The most copious, teeming, maximal writer going today : A.S. Byatt

The themes of A.S. Byatt's "The Children's Book" begin to emerge, entwine, overlap: escape. Children's book author Olivia Wellwood keeps a handwritten, personally design book in progress about each of her 5 (?) children, each with the theme (not terribly original but still...) of escaping through some kind of hatch or doorway into another world. This based on stories her father told her about the coal mines - down the hatch to another world that he tried to make fanciful. Father and brother died in the mines. So Olivia, who seems so British upper class, is really a refugee from her class - another escape, as we see her as a Brontesque/Cinderella-like abused servant, and her sister, Violet (do I have these names right? do they really echo 12th Night?), and she talk of running away, and do run away, to london, where she meets Humphry (sic) whom she marries - another escape. Then of course Philip, who is escaping his class background though also delving deeper into it - he grew up among the kilns and he still wants to make pottery though wants to make beautiful stuff. Does he talk of escaping to the seacoast? In fact he winds up as an apprentice to the talented but gruff Fludd. This all in 100 or so pp. Byatt is about the most copious, teeming, maximal writer going today - every description bursting out of its seams so to speak with specific images, or at least lists - never just a pattern of flowers but she names the flowers and nobody's every heard of half of them. She recounts the story of each of the children's books - a million ideas in her brimming imagination, one of the few writers who writes about the imagination of others and makes that credible. Her style is not really my favorite and I hope she can settle down to move the plot forward - dozens of characters already introduced and the focus getting lost - but I'm impressed with her ambitions and with the scope of The Children's Book.