This book is aptly named. It is about the children and on the side of the children who are lost, cheated, bamboozled, betrayed and finally destroyed by their elders. The adults, however different they may be in character and circumstance, are united in a pigheaded determination to please themselves and overlook the interests of their young. As the novel opens in 1895, the Wellwoods, Fludds and Cains believe themselves to be idealists, artists and trailblazers for a new way of life, but behind the bulwarks of their opinions, talent and money they practise every refinement of selfishness.

Byatt's tone is stern, even minatory, as she tells her tale of incestuous potters and prating Fabians who expect their tea-things to be brought up four flights of stairs, double-quick, by a 15-year-old parlourmaid. But her most devastating judgment is reserved for the mother and storyteller, Olive Wellwood, a study in self-

delusion and maternal exploitation. Her imagination sucks on her children's world. She publishes fairytales that walk the edge between the disturbing and the forbidden, and she enthralls visiting journalists with the bohemian glamour of her life in a rambling house full of her children. In private she writes a long story for each child, an entangling web that mimics the intimacy that Olive never really offers. She understands her world by writing about it, and to do that she must withdraw. For one child at least, the web of story becomes a noose.

Byatt suggests that no one ever sees the authentic Olive. What they see is the story, as Olive chooses to present it. Once all the stories fall apart, there is not much left for her but the whisky bottle.

This is a long, packed novel, deliberately discursive and crammed to the gills with knowledge about subjects as diverse as the foundation of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the firing of a kiln, the requirements of an MB degree in 1903 or the content of the Grande Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900. Byatt can seem almost floridly informative, but there is a backbone of purpose in it. She anatomises the era's conscious, willed dedication to the idea of progress, while never slighting its real achievements. Tube lines begin to run, and great museums are built. Women campaign for the vote, or begin the long struggle to qualify as doctors. Such facts are important: they are handholds by which her characters climb into their futures.

But Byatt also traces darker currents. Adult sexual freedom becomes licence. The Wellwoods are complacent about denying their children knowledge of their true parentage, while the terrifying Benedict Fludd (an Eric Gill figure) turns his children into sexual partners and makes art from their abused bodies.

In the end Byatt shows that these adults simply failed to create a world that their children could enter as they matured. This was the era of Peter Pan. Theatres were packed with men and women who knew that their children had been left alone in the nursery, in the care of pretty much anybody - even a dog, perhaps, as J.M. Barrie suggested in his reductio ad absurdum of Edwardian parental neglect. While the children were taught that they loved and respected their elders, they very probably hated them.

These theatregoers came to celebrate a perpetual childhood that required nothing from adults. They did not yet know that many of their children never would grow up. They would die in thousands and then millions in a war that removed from a generation any need to think about progress, the future, or how to live an adult life. In The Children's Book, the Wellwood boys emerge from the world Olive has made for them, out of fiction and money, into a devastation which she cannot imagine.

The panoramic quality of The Children's Book is achieved at some cost to brilliance of characterisation and narrative drive. Its success is as a novel of ideas, forcefully and often memorably expressed, while the story follows darkening fortunes into a chastened postwar world.

The Children's Book by A. S. Byatt
Chatto & Windus, £18.99 pp 617 Buy the book

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