Less would be more : The Children's Book

After the unbearably long and slow-moving first 3 sections of "The Children's Book," A.S. Byatt sprints to the finish with a short 4th section, rushing her characters headlong through World War I - it's as if she realizes she will never finish at this pace and has to close out the novel. This (4th section) is her homage to War and Peace, and it serves only to highlight how thin her novel is compared with Tolstoy's magisterial standard. Byatt begins each chapter in the section of textbookish regurgitations of the major events of the year - she's a great omnivore, but she has no idea how to use her research to build a story, she just pastes it in - then she zooms in on one or several of her characters, either at home or at war. Ultimately, she dispatches some with instant death, she reunites others through coincidence and happenstance that would make Dickens gasp (reminds me of Powell's Dance to the Music of Time, in which it seems all of England is populated by about 10 people who keep running into one another), and others she just plain forgets or drops. The book just ends. I will say that she writes well about the scenes of battle - as noted previously, Byatt as great at loathsome - though isn't this some of the most over-wrought material in all of British fiction? She also includes 3 poems "written" by one of her characters, who's a Rupert Brooke-ish war poet - and these are quite good. Byatt has talent and skills, but no discipline and no editing. By the end of this long novel - even on the last pages - I'm still checking to see who is this character? which family is she in? who's she in love with? - and that's absurd. I don't feel I've experienced the lives of real people - just a lot of bookish learning. Byatt ends with a thoughtful acknowledgment thanking the many people who helped her with her research as she wrote The Children's Book. If ever there was an example of less would be more, it's this novel.