It's not that Byatt can't construct a plot. She just doesn't seem to care.

It's not that A.S. Byatt doesn't know how to construct a plot, because she's done so in both short stories and novels (Possession) very effectively, but it seems as if, in "The Children's Book," she just plain doesn't care. Here we have the single most dramatic element/scene in the novel, Humphry makes a drunken sexual advance at his supposed daughter, Dorothy, she bites him severely, he reveals to her that he's not her real father. Instead of working this theme in any significant way, Byatt sends Dorothy off on a German sojourn, where she tracks down her true father, a puppeteer whom we'd encountered much earlier, where they stroll around Munich engaging in rather ridiculous conversations about puppetry and other aracana. These are not real people behaving in real ways, believe me. Even the dialogue - not only is it stilted and unimaginable as spoken language, but there are even ludicrous moments when Byatt can't help but show off her vocabulary, as when she has German youth who stumble through their English ("How is it that you say ... ") come up with words like "exigent," which I had to look up, sorry. Yet Byatt can write when she wants to. The first chapter in part 3, in which she gives a whirlwind summary of the social and political movements taking shape in the early 20th century, is quite beautiful - she's good at that - but as she gets back to her story and gives us capsule summaries of the lives of her main characters over a 6-year span, we realize how clumsy and cumbersome she can be. Far too many characters - 400 pages in and I'm still trying to figure who's who - and what's worse she loses site of her main and most interesting characters (Tom, Philip) and just dismisses them in a few words. What happened to Philip, poor shmuck, still working for pennies for the eccentric mentor Fludd? Byatt doesn't really care and barely clues us in. She's lost. Me, too.