The Children's Book

"Shortlist"

"No, it’s a story and, like great stories, it evokes a lot of emotions. I’ve chosen this book because it tells a very particular story, a very central one to the human condition, namely that of children. The main story is about the Edwardian era and the fascination that the Edwardians had with the innocent state of children. She has a huge gallery of people because the novel is what Iris Murdoch always wanted to create: A book with no central character, everybody has an equal status. Each of these characters tells us something about what it’s like to be human. One of the characters is a woman who writes stories about her children. She appropriates those stories and puts them into novels. The question that is posed by the book is: To what extent does she own those stories? To what extent do her children own them? Of course those children, because it’s set in the Edwardian era, will grow up to live through the Great War, which is a destroyer of many things. The question then becomes: What about those glorious childhoods? What about the ones who were looking at those childhoods, appropriating those stories? In the book, many historical figures are taken and thought about — people like Kenneth Graham , Lewis Carroll , and Baden-Powell, the founder of the Scout movement. We also now know, with the benefit of hindsight, that there were some dark sides to these characters. We know that Lewis Carroll loved taking photos of naked young girls. We know that Baden-Powell loved pictures of nude young men bathing. He also loved executions and would travel a long way to see one. So there was this innocence of childhood, and stories about how it was possible to have a perfect childhood — and then there were these dark shadows. The book is very much about the dark shadows. It’s about how it is that we create lives, how it is that our well-being later on is very much shaped by that early childhood. That is something that interests me enormously: how it is that the very early years have large repercussions later on for our emotional development. We now know, from the scientific literature, that the children of mothers and fathers with post-natal depression have a much higher risk of developing anxiety and depression twenty years later. We know about the long-lasting effects of that lack of intimacy which was also part of the Edwardian era: They idolised children but sent them off to boarding schools, if they were of a certain class. What does that do to a young child? What kind of darkness is hidden within that system? Why would you allow other people to look after your children in that way? And so, even though The Children’s Book is a novel, it’s very perceptive because it tells us some interesting stories about what happens to humans when they go down these sorts of roads. The other thing to say about novels in general is that they are all about emotions: If they are not about something that moves us then we stop reading them. It does take a long time to tell a story. You have to get intimate with the character, you have to get inside of their heads. Novels teach us about empathy. You empathise with the characters, you see that what they’re telling you is something you could perhaps learn from. It’s probably the only way that I can learn what it’s like to be a woman. It’s the only way I can know what it was like to live in other times. A good novel — where the author has done all the research and yet doesn’t let it show, where they take only the pertinent parts, that feel right for the story, and use those to enlighten the story — packs a punch. There are several times in The Children’s Book when you are so taken with the story that you can’t put the book down. These people become real, you want to know what happens at the end of it. At the end of the book, it’s the Great War and you want to know who survives and who doesn’t. I know when Antonia Byatt wrote the book she forgot there was a Great War coming. The way she usually writes a book is that she maps out each character on spreadsheets showing what happens. With this book, she got so involved with the story that she forgot what was lying in wait. At the moment she’s working on a novel about what happens to those who survived the war. What are the effects of the grimness of war, of the scars of war? This is something else that interests me greatly in my work. What happens when something as grim as war happens, what happens to you and how do you come to terms with it? Is there any way of healing the scars of war? Psychoanalysis was a partial answer to that. Whether it was a good answer, it is not yet fully known. It clearly helped some people, but there may be other ways of helping them. And, of course, science is all about working out what works and what doesn’t work. Yes, that goes without saying. That’s why people make choices and this is what my research is about: understanding why it is that people make certain choices based on their personal history. I’m very interested in the way the past affects our future and the prior assumptions about the things that happen to us, the kind of stories that we tell ourselves, which then affect how we act. This is what emotion is all about, how we act. Of course, sometimes emotions can cloud our judgement, they can be counterproductive and lead to the wrong choices. At the same time, I think the data show that we need these evaluations in order to make any kind of choice. Most of the time, after we’ve made a choice, we spend a long time thinking about how it is that it was the right one. We tell ourselves stories about why it is that we’re doing the right thing. That confabulation seems to be at the heart of who we are. We may not in fact have free will, but we certainly tell ourselves lots of stories about why it is that we chose to do one thing over another. Most of the time that has little to do with why we actually did it…"