A panoramic cavalcade of a novel, The Children’s Book spans a quarter of a century from 1895 to the aftermath of the first world war, crisscrosses Britain and Europe, follows the intersecting fortunes of four families and swarms with vivid subsidiary characters, from real-life figures such as Oscar Wilde, Auguste Rodin and Marie Stopes to an invented cast of late-Victorian and Edwardian writers, artists, anarchists, City financiers, Fabian progressives, potters, puppeteers, dons, debutantes, New Women, suffragettes, soldiers, philanthropists and philanderers.

Easily the best thing AS Byatt has written since her Booker-winning masterpiece, Possession (1990), it shares strong affinities with it. Possession opened in an institution full of cultural riches, the London Library. The Children’s Book begins in another, the South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and Albert). As three boys wander among its fabulous collection, the mother of one of them, Olive Wellwood, a charming and successful writer in her thirties, consults the curator about a tale of ancient treasure she is planning.

Part modelled on E Nesbit, the celebrated author of Edwardian classics such as The Railway Children, Olive is a writer of children’s stories who has a large young family of her own. Reactivating the flair for period pastiche put to such dazzling effect in Possession, Byatt artfully reproduces several of Olive’s fantasy tales as well as portraying the first-night performance of a Peter Pan-ish play she writes, whose hero is based on her eldest son. All of this accords with Byatt’s perception that the era her novel resurrects was one when childhood became a subject of unique, intense fascination, reflected in a remarkable outpouring of child-centred fiction ranging from Kenneth Grahame’s The Golden Age to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim.

Fanning out from the bohemian menage of Olive and her husband (revelations of secrets within that detonate shocks in the narrative), the multiple storylines of The Children’s Book take you into gritty, impoverished households among the Yorkshire coal mines and under the chemical fug pumped out from the chimneys and kilns of the Potteries, into smart metropolitan domestic circumstances and on edgy visits to the creepy Romney Marsh home of an Eric Gill-like craftsman and his cowed womenfolk. As it shifts between these contrasting locales, the novel opens up into a study of parenting and parentage (about which there are surprising disclosures), and of differing aspects of childhood. Childbirth (still high-risk, as several episodes convey) and child-rearing receive much attention. As she has done before, Byatt writes feelingly (and from personal experience) about the death of a child. Ways in which careers and destinies can be shaped in early years are traced. Exploitation of children — physically, emotionally, psychologically and artistically — is explored.

As a backdrop to events in the novel, Byatt unrolls crisp summaries of political and social developments against which her characters’ activities and ambitions are silhouetted. Intellectual zest keeps the book sizzling with ideas. But it is alive with imaginative energy, too. High among the qualities giving the book aesthetic appeal is its author’s responsiveness to the art and artefacts of the era she is chronicling. Byatt is an author who has always seemed galvanised into creativity by other people’s creations. Elizabethan poetry and painting inspired her novel The Virgin in the Garden (1978). Van Gogh’s canvases stimulated its sequel, Still Life (1985), as the paintings of a later artist did with The Matisse Stories (1993). In The Children’s Book, Grimm’s Fairy Tales and German puppet plays contribute to the narrative patterns, as do variants on scenarios from works by authors ranging from JM Barrie to HG Wells and DH Lawrence (Herbert Methley, a sexually predatory novelist on the prowl for young women attending high-minded symposiums and summer schools, is a scathing amalgam of the latter two). Most of all, Byatt’s imagination is fired by objets d’art of the period. With several finely skilled potters among her characters, her pages flame with rapturous appreciation of lustres and glazes. In similar mode, one of the highlights in this novel, which revels in crowd scenes and interiors crammed with artworks, is a visit to the 1900 ­Exposition Universelle in Paris.

Incongruous among the art-nouveau elegancies here, the largest exhibits on show are Schneider-Creusot’s long-range cannon and Vickers Maxim’s rapid-fire machine guns. At the end of the novel, they come into their own on the Western front, where thousands of lost boys disappear. Brilliantly following the trajectory that brought a civilisation and a generation to this catastrophe, The Children’s Book is a work that superlatively displays both enormous reach and tremendous grip.

The Children's Book by AS Byatt
Catto £18.99 pp617

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