Children's writers are sometimes cruel, and often damaged. As AS Byatt crisply noted about her 2009 novel The Children's Book: 'Writing children's books isn't good for the writer's own children.' Think of Christopher Milne raging at having been Christopher Robin; Vivian Burnett dragging Little Lord Fauntleroy behind him; Alastair Grahame lying down on train tracks.
This is fertile material for a grown-up book, as Byatt recognized. American author Melissa Albert, herself a successful children's writer, has made it the theme of her first adult novel. The Children's protagonist is Guinevere Sharpe, a grown woman trapped by a very public version of her childhood. Her mother, Edith, a sort of JK Rowling/Enid Blyton composite, wrote an era-defining run of children's portal fantasies called the Ninth City series, in which Guin and her older brother Ennis appeared as named protagonists.
They didn't know it at the time, but they were becoming as famous as Christopher Robin – with all that implies. In the present day of the novel, grown-up Guin is the custodian of her mother's literary legacy. She is releasing a ghostwritten, somewhat saccharine memoir about the years she and Ennis spent running wild in rural isolation while Edith wrote the books that defined their lives.
But the truth, as Albert's sometimes unwieldy triple time scheme reveals bit by bit, is darker than Guin's memoir suggests. Her father, Llewellyn, was a handsome and successful actor whose career tanked after he abandoned his wife to run off with Edith, a young woman barely out of girlhood. After a brief and unhappy interlude in Venice, they decamp with their two young children to rural Vermont in the late 1990s: she to write; he to take up painting and have affairs with a succession of young admirers.
Their marriage turns toxic. Edith is remote and frosty. The loving and boisterous Llewellyn is stricken by an unspecified illness, and the light starts to go out of him. The children, devoted to each other and freed from formal schooling, are left to their own devices. Meanwhile, there's something very spooky about their old wooden house. Occult artefacts surface. Its inhabitants have disturbing dreams. Edith shows up one day with a missing finger.
In the present tense of the novel, Edith and Llewellyn have died in a fire that consumed the house; the sixth and last book in the Ninth City series never got written; and Guin and Ennis, once so close, have been on nonspeakers for two decades. A conceptual artist who builds uncanny installations, Ennis has always refused to talk about his childhood and the Ninth City books – but just as Guin is publicising her memoir, he announces a new show called Mother. The now of the story tracks Guin's panicky peregrinations as we count down to its opening day and the inevitable confrontation. Meanwhile, a third time strand fills in Guin's experiences between her parents' death and the present.
What we know about the Ninth City series – that in its universe there's a vampiric figure called the Architect who steals the dreams of children to build constantly shifting fantasy worlds – casts an ominous shadow over Guin's story. You get a hunch Albert is saying something here about the creative process and its cost. Edith is a brilliant children's writer – but she's not quite right.
One of the pleasures of The Children is that you're quite some way through it before you figure out what, exactly, it is. Is it a psychological drama, a haunted house story, or a dark fairytale? We're certainly closing in on a secret, or rather a whole passel of them. We wonder why Guin, a talented writer, declined to write her own memoir. We wonder how the house came to burn down. We wonder what's going on with weird Edith and her demonic tap-tapping on the typewriter. We wonder why Ennis is so elusive, and why one of his installations seems to have killed a visitor a few years back. And what's with the amulet Edith wears round her neck? Why, for that matter, does losing her finger seem, at the time, like no big deal?
That bumper crop of mysteries is also a slight weakness of this very readable and intriguing book. There's simply so much going on that the force of the story dissipates: Edith never comes fully into focus; Guin's crumbling relationship with her fiance, Hank, though acutely described, struggles to carry the weight it wants to; the ending is a little rushed. While Albert assiduously seeds her backstory with fairytale motifs, the clarity and simplicity from which fairytales draw their power eludes her. The Children by Melissa Albert is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99).
