is that sometimes it feels a little too swamped with characters. There are huge numbers of things going on at any one point – which is great! – but could get a little overwhelming. I don’t want to pick holes in it, though, or overplay the criticism, because frankly it’s the only one I have. I loved this book and enjoyed it immensely, so I’m currently going around placing it into people’s hands and giving them an encouraging nod. Or two. Or, in fact, three.

Given that I’ve loved everything I’ve read by A.S. Byatt, I’m certainly going to be reading even more as time goes on.

Alphonse asks: any applicable challenges? At a pretty rocking 624 pages of awesome, this is totally good for the Chunkster Challenge. Good show, I say!

Picture found courtesy of a wonderful blog from Booklover:

I want to go to there.

I found this letter in the latest London Review of Books to be quite amusing:

Hot Air

In his review of Ian McEwan’s Solar, Thomas Jones mentions that the incident at the start of Enduring Love involves a hot-air balloon, although McEwan makes it clear that this is not the case: ‘It was an enormous balloon filled with helium, that elemental gas forged from the hydrogen in the nuclear furnace of the stars’ (LRB, 25 March).

Hot air is the usual choice, since balloonists can simply let it cool to descend gradually, or let a bit out to descend more rapidly. After landing, they can empty the balloon completely and fold it up for easy transportation. If the balloon were filled with helium, it would be expensive to empty it partially (to descend) or fully (to allow transport). However, by filling the balloon with helium, McEwan not only gives the narrator the chance to make an in-character remark on the origins of helium: he also makes the unexpected and fateful rising of the balloon more plausible.

Paul Jenkinson
Zollikon, Switzerland

Man, that guy got told! I feel as though I have learned something on this day.

P.S. My Wednesday Waffle is not going to take place until next Wednesday. Turns out that setting up a website takes time and energy and now I think it’s time for me to put my money where my blog is, and actually, y’know, read something. I’m currently nearing the end of a quite excellent book, so more on that to come!

Click! [Lights on]

‘We’ are Jenny and Fliss, and have been blogging separately about books for a while. Feeling pretty limited by the blogging software we were using, we decided to go rogue, and set up our own, joint, website for talking about books a lot.

All of our posts from our old, separate, blogs have been imported for our own reference, and Fliss has kicked us off in fine style with her latest book. It’s all go from here!

A bit of admin stuff: the design isn’t completely finished yet. We’re going to have a nice new header at some point. Alas, neither of us are well known for our patience, and we couldn’t wait until it was all ready, so we’re getting stuck in right now and will tweak as we go. Hopefully we won’t send the internet askew by doing so, but we don’t yet know the limits to our powers…