Byatt's characters - I don't know them well enough to loathe them

Another example of the perversity of A.S. Byatt's plot instincts in "The Children's Book" (there will be a spoiler here, kinda, but if you haven't guess Fludd's fate by now you're not much of a reader): She does build up a good bit of dramatic tension (as she does every so often in this long novel) as Prosper Cain proposes to the much younger Imogen Fludd (great names!), and then he asks her father, Benjamin, for her hand, in proper Victorian style - and Fludd refuses, plays King Lear, slaps Cain across the face. Cain ducks and avoids a second slap, then politely leaves the scene - and that's basically the end of that bit of tension. Why can't or won't Byatt do anything with these characters? Why do they retreat from everything? Fludd himself, a rather interesting if peculiar guy, seems to literally go off the deep end - disappears for about a week, even though he's expected to give a big pottery demonstration (could anything be more boring in a novel than that?), and nobody seems particularly worried but then - big surprise! - a fisherman turns up with one of his boots. Guess he drowned himself in the surf, out of some morose guilt? Clinical depression? We will never know. And the rest of the story rumbles on - an odd blend of tragedy and comedy, as various couplings in the much-entwined families that we've been following for years, head off to the altar. We are at last nearing the end. Part of me would like to loathe some of the characters - particularly the men, with the insinuations that several of them, from the weirdo Fludd to the Bohemian intellectual Humphry Wellwood, are child abusers. But - I don't feel I know them well enough to loathe them.