Straw men and strong women - in The Children's Book

Anyone who's read A.S. Byatt's justly famous story about the worm in the forest - I can't recall the title - knows that she does loathsome really well - in that story about a horrifying possibly imagined forest creature that appears to three young girls. In "The Children's Book" she does loathsome in a different way, creating (at least one) thoroughly loathsome character - Herbert (?) Methley (sp?) - and I find the chapter in which Methley seducing the naive, vulnerable Florence to be one of the best, in its loathsome way, in the novel. Hard to accept that this invidious, phony Methley would be able to seduce not one not two but three attractive, independent women (and get two of them pregnant no less), but if we can accept that she depicts his "conquest" of Florence and its terrible consequences for her very well - it's a moment when the novel gets away from the abstraction of ideas and really dramatizes the life of the characters. Too bad Byatt can't stay on that plane, because soon we move along with Florence to Italy (the characters are always running away to Europe, and so is the plot) and engaging in another interminable conversation with a dreamy young man. Byatt just can't sustain a drama. She doesn't really want to, anyway - she probably sees this as a novel of ideas, a defense of feminism - does it really need a defense? Are Byatt's readers in any way likely to disagree with contemporary feminist ideas, much early suffragist ideas? - and in support of her thesis she makes the adult male characters horrible (child abusers and Lotharios - even the sympathetic Prosper Cain ends up being a very indifferent father) and young men, as M pointed out to me, are either feckless of homosexual (or both). The women are not exactly heroic, either, but at least they have some life to them. In comparison with the men, they're moral giants.